The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 83 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mignano: Fred Wilson's key VC lesson is to never pass on price
“I asked him, what are a couple of the biggest lessons? And one of them was, never pass on price. So Fred says, never pass on price.”
Weitzman: Union Square Ventures has storied name but lacks strong leadership
“What I would do is I would join Union Square Ventures. I would join an institution that has a really storied name, but doesn't have particularly strong leadership. And I would become the leadership for that organization.”
Chirls: Coinbase would have succeeded without Andreessen Horowitz and USV
“Would Coinbase not have been successful? If they hadn't take money from Andreessen Horowitz and USV. No, I think they would have been just as successful.”
Mignano: USV avoids enterprise investing to focus on market obliteration
“At USV, we like to bet on businesses that obliterate, that literally obliterate markets and existing business models. And so, you know, we're, we actually don't do a lot of enterprise investing for this exact reason.”
Hacker: Silicon Valley VCs passed on Duolingo over Pittsburgh location
“We actually did get a lot of interest from Silicon Valley VCs at a time, but they all made it a requirement To move to Silicon Valley. So we're like, you've got to move here, right? Like, when are you going to move here? That was the, always the question. Okay…”
Wenger: Cash flow positivity is the only safe place for high-valuation startups
“If you have raised at a high valuation, you, and you have a lot of money in the bank, you have to get a cash flow positive. It's the only safe place. Literally the only safe place is cash flow positive.”
Wenger: VC generational transitions fail when senior partners hog the economics
“By not hogging the economics.”
Shah: Union Square Ventures is the best pound-for-pound VC fund
“I just, I follow a lot of honestly what USV does of like try to learn. I think they're the best pound for pound fund in the world both operationally and in every way.”
The VC Industry Faces a Reckoning With Many Firms Shutting Down
“I think there will be a lot of folks that go away in this cycle. I watched it in the last go round. You know, Spark and USV and all these firms didn't exist before the last cycle. And they really made their names coming out of the O eight crisis. And on the ot…”
Kaden: USV will not invest in startups competing directly with Amazon
“So the short answer is I don't want to invest In companies that think they're going to take down Amazon right now, because I believe it's extremely difficult, particularly at the stage we're going at.”
Kaden: Startups dependent on continuous paid acquisition are poor VC investments
“We don't believe that businesses that are going to pay to acquire customer after customer are great venture businesses. They require way too much capital, and you don't get enough leverage on those dollars.”
Monegro: Buying Bitcoin directly outperformed USV's early-stage crypto equity investments
“I calculated how much better or worse an investment it would have been to just buy Bitcoin and buy the same amount of dollars worth of Bitcoin, and found that Bitcoin would have been a much better investment”
Neumann: Top seed funds like USV outperform when market prices are low
“If you look at the best performing venture funds in history, at least seed stage, like things like USV, you will find that they started investing in a market where the market price was below the indicated discounted price. When the market is above where the in…”
USV does not vote on investment decisions, relying on consensus
“Well, as a firm, we do not vote. We have a conversation, and that conversation leads to a point where everyone is comfortable with the parameters of an investment”
Mignano: Founders matter most in venture, followed by market and product
“When I first started this job, I would have said product, market, founder. I've completely flipped that. Now, founder, market, product. I think that the founder is the most important thing.”
USV Will Always Impose Price Limits on Early-Stage Investments
“Just to bring it back to the USV strategy, I think for us, again, if we're investing a little bit later stage, we need to really believe that it's a market winner, and the multiple can be very, very, very high, and in that case, I think we can be a little bit …”
Mignano: USV is investing heavily in open-source AI and agents
“At USV, we're really interested in the Rebel Alliance. This new universe of open weight models and open source harnesses and distributed compute and agents, right? Human aligned agents.”
USV Waives Ownership Target for Investment in FOMO Trading App
“We think it can be a lot bigger than it is now. And so, for this one, we're not gonna be ownership focused. We're just gonna, we're gonna put a check in.”
Hacker: Duolingo had only one Series A offer, from Union Square Ventures
“We may have to cut this afterwards, but I think we only had one offer. It was Union Square or back to university.”
Kaden: Most struggling startups will die rather than be acquired
“I think we might see a little bit of M&A, but I actually think that M&A is really hard right now. I think you're just going to see a lot of them unfortunately die because M&A works if some other piece has a lot of cash, right? Or has a lot of asset and you're …”
Kaden: Seed-stage startup mortality rates will rise significantly
“I think we have way increased mortality rates.”
Basu Trivedi: USV belongs in the VC pantheon alongside Sequoia and Benchmark
“I think USV doesn't get the credit that it deserves. I think it should be in that pantheon of greatness that sort of Sequoia and Benchmark are typically put in.”
Wenger: Multiple focused funds force more discipline than one large fund
“Because it forces discipline. Like if you raise one big fund, you can be less disciplined than if you have three vehicles where you have a very specific thesis for each vehicle. And each time you can ask yourself, does this fit with the thesis? Or am I just, y…”
Durable VC Firms Require Clear Leadership Rather Than Equal Partnerships
“And while both can certainly work and there are certain, and there are notable exceptions here, like union square ventures, for instance, which works very well as a partnership structure, the more durable firms in my experience often have very clear leadership…”
Rebecca Kaden: Crypto and blockchain ecosystems should be regulated
“We don't think it should be unregulated. We think it should be regulated.”
