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Nick Grossman – Aug 12, 2021
The amount of invention and creativity happening in crypto is head-spinning. Countless projects, protocols, apps, tokens, and communities are launching, layering, merging, forking and growing every day. It’s a lot to keep up with. Fortunately, blockchains are (mostly) public data [...] Read more
Open Finance First, Open Data Second
Fred Wilson – Aug 13, 2019
My partner Nick put together a deck outlining USV’s approach to crypto investing earlier this year and we have been using it with founders and investors since then. One slide I particularly like from that deck is this one which [...] Read more
goTenna Series C
Albert Wenger – Jun 18, 2019
We are excited that Founders Fund has led a Series C financing for goTenna. It is a recognition of the tremendous progress the company has made in serving the communication needs of first responders and other professionals. The goTenna Prooffering works with mobile phones [...] Read more
Why USV is Joining the Libra Association
Nick Grossman – Jun 18, 2019
A new blockchain & cryptocurrency project, Libra, was announced today. Libra has been incubated by Facebook. USV will be one of the founding members of the governing body, the Libra Association. Libra is a stable, fiat-backed cryptocurrency that will launch inside [...] Read more
The Distributed Computing Update #3
Dani Grant – Feb 27, 2019
Why is distributed compute important? It's not about price, it's about integrity with developers. Developers can trust that a distributed compute protocol won’t go away, fall down, lock them in, revoke their access, or become their direct competitor. Developers cannot trust Amazon, Google or Microsoft to promise them the same. Read more
What decentralization is good for (part 2): Platform Risk
Nick Grossman – Jan 29, 2019
Continuing on the theme of what decentralization is good for , this week I would like to focus on one of the most powerful drivers in the near-term: Platform Risk . Platform Risk is is the risk that the tech [...] Read more
What decentralization is good for (part 1): resilience
Nick Grossman – Jan 18, 2019
Recently, Simon Morris, a long-time BitTorrent exec, wrote a provocative series of posts on the nature of decentralization, in the wake of BitTorrent Inc’s acquisition by TRON . They are relatively short and a good read: Why BitTorrent Mattered — Bittorrent Lessons [...] Read more
The Myth of The Infrastructure Phase
Dani Grant and Nick Grossman – Oct 1, 2018
We are not in an infrastructure phase, but rather in another turn of the apps-infrastructure cycle. First, apps inspire infrastructure. Then that infrastructure enables new apps. Platforms evolve from an iterative cycle of apps=>infrastructure=>apps=>infrastructure and are rarely built in an outside vacuum. Read more
The Distributed Computing Update
Dani Grant – Aug 7, 2018
One of the applications of cryptocurrency we continue to be excited about is distributed computing. Before crypto, my laptop couldn’t pay a stranger’s idle server as a thank you for running a machine learning program. Cryptocurrencies finally give us the [...] Read more