Looking for Design Talent
We are excited to announce a Behance talent audition to identify five designers that will be commissioned to update the look and feel of USV's identity. You can find a detailed design brief at Behance. We have decided on a network-based approach, leveraging our portfolio company Behance’s design community, because it is a natural fit with networks as our central investment thesis and our rethinking of USV.com as more of a network. Rather than spec work, we are using Behance to conduct a talent audition based on existing work first and will then commission five designers. This means that everyone...
ContinueResearching Online Education
We've blogged about many aspects of USV, including our investment thesis and our preferences on deal terms, but we've rarely shared our internal research on new markets and industries. On reflection, we've decided it would be better to make that work public. Starting today, we'll share more of our preliminary work on specific markets, industries, and technologies on USV.com. We hope it will be interesting and useful to you all, and we're looking forward to your feedback: what "required reading" did we miss? Which service must we try out? What conclusions have you drawn? Our bias is toward openness, and...
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If you follow our investment strategy, you know we love internet-based marketplaces that enable direct transactions between interested parties. What is less well known is that our focus extends beyond consumer-facing marketplaces such as Etsy and Lending Club. Last week Fred blogged about our investments in companies that serve enterprises and today we are delighted to add Pollenware, a company based in Kansas City, to that list. Pollenware has created a sophisticated marketplace for one of the largest but most overlooked areas of finance: working capital. To give you a sense of scale, the company estimates that global working capital...
ContinueNetworks And The Enterprise
Many think that USV is a consumer web investor. We don't think of ourselves that way. We invest in networks and for most of our short history, that has meant investing in networks of individuals connecting with each other. Thus the consumer web investor moniker. But if you go back over the past four years and analyze the roughly thirty investments we have made in that time period, you will see that a good portion, maybe a third, have been in networks where enterprises participate. I like to think that our first foray into this kind of network was 10gen,...
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Twenty years into the personal technology revolution and we are still using address books that work pretty much like physical address books. It makes no sense. The mobile address book should be hyperconnected to our digital life, informed by it, and responsive to it. I remember back in early 2011, Steve Greenwood walked into our old offices on the 14th floor and told us that he intended to build that hyperconnected mobile address book. He showed us a spreadsheet he had been personally using for the past five or so years to manage all of his relationships. I had never...
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