Read more about how we’re thinking and where we’re investing here.
Recent Posts
Portfolio
Happy Canada Day & Happy (early) Fourth of July! Here we are, halfway through 2020 and what an unprecedented year it has been. As we focus on staying safe and healing, we continue to look forward, keeping our heads down to build great companies. At the end of every quarter, we publish a quick recap. […]
Data / AI / ML, Portfolio
Today, one of our newest portfolio companies, Cape Privacy, announced their seed fundraise in conjunction with the public launch of their privacy platform. You can read more details about the launch here. We co-led the seed round with our friends at boldstart ventures with participation from Haystack, Radical, and Faktory Ventures. Privacy and machine learning […]
Portfolio
We are very excited to announce our investment in Opyn, a decentralized options marketplace. If you invest in ETH (or just follow it), you’re used to prices going up and down. Opyn lets you protect your DeFi deposits and hedge ETH risk. The platform allows you to purchase put and call options on the price […]
Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects, Portfolio
Today we’re excited to announce that we led DemandStar’s $2m seed round. The Seattle-based company provides an online marketplace for business-to-government commerce – it connects local and national suppliers with government procurement officers. It should come as no surprise that government procurement is riddled with inefficiency. $1.5 trillion is spent in the local government procurement […]
Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
As we’ve been spending time on B2B marketplaces and dev tools/platforms, we’ve come to realize that there’s an interesting sub-category that combines elements of both: the API-as-a-marketplace. What is an API-as-a-marketplace? Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-marketplace has two sides: suppliers and buyers. But, the interface is different. In a traditional marketplace, discovery and […]
Marketplaces / Social / Collaboration / Network Effects
Twenty years ago – in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom – expectations were high for B2B (product) marketplaces. The assumption was that online platforms would completely automate all supplier-customer transactions including retailing, wholesaling, and procurement. Yet today, the world of B2B marketplaces still lags far behind its B2C counterpart. Alibaba is an exception. […]
Crypto / Blockchain
If you spend a lot of time in crypto (like we do here at V1), it can be easy to lose sight of how non-crypto investors and entrepreneurs think about the space. The huge ICO run-up in 2017 brought a lot of attention to the vertical. Since then, many have stopped following the progress or […]
Crypto / Blockchain
I recently shared some thoughts about DeFi in light of recent market turmoil. While I remain extremely bullish on p2p finance in the long run, I believe there are at least 3 major questions to answer in the short term: 1) what blockchain/layer is most appropriate for DeFi scalability, 2) what use cases can DeFi […]
Health / Biology
It’s been over five years since my friend Jonathan Libov and I wrote a blog series on digital healthcare. I revisit these posts every so often – most recently, when I wrote the 2020 edition of our areas of interest in healthcare. Each time I go back, I’m reminded that despite so much development in […]
Crypto / Blockchain
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 […]
Portfolio
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 […]
Entrepreneurship
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 […]
Health / Biology
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 […]
Version One
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 […]
Crypto / Blockchain
Almost six years ago Marc Andreessen spelled out the playbook for creating the next Silicon Valley: Don’t copy the Valley but “figure out what domain is (or could be) specific to a specific region—and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain”. Unfortunately for the Valley (and North America in general), a few regions […]
Health / Biology, Portfolio
Last week, I outlined our current areas of interest in healthcare: patient networks, digital therapeutics, patient care management, new diagnostics, and disrupting health insurance. At the same time, one of my closest friends, Josh Nussbaum, introduced his new company, Halcyon Health, to the world. I encourage everyone to read Josh’s own words about Halcyon and […]
Health / Biology
Over the past two weeks, Boris and Max have shared their investment themes and interests. Boris wrote about the latest opportunities in enterprise SaaS, while Max outlined some of his current investment themes, from the Open Internet to climate change. I’m going to continue the trend by highlighting some of the key areas in healthcare […]
Entrepreneurship
Enterprise SaaS has seen tremendous growth over the past decade and created many, many large stand-alone companies. Given the current public struggle of tech-enabled services, marketplaces, hardware and DTC companies, enterprise SaaS also feels like VC’s most favourite investment category right now. The amount of money that has poured into this space has made enterprise […]
Version One
In my first post, I shared a bit about my worldview and values. Today, I’d like to outline some of my investment themes. Note that my personal interests and theses (each of which ties into Version One’s firmwide network effects thesis) are constantly evolving – so this is a perpetual rough draft. 1) Open Internet […]
Version One
To all of the Version One founders, friends, and followers: I’m extremely excited and grateful for the opportunity to join the team! Becoming a VC is a bit of a surprise for me, but I believe that it is a perfect fit for my current passions and abilities. Over the next two posts, I’d like […]