Three and a half years ago, I joined USV as an investor through the firm's analyst program. The analyst role is fixed-term, and nine months ago the team gave me the opportunity to stay on and move up in the firm as an Investment Partner. This seems worth sharing externally. It also seems like a good moment to reflect on the last few years.
The short version: I love venture capital, I want to practice the craft for a long time, I think I am at my best with a team, and I think this team is elite.
Venture capital is an unbelievable game to have the privilege to play. All of the downsides are true, but so are all of the cliché positives. You get to engage intellectually with interesting and diverse technologies and businesses every single day, as well as work closely with incredible entrepreneurs trying to bend the world in their direction. This has been a dream job.
One of the nice aspects of a firm like USV is that it is particularly top-heavy. For my entire tenure as an analyst, the investment team was three junior investors and seven equal GPs, each of whom had been doing the venture job for anywhere from 10 to 40 years, and each of whom is quite a different investor from the others. When you are starting out, getting to observe and learn from seven completely different styles of investing at close range is an unbeatable experience. I could write many things about the investment team, but I'll give one note on each person and how they've influenced me.
Rebecca is a paragon of modern venture capital. Insane work ethic. Unbelievable at the nuts and bolts of this job. Incredibly responsive, in every room, on top of everything, always. She raised my baseline a lot for what doing this job well looks like.
Nick is the most present and engaged investor I've ever met – maybe the most present person I've ever met, period – which stands out in a world of hyperconnectedness and hyperdistraction. Nick's intelligence combined with his ability to be so locked in is an inspiration and also taught me a lot about how to give entrepreneurs a great experience in conversation.
Mike is the newest GP on the team. We have only worked together for a couple of months, but he brings immense energy and hustle, and strongly brings an entrepreneur's mindset.
Fred is the ultimate communicator, which is downstream of clear thinking. He never minces words and always gets exactly to the heart of an issue as concisely as possible. It has taught me a lot about how to deliver a message, internally and externally. I am still too verbose. As my old colleague Matt would say, it really does help to sit down every day for 20+ years and force yourself to write about a topic. Everything's a muscle!
Andy is potentially the best conversationalist I've ever met, truly beloved by everyone he speaks to: entrepreneurs, operators, investors, and people in all walks of life. Also probably the coolest investor I know. He has taught me a lot about how to make people feel heard, seen, and respected.
Albert is the most polymathic investor I've ever met. He can touch almost any topic — consumer software, quantum, bio, and so on, is deeply technical, understands things very quickly, and is able to tease out the root of the question. From Albert I have learned how to think about where compounding can come from in all types of businesses and how to build an appetite for investigating ideas that have fallen out of favor.
Brad is a breed of investor that I'm not sure exists anymore. He is unbelievably thoughtful and operates at an almost philosophical level. He rarely touches product and somehow doesn't need to in order to build intuition about markets, companies, and themes. He is incredibly selective and patient in making new investments, but also incredibly open-minded about where opportunities can come from — he probably fields and responds to more cold inbound than anyone I know. Brad has taught me a lot about respecting the opportunity and the entrepreneur, and about stepping back and asking the bigger questions.
John is the only investor I didn't get to see make a new investment during my time at USV, but I got to observe him on a number of his boards. He is an unbelievably prepared and thorough investor who really takes his time to understand businesses, and advises with a cautious and steady hand. John has taught me a lot about what it looks like to do the right thing and to bring rationality to an exuberant industry.
Jared is a venture partner at USV. We worked closely for some time. He is intense while maintaining an extremely low ego, and is very charismatic. Venture capital is an odd and non-linear type of work – the rhythms of a venture firm have little resemblance to building a technology business. Jared helped me see what productive intensity can look like in this environment.
I’ll save most of my thoughts on this topic for another post, but some things that stick out from that period are:
1) Figuring out who I want to be as an investor. It is simultaneously true that the venture capital job is very simple (“see, pick, win, support”) and also that there are so many different ways to play it. I think it takes time to find your strengths and figure out what your style will be. I have borrowed a lot from my team and many of my peers, and will continue to.
2) The dramatic shifts in the market landscape. Obvious to state, but AI has completely upended the market in such intense ways – the environment in 2026 is not even comparable to when I joined the firm in Jan 2023 as the private markets were bottoming out. Partaking in this frenzy has been fun as a consumer and edifying as an investor. It also has deeply challenged us as a firm, and while we feel more conviction in our approach than ever, it has been fun to question all assumptions and rethink our strategy from the ground up.
In cutting over to this new role as an Investment Partner, I've had the opportunity to be in a lead seat on investments. And while we make all our decisions at USV as a collective, being in this position has felt like an entirely different ballgame. Getting right up to the edge of pulling the trigger on an investment — staring down into the abyss on projects where you know failure is the most likely outcome — is terrifying and thrilling. Working through that feeling on different opportunities has itself been a huge learning. It sounds so obvious, but actually doing the thing has been the only way to really understand what conviction feels like.
I truly cannot imagine a more interesting time to be an active participant in technology. LLMs are obviously the most important technology of our time and seem poised to continue improving at a fast rate. But there are also so many other technologies that are at different and investable points in their maturation cycle (reusable space launch, solar, batteries, physical AI models, autonomous vehicles, blockchains, DNA sequencing, DNA editing, micro-nuclear, etc, etc). The digital and physical worlds are going to be remade, and rapidly.
Against this backdrop, we are as committed to generalism as ever before, but we also continue to believe deeply in constraints. Our fund sizes will continue to be as small as will allow us to execute on our strategy. And we will continue to tightly focus on the categories we care about most, and try to build strong perspectives on where value accrues within those categories.
As exciting as this time is, with a rate of change and pace that feels like it only keeps increasing, I also think it is easy to get lost. I am grateful to be working at an institution that is still committed to having constraints, and to getting better at knowing when to break them.
I am unbelievably excited for the decade ahead, and about the team and founders I get to do it with.