Matt Cynamon (@mattcynamon) — posts, photos & videos

Legendary VC Fred Wilson (@fredwilson):

“USV has now had over 10 early-stage funds & every single one of them has produced 2-3 really great companies.”

USV backed:
› Twitter
› Stripe
› Coinbase
› MongoDB
› Twilio
› Duolingo
› Etsy
› Indeed
› Abridge

“There are probably 20 or 25 companies that we've invested in over the last 20 years that I would consider to be extraordinary.”

“It's never a straight line to the top.”

“Twitter, now we know what it is—it's one of the most important pieces of media infrastructure in the world. When we invested, it was like 5-6 people.”

2:43

BREAKING: USV Raises $900M in New Funds

$500M dedicated for early-stage, & a $400M opportunity fund

The largest fund cycle in the firm's history.

FULL INTERVIEW + HQ TOUR

For more than 20 years, Union Square Ventures deliberately kept its funds small.

I sat down with General Partners Fred Wilson (@fredwilson ), Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccakaden ) & Mike (@mignano), to break down why the firm is getting bigger now, what it's betting on, & where VC goes next.

Nick Grossman (@nickgrossman ), also a General Partner, was out of town for the recording.

@usv was early to Twitter, Etsy, Twilio, MongoDB, Coinbase, Duolingo & Abridge.

Their new thesis is that AI could obliterate entire markets.

"I was a little surprised how many of them said, 'Are you sure you shouldn't raise more?'" -- Rebecca Kaden

We cover
› Why USV raised $900M & why some LPs wanted it to raise more
› Series A checks now running $10M to $30M
› Supertake, USV's first incubation, & a seed strategy built around incubations + proprietary seeds
› The "Rebel Alliance" & the case for open AI infrastructure
› Why energy is 20% to 30% of the portfolio & one of the cleanest bets on AI

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Fred, Rebecca & Michael, GPs at USV
(01:12) USV's biggest fund ever: $900M
(02:13) TOUR: Inside USV's New York office
(07:19) An AI agent that runs your portfolio
(12:38) AI Agents won't watch Netflix for you
(14:00) USV's new strategy for the AI era
(16:54) The real cost of building in AI
(21:03) The fight over monetizing Twitter
(23:54) Why Amazon is shutting out agents
(31:02) Why smaller funds pick better
(33:40) What Series A looks like now
(40:17) Is ARR a fake metric?
(46:00) 20 years of USV's biggest wins
(51:10) Why great founders still fail
(57:46) Will Anthropic compete with its customers?
(59:54) Why Coinbase moved off Claude
(1:01:44) An AI doctor that writes prescriptions
(1:04:09) Your AI lawyer is the worst it'll ever be
(1:08:29) Who protects you from your own AI agent?
(1:11:58) Fred Wilson's been hacked 4 times
(1:13:31) Coinbase: a security company in disguise
(1:16:28) Betting on markets that don't exist yet
(1:21:16) From first-time founder to Suno

85:14

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@mattcynamon reposted

Molly O’Shea

@MollySOShea

Fred Wilson says *AI* is at the same point the internet was in 2003:

“The infrastructure was there. We had Google, Amazon, Yahoo & eBay, but we didn't yet have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or the iPhone.”

“We imagined that there were going to be all these new applications that would be built on top of what we now think of as ‘the web.’”

“The moment we're in right now reminds me a lot of that, except now it's AI.”

1:39

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TBPN

@tbpn

Union Square Ventures’ @rebeccakaden and @mignano explain why NYC is poised to thrive as AI shifts from an infrastructure buildout into a deployment and application era:

1. Consumer-oriented talent
2. Cross-industry density

“One of our portfolio companies, Suno, they have offices in San Francisco, they have offices in Boston, but their biggest office is actually becoming New York City.”

“It’s strategically advantageous to maybe build around the market there and attract talent that is interested in consumer and other sort of non-pure enterprise or infra areas.”

