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Looking For Syllabus 2.0
Dani Grant – Nov 19, 2018
Becoming a fast expert in a new topic is still a big challenge. There are a lot of open resources available on the web, but finding, qualifying, and navigating them--let alone combining them into a self directed system--is a challenge. In the classroom, the syllabus plays that role. The syllabus is a learning map. There's a big opportunity to reinvent the syllabus for the internet. Read more
Reinventing Education
Fred Wilson – Sep 9, 2018
Alibaba founder Jack Ma has announced that he plans to retire at age 54 and turn his attention back to education . He started his career as an English teacher. It seems, from reading the piece I linked to and [...] Read more
Our Investment in Modern Fertility
Rebecca Kaden – May 30, 2018
Modern Fertility is building a trusted consumer brand in fertility, starting with their launch today of at-home testing for women. In the comfort of their own homes, and for a fraction of what it would cost at a clinic, women can have their key fertility hormones tested through a few drops of blood. Read more
USV Thesis 3.0
Rebecca Kaden – Apr 1, 2018
We believe we are still at the beginning of the opportunity to broaden access with the most critical implications ahead of us. As a result, we decided to revise our thesis into a third version: USV backs trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. Read more
Call for Genomics and Software-driven Biology Startups
Jennifer Campbell – Feb 28, 2017
Everyone knows the big Web 2.0 companies use hundreds of data points to determine which ad we might prefer. And yet — in the deathmatch against disease, we reduce human health to single variables. Read more
Top Hat
Albert Wenger – Feb 15, 2017
Even back when I was in graduate school, I found the price of textbooks to be high and their quality to vary widely. Now that I have children taking college courses, I was shocked to find textbooks that cost over $200 and are still large physical objects that have to be lugged around! The high prices and lack of innovation are the result of a market structure which has become highly concentrated among just a few textbook publishers. That's why I am excited to announce that USV has led a new round of financing for Toronto-based Top Hat, which last year launched a content marketplace for higher education. Read more
Quizlet
Fred Wilson – Nov 23, 2015
There are some investments that take years to make. They are often our best investments. Quizlet took something like five years to go from a company we got interested in to a USV investment. In March 2009, we hosted an [...] Read more
Figure 1
Andy Weissman – Aug 6, 2014
Social applications leverage the network structure of the Internet to connect people, places, and media. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the origination and maturation of these services, from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Tumblr to many more. At [...] Read more
Small Pieces, Khan, Quizlet
Andy Weissman – Nov 19, 2013
One way to build something big is to build something big. Like a pyramid. Or a multifaceted bank. Or a university. Another way is to build something that is architected to be full of small pieces, small things, small units. Khan Academy is one [...] Read more