Writing

Can a machine help you invest in shampoo? Coffee? Another consumer product? Last week, the USV portfolio company CircleUp announced the closing and launch of CircleUp Growth Partners  - a $125 million fund that will use a quantitative machine learning [...]  Read more

In July 2011, we were fortunate to lead the Series D financing round in Lending Club, founded in 2006 by Renaud Laplanche. Along with Zopa (UK company) and Prosper, Lending Club was a pioneer of the now-familiar marketplace lending model, which cut interest costs for high quality borrowers by as much as 50% (not a typo) and at the same time offered investors attractive risk-adjusted returns not available elsewhere. This was a fundamental innovation in financial services that is thriving globally and will continue to gain in importance. Read more

Sometime in the late 90s I picked up my first mobile phone, a Motorola StarTAC. The sound quality wasn’t great but it was a radical change to no longer be tethered to a wireline. Next up was the Blackberry, which [...]  Read more

Anyone who owns shares or options in a private company instinctively knows that cap table management remains frustratingly analog. At USV, we own equity interests in more than 50 companies. For many of our portfolio companies we own three or [...]  Read more

Investment management is an increasingly important problem. With the decline of defined benefit plans and the increasingly shaky social security system, most people will have to rely primarily on their savings and retirement accounts to fund living expenses after they [...]  Read more