More than a decade ago, I had the privilege of pitching USV when I was raising capital for the podcasting startup I was building at the time, Anchor. While I dreaded many fundraising pitches, I was excited for this one, for a few reasons. First, USV was one of the world's most legendary and best performing venture firms, especially in New York, where I’m from and where we were building the company. Second, I knew they were into products that more mainstream VCs wouldn't touch, and few others seemed willing to back a podcast company at the time. Third, I had learned a lot about building my startup as a daily reader of Fred Wilson's blog, AVC.

We didn't get the investment. But the conversations stuck with me: it was obvious that they were students of the world's best products and founders, deeply opinionated, and genuinely curious about things that were still too weird for most VCs to take seriously. I got to know them much better over time, as both a friend to the firm and eventually an LP. And what I consistently heard over the years since was that USV's reputation with both their founders and LPs is every bit as strong as their returns. Occasionally, after exiting Anchor to Spotify and becoming a VC myself, I found myself channeling their sensibility through my own investments when they still looked strange to most people.

USV describes itself as “a conversation”. They form their strategy by talking to each other. A lot. They do this as a very small and collegial partnership, in person, in NYC. It's how I believe I’ve done my best work, too: building Anchor with my co-founder Nir, in a small office, where we'd talk strategy and whiteboard obsessively, sometimes for weeks, before touching a line of code. Or at Spotify post-acquisition, with Gustav Söderström, Daniel Ek, and the team, where we’d debate deeply, and align as a 6,000+ person company before building anything. Gustav has a famous saying within Spotify: "talk is cheap, so you should talk a lot." His point: building the wrong thing is expensive, so earn the right to build by thinking hard first. USV operates the same way. Talk a lot, form true clarity of thought, and don’t be afraid to look weird before being right.

Venture capital has a prevailing strategy right now, and it's not a secret: raise a war chest of capital and deploy aggressively into companies that look like they can become category leaders. Capital and velocity are the weapons. And it has worked extraordinarily well. The funds that deployed into consensus-winning AI companies over the past few years, backing the infrastructure, the foundation models, and the clear category leaders early, will generate some of the best returns this industry has ever seen.