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Quantitative Investing in Shampoo

Can a machine help you invest in shampoo? Coffee? Another consumer product? Last week, the USV portfolio company CircleUp announced the closing and launch of CircleUp Growth Partners  - a $125 million fund that will use a quantitative machine learning [...]  Read more

The USV Portfolio Network: Now 70 Companies Strong

At Union Square Ventures, we spend a lot of time thinking about networks. Financial networks, social networks, data networks, and yes, even decentralized networks. But the most “meta” version of this is the network we’ve spent the past seven years cultivating among the employees of our active portfolio companies -- our USV portfolio network. Read more

The Unknown Path to a Decentralized Future

Some companies with currently centralized services have been criticized for issuing tokens and raising money in ICOs. There are even allegations that venture investors are pushing companies to do so as a ploy for liquidity. I suspect that some situations like that do actually exist, but I know from first hand conversations that many of the entrepreneurs pursuing this route are doing so out of a genuine conviction that it is the right path to a decentralized future. Read more

USV Network Guiding Principles

We expose frameworks and ideas, not prescriptive solutions: As VCs and not operators, we know we don’t have all the answers. We seek to expose a wide variety of options to our companies, but never the only way to do something.We [...]  Read more