Building Things

A conversation with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince about the shift from search engines to answer engines, the future of content monetization in an AI world, and why original human creativity may be more valuable than ever.

A conversation with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about building an open social network on the AT Protocol, giving users real control over their experience, and why protocol design decisions shape everything downstream.

A conversation with Jam CEO Dani Grant about her journey from USV analyst to founder, cultivating curiosity, and building tools that make bug-fixing and team collaboration not just efficient but joyful.

The most durable network effects often come from being the system of record. Carta, blockchains, and enterprise ERP systems all share a common pattern: the more records and stakeholders in the system, the more valuable it gets.

After a decade of crypto-native exploration — DeFi, DAOs, NFTs — we're entering the era of crypto-enabled apps that look like normal web apps but have superpowers under the hood.

One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes. Bitcoin at first was “weird internet money” and then it was “a protocol” and then it was “digital gold”. Ethereum is “ICOs”, or maybe “DeFi”, or maybe “Web3”, or maybe all three, or maybe something...

It has been a stressful year, in so many ways. This morning, I opened up my Calm app to attempt to resurrect my meditation habit. I have had an intermittent meditation practice for years, and despite the fact that it really seems to work for me, I have never developed a rock steady daily habit.… Con...

Several years ago, I started volunteering at Defy Ventures, a program that helps formerly incarcerated individuals start their own businesses. Through Defy, I met an entrepreneur named Coss Marte, who beginning to build a personal fitness business called Coss Athletics. At first, it consisted of 1:1...

It has been a long few months, and many people’s lives have been turned upside down in untold ways. One way to help is through the 1k Project. The 1k Project matches sponsors with individuals & families in need, using a $1k / month for 3 months model. Recipients are sourced through the Project’s tru...

Last year around this time, I had a major medical scare which shook me pretty hard. The details don’t matter, but the takeaway was that afterwards I felt lucky to have not had a more serious problem, despite a bad situation that was totally avoidable. I dodged a bullet. It was a wake-up call. Last… ...

Discuss on Twitter is a WordPress plugin that uses Twitter as the commenting system for your blog. I’ve been developing it over the past few weeks along with Fred Wilson and Kirk Love as part of the launch of AVC 3.0 which went up yesterday. It’s currently live on this blog, as well as AVC… Continue...

A few years ago I wrote about one of my favorite product sayings: “Half, Not Half-Assed“, which comes from my favorite book on product development & teamwork, Getting Real (from the team behind Basecamp). I actually first got hooked into this thinking when I saw one of the Basecamp founders, Jason F...

Today I’m finally switching off of Capital One because of their broken integration with Plaid. For those who don’t know, Plaid is a service that makes it easy for apps to connect to your bank account. So, if you want to do anything interesting that your bank doesn’t offer (spending analytics, smart ...

At USV, we talk a lot about our investment thesis.  The USV thesis is a set of ideas that has guided our investing over the years.  It is a tool we use to help ourselves know what to look for, and to help companies who fit into it to find us. Despite all of the… Continue reading

Picking back up the series on what decentralization is good for (part 1, part 2), today I want to focus on one of the most exciting aspects of decentralization: growth.   In this case, when I say “decentralized”, what I really mean is “open and non-proprietary”.  The two often go hand-in-hand. Ok, s...

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 platform that you build your product/app/business/life on will become a critical dependency, w...

Debt is a complicated subject.  On the one hand, it is empowering — it lets you get a quick start on something, and lets you do things that would not be possible otherwise.  There are times when it is useful, necessary, and unavoidable. I think about “debt” in the broadest possible terms: times when...

One of my favorite things to do is get my hands into something and figure out how it works, whether that’s an app, or a gadget, or a house. For example, over the past few months I have been renovating our basement, turning an unfinished, dank storage area into a playroom for the kids.  Here… Continu...

With real-time, interconnected, self-executing systems, sometimes when things wrong, they go really wrong.  I wrote about this general idea previously here. Yesterday, while I was writing my post on Trusted Brands, I was doing a little searching through my blog archives, so as to link back to all th...

I wrote recently about the challenge of turning plans into routines.  One of the activities that is the most impactful for me is meditation.  I cannot say that I have a perfect meditation routine, but I can absolutely say that when I do do it, it makes me feel great, immediately. There are a bunch… ...