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Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage
Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed 
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Mon, 29 Sep. 2008
I had a beer recently with Dave McClure of 500 Hats. As is always the case when I get together with Dave, we had a long, rambling and enjoyable conversation about how the Web is changing the way businesses get built.
At some point, I said that the vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to
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Power to the People
albert via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Mon, 22 Sep. 2008
We encourage our portfolio companies to make sure they take
time out from the operational demands of their business to think about the
bigger strategic picture. We do the same
for USV and a couple of weeks ago took a day off to discuss how we think the web itself is
changing, how the web is changing industries and society, and as a resul
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Zemanta
fred via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Mon, 15 Sep. 2008
We've invested in a number of blogging related applications and services; Adaptive Blue, Delicious, Disqus, FeedBurner, Outside.in, Twitter, and
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Meetup - The Original Web Meets World Company
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Wed, 23 Jul. 2008
Something is changing on the web. We have lost some of the giddy enthusiasm that has surrounded the web since 2004. It was then that Tim O’Reilly defined Web 2.0 as a platform that leveraged collective intelligence. There is still a ton of interest this idea, but many of the recent conversations we have had about the web are colored by concern.
Though it is not often stated, I think
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10gen
albert via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Mon, 21 Jul. 2008
My love for computers and software started as a teenager growing up in Germany. I fondly remember my Apple II which followed my TI 59. I early on discovered that I could earn money with my programming skills and wound up doing some after school work for Siemens. While I mostly wrote code on a local machine, I got to do some mainframe stuff in Cobol. I was struck at the time by how incredibl
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Internet for Everyone
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Tue, 24 Jun. 2008
This morning Union Square Ventures endorsed an initiative called Internet for Everyone. This group does not sponsor specific policies or legislation. Rather, it hopes to build broad popular support for a few basic principles, that hopefully will guide policy choices over the next few years.
Internet for Everyone's principles are:
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The Weird Economics of Information
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Mon, 02 Jun. 2008
Several months ago I ventured into the spooky economics of information with a post that suggested that data had an increasing marginal utility. A number of folks like Albert, who know a whole lot more about economics than I do, argue that it was not exactly an increasing marginal utility, but they acknowledged that th
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Pinch Media - Investing on a New Platform
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Thu, 29 May. 2008
New platforms create new opportunities. One would think that established vendors with big balance sheets, big investments in R&D, and established brands would quickly move onto a meaningful new platform, using their market power to prevent new entrants from creating a defensible beachhead there. But, that rarely seems to happen. More often, the winners are agile young companies who exploit
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Wesabe Steps Out
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Thu, 24 Apr. 2008
Over a year ago when we first started thinking about personal financial management tools on the web, I had this OMG moment when I realized that a web based personal financial management service was going to be way more disruptive than just putting Quicken on the web. It was immediately obvious that the data buried inside everyone’s personal spending patterns could be an incredibly important
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AB Meta
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Tue, 22 Apr. 2008
Over the last two years, our portfolio company Adaptive Blue has become known for its ability to automatically recognize things like books, movies, stocks, and wines on the web. By using semantic analysis to figure out the difference between The Da Vinci Code, the book and The Da Vinci Code, the movie, they are able to provide useful shortcuts that acc
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I (May) Have a New Platform
albert via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Tue, 08 Apr. 2008
Google has unveiled App Engine and unlike some other recent Google efforts this one feels fully baked and well thought-out. For starters it includes all the elements that I had identified in my post calling for a new platform, such as a hi
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Covestor
albert via Union Square Ventures: A New Y on Mon, 07 Apr. 2008
Access to financial markets is fairly open. All it takes is a bit of money to set up a brokerage account and one can start buying stocks. Over the last decade the Internet has further opened up access by letting people trade from home (more recently even without commissions) and putting financial data, SEC filings and more at investors’ fingertips. The result of this accessibility of the m
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