We recently started investing out of our newest USV Core Fund. As with each of our previous funds, while it is a new vehicle, our approach will stay the same: small fund, thesis driven, high conviction, and low velocity. We’ll focus on being long term and dedicated partners to a small number of teams creating projects and businesses that are aligned with our thesis. We’ll continue to commit once and then partner with the companies throughout their lifetimes. We run a collaborative partnership model for decision making and believe each of us should be knowledgeable about and ready to jump in with any company across our portfolio. Despite rapid change around us, we continue to find that this approach produces the outsized results we can be proud of for our investors and allows us to partner with teams in the way that can be most impactful and we enjoy the most.
We will continue to look to invest at the edge of large markets being transformed by technological and societal pressures and to do so from the early days and sometimes the very earliest. We published this iteration of our thesis almost exactly a year ago and find it is only getting more relevant and accurate in describing our areas of interest. We are looking for the categories undergoing the most radical change and the approaches that allow outsiders to not just inch them along but completely transform them. Often these are the ones that seem weirdest, quirkiest, most unusual, but also are the most ambitious. How do we make healthcare both excellent and free for everyone? What does learning become when it’s divorced from the constraints of a school system? How does energy become both more abundant and programmable, do buildings become batteries, and the grid get balanced? How do we get rid of loneliness and isolation? What if drug discovery could happen in decentralized networks? What new behaviors emerge out of borderless digital currency? If we all owned our own data and could make it completely portable, what would we do with it? If we took the gatekeepers out of X (publishing and media, financial services, healthcare, drug development, education, etc, etc. etc) how could we create direct paths to more access and better outcomes? How will agents both collaborate and compete?
These are only some of the questions we continue to ask and invest against. The same questions have led to many of our previous investments both at the application and the enablement layers. But now, LLMs and AI allow teams to approach them with unprecedented speed and, often, brand new capabilities. The tectonic plates in the most important markets feel closer than ever to making major shifts. We are looking to be bold both in magnitude of opportunity and the way new technologies and approaches might push these plates forward, forever transforming the markets they tackle.
We will keep writing and sharing our ideas and hypotheses in the hope that our internal conversations become collaborative ones with the broader ecosystem. The Librarian, the newest addition to our team and only AI member, is also helping make sure the continual internal USV dialogue becomes more accessible, a strategy we always have believed makes us smarter and better. We hope you push our thinking forward, share in pulling the threads of these big questions, and come visit us in NYC where we are often hosting demo days (live demos only!) or roundtables around the wildest ideas we can think of. And if you’re building at the edge of large markets undergoing significant transformations we’d love to talk to you.
We’re grateful to our dedicated, long term LPs for continuing to support us and to the new LPs we welcomed into this fund. We’re particularly excited that we continually strive to make our LP base more diverse and make sure we are working hard to create great returns for incredible organizations we care about deeply.
