Four Futures
We are in a moment where the future is both wildly exciting and highly uncertain. The acceleration of AI has created a new paradigm of possibilities but also fundamental questions we can’t yet answer. Will we continue speeding towards exponentially [...] Read more
Scale is All You Need?
Progress in artificial intelligence has come in the form of a bag of tricks, some of which have proven to be unreasonably effective: word embeddings as a way of representing semantic similarity; the attention mechanism for contextualization; self-supervised learning on [...] Read more
The Fragmentation of Search
The market structure for Search is currently being reshaped. Horizontal and LLM-based “search agents” like ChatGPT and Perplexity are placing unprecedented pressure on search engines like Google. Cracks are beginning to form, from which new possibilities of search are rapidly [...] Read more
Tutors for Everyone
In 2009 we hosted a one day event we called "Hacking Education." We brought together a diverse group that included game designers, principals from schools, and even homeschoolers. We were fortunate to have the late Sir Ken Robinson give opening [...] Read more
Fiveable’s Series A
Co-authored by Rebecca Kaden Inequities in our education system are well-documented. High-quality instructors, college prep classes, and affordable test prep materials are unevenly distributed. However, learners in today’s classrooms don’t have time to wait for systemic change. Educational equity [...] Read more
Dune Analytics
The amount of invention and creativity happening in crypto is head-spinning. Countless projects, protocols, apps, tokens, and communities are launching, layering, merging, forking and growing every day. It’s a lot to keep up with. Fortunately, blockchains are (mostly) public data [...] Read more
Hacking Education 2.0
More than ten years ago, USV hosted a small group of educators, entrepreneurs, activists, and investors for a day-long session called Hacking Education. In summarizing that discussion, our partner Brad described the group’s collective optimism about the role technology would [...] Read more
Sora
Co-authored by Hannah Murdoch USV’s education portfolio is built around the idea of changing a system from the outside in. By going directly to learners with products and platforms that offer high quality experiences for free or at accessible price [...] Read more
Outschool’s Series B
In the post about USV’s initial investment in Outschool 16 months ago, I wrote about the dramatic need for innovation in an education system that looked effectively the same as it did 50 years ago. While the internet had altered [...] Read more