Payjoy
Sometime in the late 90s I picked up my first mobile phone, a Motorola StarTAC. The sound quality wasn’t great but it was a radical change to no longer be tethered to a wireline. Next up was the Blackberry, which [...] Read more
Can Mobile Banking Improve The Lives Of The Poor?
eShares
Anyone who owns shares or options in a private company instinctively knows that cap table management remains frustratingly analog. At USV, we own equity interests in more than 50 companies. For many of our portfolio companies we own three or [...] Read more
Why It’s Expensive to be Poor (And Why It Shouldn’t Be)
I spent the day yesterday at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in DC, at an event discussing mobile payments and related innovations and regulatory issues. Naturally, this is a big issue, with the huge rush to mobile everything, the continued expansion of [...] Read more
SigFig
Investment management is an increasingly important problem. With the decline of defined benefit plans and the increasingly shaky social security system, most people will have to rely primarily on their savings and retirement accounts to fund living expenses after they [...] Read more
Auxmoney
Today we are delighted to announce that we have made an investment in Auxmoney, an online credit marketplace in Germany. The CEO, Raffael Johnen was in London last week and appeared on a LeWeb panel with the CEOs of two [...] Read more
Coinbase
We have been thinking about and looking to make an investment in the Bitcoin ecosystem for several years. Today, we are happy to be able to talk about our first investment in the sector. We have made an investment in [...] Read more
Funding Circle
The shift from hierarchical models of resource allocation to more efficient marketplaces is occurring not only in handmade goods or creative projects, but in the provision of financial services as well. New digitally-native financial services that use technology in ways [...] Read more
Dwolla
Money is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the economy, yet we largely take it for granted. When we pay for our morning cup of coffee (or tea) with cash or a credit card, we tend not to stop and [...] Read more