USV publishes a public blog post as its investment memo for every deal
“We're public about every investment we make. In fact, our investment memos are our blog posts. You know, when we make an investment every single time we write a blog post explaining why we made that investment, that acts as our internal and external investment…”
UTIMCO Secured a 20% LP Position in Union Square Ventures' Early Fund
“I think we had the opportunity to get 20% ownership, and that's what we wanted, just like all the VCs do in companies. At UTEMCO, and frankly, today, we like being an important part of the capital base.”
USV's 2004 Fund Had Four Investments Each Return the Full Fund
“We made investments in Zynga, Twitter, Indeed, and Etsy within about a six month period. In our 2004 fund, each of those returned the fund.”
Wenger: Speculative tech bubbles benefit society by rapidly funding foundational infrastructure
“These sort of frothiness in the installation phase is good from a social perspective, because it means that A lot of capital is allocated very rapidly to a sector, and then subsequently you can build interesting things on top of that.”
Union Square Ventures reversed its anti-crowdfunding stance to invest in CircleUp
“Union Square had said very energetically that they would never invest into an online equity investing platform. And they met us, and they changed the Their view because they realized that we were filling a need”
USV Operates as a Thesis-Driven Firm Rather Than Deal-Flow Driven
“We're thesis driven, which means that we operate, we look out at what's happening based upon are sort of core beliefs about the internet and how to grow a business on the internet. So in contrast to some firms, which I which are more, I think, deal flow orient…”
Mignano: USV Did Not Invest in Major Foundation Model Companies
“So, USV, again, I think has never been afraid to take a position, and I think USV maybe, ah, did not invest in any of the big model layer companies.”
Mignano: Small venture funds must focus deeply on a few thesis areas
“And I think when you're small, you kind of have to pick Your spots. You have to have constraints and focus on a small number of things, and so I think to the extent that we see things different, it's because we focus really, really deeply, and for a period of …”
Mignano: VCs must avoid projecting operator ideas onto startup founders
“You can't project your own ideas on the founder. Sure, you can offer ideas, of course, if the founder wants, but especially as a former operator, you know, you often think, Oh, I know how this business should be built, or I know how this product should work. A…”
Union Square Ventures Is the Best at Active Portfolio Selling
“Union Square broadly, and we're not an investor there, we wish we were, but I think they've perennially been the best at selling, and they've got a very strict protocol that they run through, you know, from years eight to 12 on those funds, and with those foun…”
Kaden: Union Square Ventures' best investments came from non-mainstream bets
“In many of the best examples that I studied from USP's history, it was very much not the case, and so I think a lot about where can I develop strong perspective that may not be the hottest thing of the moment.”
Kaden: AI's biggest impact comes from existing companies integrating the technology
“Impact in the portfolio has actually come from existing portfolio companies application of it, which has for many of them changed trajectory or meaningfully evolved their business.”
Wenger: USV's Opportunity Fund has no minimum revenue requirements
“We don't have a growth fund, for example, we have a fund that we call the Opportunity Fund. And why do we call it the Opportunity Fund? Because things we put in there need to feel like they're actual opportunities. And so it doesn't have any revenue requiremen…”
USV and Benchmark are rare exceptions to VC fund bloat
“Union Square Ventures, Benchmark, or some other exceptions to what I said.”
Kaden: Referral and retention are the earliest signs of customer love
“And often the earliest indication of that is referral and retention, because when we love something, what we do is we come back and we tell our friends”
Kaden: USV Requires All Startup Investments to Align With Firm Thesis
“Obviously one thing that's different about USB is we have a real thesis driven approach. So we believe in a model of kind of collectively coming up with a sense of where we think the opportunity lies and where we think the shifts are happening and really placi…”
Kaden: USV and Maveron intentionally resist the trend of fund size inflation
“So both Maveron and USV have similarly sized Funds by Design. Both firms believe in relatively small funds, a very focused approach to kind of series seed and series A investing, and resisting this macro environment of raising massive amounts of capital as oth…”
Parker argued mobile internet wouldn't overtake desktop in his 2006 USV interview
“The interview was mostly around one question, which in retrospect, I was like dead wrong. They asked me would the mobile internet be bigger than the desktop internet? And so this was 2006. It was like pre iPhone coming out. State of the art was the Blackberry …”
USV hired Andrew Parker in 2006 without a resume or reference checks
“They never asked for my resume. They never checked any references. They just wanted to see my web presence. So I showed them my blog at the time because this is pre-Twitter or pre-Tumblr or anything like that. They brought me in for a 40 minute interview and t…”
Gordon: USV led edtech discourse years before making edtech investments
“And then Albert Wenger, he created the meme of hacking education, which I'm a fanboy of. And that was probably in oh nine or oh 10. He convened leading thinkers. And interestingly enough, they didn't invest in any learning and Companies for several years after…”
USV has invested in quantitative funding models like CircleUp and Numerai
“We have made investments in other sectors where we believe the answer to that question may be yes. We've done that in consumer products with CircleUp. We've done it in quantitative hedge type financing with Numeri.”