Union Square Ventures

In 2015, my partner Fred Wilson published a short blog post, Don't Automate, Obliterate, on how USV thinks about startup investments. The post was based on a 1990 HBR article by Michael Hammer by the same name. Specifically, Fred and the rest of USV partn

There's a great story in Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn about how a temporary wooden structure left over from World War II became one of the most loved buildings at MIT. During the war, MIT needed a new building to house the urgent classified develop

We like to say that USV is a continuous conversation. It's through conversations that new ideas and observations emerge, take root as theses, and continue to grow through public engagement. Over the last year, we've been sharing ideas and sparks as they s

The purpose of our annual portfolio summit is simple: give 100 CEOs from around the world the space to connect and learn from each other. This year, we tried something new. We pulled 16 of them aside, paired them up, and turned on the cameras. No script.

This blog is co-authored with Zoe Weinberg and Matt Hawes at ex/ante and can also be found here. Who will own our digital memory? This question has become increasingly urgent as ChatGPT and Claude ask us to entrust more and more of our memories to their p

The Information Age was a consequence of two developments: the ability to work with information programmatically and the democratization of that capability. We are now entering a similar period in biology. We can now program life itself with the ever chea

A quiet insurgency is rewiring our world. We're hitting a critical moment when the inefficiency of constant AC/DC conversion is becoming too convoluted to ignore, especially as data centers strain capacity, renewable projects multiply, and extreme weather

AI represents something fundamental and powerful: an entirely new computing paradigm that will reshape how we work, learn, and interact. But today's AI landscape offers limited options: either access AI models through commercial APIs or use "open source"

In the original designs for the World Wide Web, there was a clear line drawn between the services people interacted with (websites), and the software they

Co-authored with Jared Hecht A new pattern is emerging that we are excited about at USV: entrepreneurs are upgrading physical industries with an AI-first