2:13

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@mattcynamon reposted

USV

@usv

We designed our office so that it felt open to anyone passing through New York

Especially when it's @MollySOShea

Watch @fredwilson @rebeccakaden and @mignano on @sourceryy laying out the vision for the new fund

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@mattcynamon

LOOK MA! IM ON THE @MollySOShea SHOW!

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Michael Mignano@mignano · Oct 8 Open quoted post →

My last 7 years at USV have all been a dream

But the last 7 months have been the most exciting

@mignano @rebeccakaden @nickgrossman and @fredwilson do a nice job laying out the vision for the next chapter of the firm.

Looking forward to telling this story together.

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Joel Edwards

@joelhedwards

Oct 7

to all the geothermal believers out there, the flippening has come

in NV Energy’s 2026 filing, 3 geothermal offers came in at $105–107/MWh, below the ~$114/MWh capacity-weighted average for 11 solar + bess offers

in Nevada, of all the sunny places

the 3 solar + bess projects NV Energy put forward in 2024 averaged ~$94/MWh, but this 2026 slate is pricier, e.g., Boulder Solar III’s levelized price jumped from ~$85/MWh to ~$125/MWh after permitting delays, land carrying costs, higher financing costs, and, of course, big, bad tariffs.

could geothermal pull off a solar + wind circa 2010 move and scale faster to come down the cost curve? it now has a much longer tax-credit runway than new solar + wind projects (oh how the tables have turned), plus firm output and higher energy density (all true for nuclear too)

and for the 24/7 solar crowd: the ~$114/MWh average covers solar paired mostly with 4-hour batteries, and we all know 12+ hours of storage would cost more and still wouldn’t cover multi-day gaps

it might be time for more geothermal, people

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nikhil

@uninsightful

Oct 6

6-12 months ago the large labs started buying bio data

this spend is starting to ramp very aggressively. the labs are somewhat indiscriminate buyers with enormous budgets. the therapeutics market has long had buyers of data (large and small pharma) but they've historically been the exact opposite of huge-budget and indiscriminate

this shift will distort the bio startup market in a bunch of ways. there will be a lot of short-termist behavior to try to get in front of this capital firehouse. but unlike the AI data labelers (mercor, et al) and the robotics labelers (mecka, et al), the bio startups serving up this data have a chance to emerge from this period with businesses that don't rely on selling data

the best bio startups will use these sudden resources the labs are dumping on them to supercharge their novel assay and work towards independently powerful models and eventually directly produce therapies

bio is the final frontier and its a very exciting time ahead for bio startups IMO

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@mattcynamon

Oct 5

Last year, @fredwilson and @uninsightful passed on @fomo and then spent 6 months trying to fix their mistake.

It’s one of my favorite stories of the last few years. Nikhil became an active user and tried to get @paulerlanger and @seyong to let him angel invest. Fred had spent decades investing in emergent social behaviors. Yet they both totally whiffed on the Series A.

Then I remember Fred coming into the pit one day and saying, “Nikhil, I’m having fomo about fomo.” There was no round to join and no check to write but they spent 6 months trying to earn their trust anyway.

The mistake was enormously costly, but it was an awesome lesson in not letting ego and your own bad decisions get in the way of a great idea. And I loved watching Fred and Nikhil work a deal together from the sidelines.

1:07

Matt Cynamon@mattcynamon · Oct 2

Writing a check doesn’t qualify you to give advice.

When @fredwilson was 29 he tried to show up to a board meeting and start giving advice. One of the founders stopped him, “come do every job in the company for a week, then we’ll listen.” So he flew to Buffalo and did it.

With @uninsightful staying at USV as an Investment Partner, I asked the two of them to sit down and compare notes on a business they entered almost four decades apart.

Nikhil is the first analyst in our program’s 20-year history that we've offered the opportunity to stay and move up in the firm.

They covered earning a founder’s trust, building conviction before your partners agree, and staying open to ideas that challenge your strongest held beliefs. They also got into where USV has been right, where we’ve been (very) wrong, and how the venture business is changing.

