Hi everyone. I just joined USV as an analyst and am very grateful to the USV team for the opportunity to learn from them. I’m coming from Cloudflare, a USV portfolio company, where I worked for Dane on the Product Strategy team. I was there for 3.5 years and worked with the team there to launch a lot of fun projects like 1.1.1.1, Spectrum, DNSSEC, and Cloudflare’s partnership with F-Root.
I’ve been at USV for 2 weeks. Here are some things I’ve learned so far:
1. Investors at USV are in a day-long meeting every Monday so the worst time to cold email a USV partner is on a Monday.
2. One winning presentation format is to start with growth numbers. A lot of company presentations start with describing the product first, but nothing grabs investors’ attention like proof in data.
3. This one I learned from Assif: Thinking of tokens as an asset class is missing the picture. If tokens are successful, everything will be tokenized (sports teams, companies, real estate, art, etc), and more people than ever will own pieces of tokenized assets.
4. Some interesting blockchain projects are starting with Android-first because it’s easier to grow a network in places where the few tokens you get in return for participating in a network are more meaningful.
I’ll be continuing to share what I’m learning on this blog – stay tuned for an overview of distributed compute projects later this week. If you’re working on anything interesting related to our new thesis, reach out. I’m dani@usv.com. Excited to start the Union Square adVentures.