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Recent Posts
Portfolio
Over the past year and a half, we at Version One have spent significant time on energy and climate. To date, we’ve made three investments in this space but have only announced Patch. Today, we are thrilled to share that we’ve backed SilviaTerra, a precision forestry startup. SilviaTerra is building a Natural Capital Exchange (NCAPX), […]
Portfolio
Happy new year! We hope you’re well rested and recharged from the holidays! While 2020 brought unprecedented challenges, it’s also been a time of great innovation and perseverance. We’ve seen our startup companies find new ways to keep moving forward. Here’s a quick look back at some of the biggest (public) highlights of Q4. It’s […]
Version One
Two weeks ago, Boris recapped our fund and portfolio activity in what has been a year of unprecedented hardship, innovation and human accomplishment. If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at our post, The Version One year in review and looking ahead. We also like to send off each year by sharing some […]
Version One
2020…the year of the pandemic. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of human loss and hardship, but it’s also been a year full of hope and innovation. Technology’s role in the human response to Covid-19 cannot be understated. Hundreds of millions of people suddenly started working from home and attending school/university from home. We shifted a […]
Energy/Climate
Earlier this year, I published a post that was very bullish on an emerging electricity grid powered primarily by distributed energy resources (DERs) like solar, wind, and batteries. The crux of the piece was simple: decades of compounding 10-20% cost reductions present us with a world where it’s now cheaper to build new DERs than […]
Entrepreneurship
As we all know, the pandemic has forced companies to become remote organizations virtually overnight. While some CEOs and companies cannot wait until the conditions are safe for everyone to return to the office (e.g. Reid Hastings from Netflix), others have chosen to become “digital by default.” (e.g. Shopify). Several companies in our portfolio have […]
Version One
In recent posts, we’ve outlined our updated thesis around backing mission driven founders and explained why we’ve doubled down on searching for such entrepreneurs. There is no substitute, however, for letting these exceptional founders speak for themselves. In that spirit, please see the short video below highlighting a handful of our newest mission driven founders […]
Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
In a recent Invest Like The Best podcast, the guest, who goes by the pseudonym Modest Proposal, described a 2×2 matrix for segmenting marketplace types. It’s a simple, yet very effective way to think about the differences in online marketplaces, from the original product marketplaces like eBay to the emerging services marketplaces. One axis represents […]
Version One, Portfolio
We updated our investment thesis a few months ago…we invest in mission-driven founders at the earliest stages. Since that time, we’ve been asked how we define a mission-driven founder. It’s not just some vague buzzword to us, so we thought it would be helpful to provide more context on our definition of mission-driven and why it’s […]
Portfolio
Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Jam, a tool that brings Google Docs style collaboration to a live product/website. With Jam, you can comment on, or soon even suggest a change to your live product, from within the product itself, turning your live product into an all-encompassing workbench. Jam’s mission has inspired […]
Crypto / Blockchain
While Ethereum based DeFi has stolen the show for most of 2020 – and rightly so, the amount of innovation and experimentation happening there is insane! – there have also been some major breakthroughs on Bitcoin’s native layer 2 scaling solution, the Lightning Network. I believe that this progress, while less flashy, will ultimately prove […]
e-Books
We’re thrilled to announce the third edition of “A Guide to Marketplaces.” We published our first edition five years ago and the second nearly three years ago. So much has changed since then – from the rise of B2B marketplaces to new crypto-native platforms. Even as we explore emerging sectors like climate and crypto, we […]
Portfolio
It’s hard to believe that it’s already October and time to recap another quarter. While we are all focused on staying safe (whether from Covid-19 or an unprecedented fire season), we are also looking ahead – working hard to build great companies and hopeful for 2021! As we do at the end of every quarter, […]
Energy/Climate
Few launches have been as timely. Over the past month, those of us on the west coast have been dealing with forest fires… if anyone ever doubted climate change, let us be the first to tell you that the orange, fiery, smokey skies and the ash raining down from it are all very real. At […]
Energy/Climate, Crypto / Blockchain
I’ve spent the majority of the last decade working in two fields: solar energy and cryptocurrency. At first blush, these may seem pretty different. In my mind, however, they have a lot in common and are converging by the day. Both are based on principles of decentralization. Both are disrupting antiquated, opaque industries with large […]
Energy/Climate
It’s been exciting to see so much renewed investor interest in climate tech and clean energy startups. As Peter Thiel documented in detail, the last wave of late 2000s cleantech VC excitement ended in a trough of despair as many of the more well-funded companies went bust (with the notable exception of a few big […]
Crypto / Blockchain, Portfolio
We are very pleased to announce our investment in Uniswap, the leading decentralized crypto exchange. We participated in the $11m Series A raise, alongside our friends at a16z, USV and Paradigm. Exchanges have been the most important piece of infrastructure when it comes to building out crypto networks. The first generation of exchanges were centralized […]
Crypto / Blockchain
Since the early days, crypto has had four core promises: 1) Enabling trust at scale. Transactions are executed by code, rather than a single gatekeeper like a bank or other financial middleman. 2) Permissionless innovation. Crypto’s open source nature enables anybody to build on top of existing code. 3) A decentralized governance model. Power rests […]
Version One
Technology changes. The startup market evolves, and so do we as VCs. Over the past few months, we’ve reflected on our journey over the past decade, who we are and what we invest in. We’ve quietly made changes to our website. And here’s the official unveiling, with a quick synopsis of our new messaging and […]
Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of education lately. It’s clear that our current model is beyond broken. The very young are taught to grin and bear twelve years of compulsory passive absorption. Upon graduation, they’re then incentivized to take on >$30k in debt to study random subjects which may or may not […]