0:00 Preview
1:46 Why Difficult Founders Make the Most Money
5:20 Before You Give a Founder Advice, Earn the Right
11:28 @fomo: We Passed. Then Spent Six Months Trying to Get In.
20:20 Biology Is Becoming Programmable and Opening Up to Outsiders
22:49 When Knowing Less Helps You See More
26:34 How Do You Compete With a $100 Billion VC Firm?
34:45 Why Fred Would Take His Company Public
38:01 What USV Gets Wrong About Founders
40:47 The Moat AI Hasn’t Broken: Network Effects
44:33 Who Wins When AI Becomes Multiplayer?

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@mattcynamon

Oct 5

proud DAU here

Andrew Lee@startupandrew · Oct 5

Today, I’m excited to share we’ve raised an additional $12.8M at a $500M valuation.

Muse, Instinct, Grokbot, Dots, etc are great for consumers, but businesses need more if they want to delegate real responsibilities to AI.

@TaskletAI is built with collaboration, automation, security, and control at its core, and our model-agnostic harness & cloud infrastructure gives you the best value for every AI dollar you spend.

Investors in the round include @usv, @359Capital, @salil, @RakeshAgrawal, $RVI, @patrickc and others.

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Jay Yu 🐟

@0xfishylosopher

Oct 5

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Nick Grossman

@nickgrossman

Oct 4

thinking through the built-in timeline tensions as AI deploys further and further into the economy x.com/i/article/2106…

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@mattcynamon

Oct 3

I think @fredwilson is kind of full of it because he understands most things better than I ever will. But I get his point that in high risk environments sometimes you need to be able to take a leap, and knowing too much can make that hard.

"I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to come into a sector a little naive. I think too naive is a bad idea. But a little naive, sometimes I think can be a good idea."

1:08

Matt Cynamon@mattcynamon · Oct 2

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Oct 2

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Oct 1

My best friend in college was (deservedly) laughed out of his thesis advisor's office when he proposed that if we could teach dolphins agriculture they would eventually rival humans in intelligence.

I guess we're about to find out if he's right.

Finn Murphy@FinnMurphy12 · Oct 1

In a break from the current VC world drama, I pose the question everyone actually cares about. Can we use AI to talk to whales?

@ProjectCETI’s David Gruber is building the infrastructure to enable the first human-whale conversation and initiate an interspecies dialogue.

We discuss:
- David’s journey to sperm whales
- How AI can translate a language no human has ever spoken
- Sperm whale culture & the whale economy
- The seismic societal implications of human-animal communication
- The future is going to be much stranger than we can imagine.

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:48 David's Journey
12:30 An Interspecies Dialogue
17:14 Sperm Whale Language & Culture
23:48 The Breakthroughs Yet to Come
27:49 The Whales Are Yappers
31:03 Sperm Whales Have Accents
39:47 Verifying a Whale Translation
42:13 What Success Looks Like
47:32 Saving the Whales

52:42

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Oct 1

Its hard to not be romantic

puneet@puneetp · Oct 1

Gritt AI is now installing 1 MW of solar capacity per day at 4× the speed of a typical installation crew. And our daily installation rate keeps accelerating.

At our active site, each day’s installation adds enough solar capacity to meet roughly 200 homes’ annual electricity needs once operational.

That’s the milestone: every day, more infrastructure built. Every increase in speed, more capacity to meet America’s growing energy demand.

Solar is just the beginning. Next, we aim to bring Gritt’s construction superintelligence to data centers, water treatment plants, and pipelines.

Our mission: enable humanity to build centuries’ worth of infrastructure in decades.

Civilization. Accelerated.

@Jason @andrewbeebe @albertwenger @hayleybay @CleanVC @rebeccakaden @Rajil @GrittRobotics

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@mattcynamon

Sep 30

Who in New York City wants to learn to cut steel!?

Supposed to take a machining class this weekend thats going to get cancelled unless I can find someone else to come.

Its called Learn to Mill with Phil

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