Thoughts on the State of DeFi
The last couple of weeks have been quite a test for cryptocurrency markets in general and DeFi in particular. On Black Thursday (March 12), BTC/ETH prices declined by ~50% and DeFi’s flagship project, MakerDAO, ended up with ~$5 million USD in unbacked DAI. You can read Tom Schmidt’s excellent postmortem of what happened here. This […]
Version One quarterly news and COVID-19 response
This has been the longest quarter ever. Early January seems like an eternity ago. Countries, communities and households have been turned upside down. This time of year, we normally provide a portfolio update that highlights the various product launches, accolades and funding announcements from the past quarter. But before launching into “business as usual,” we’d […]
Security tips for work from home
With many companies moving to work from home (WFH) over the past few weeks, our portfolio company Kobalt (which provides security as a service for small-and mid-sized companies) has been getting a lot of calls from organizations that have had suffered incidents related to remote work. This is not only a good time to shore […]
The state of COVID-19 testing
In these unprecedented times, we know that controlling the spread of novel coronavirus requires social distancing and testing. While all of us are doing our parts to stay at home, there’s a lot of confusion, chaos and frustration surrounding coronavirus testing in the US. Before going further, I want to be clear that I am […]
Announcing the Version One Opportunity Fund
It has been almost 10 years since Union Square Ventures launched the first Opportunity Fund, creating a strategy that has since been copied by many other VC’s. An opportunity fund is basically a separate pool of capital that allows a VC to continue to invest in its most promising portfolio companies once the core funds […]