But a nagging truth lingers in my mind even if I don't wan't it there. I don’t really want to build the apps I actually use. I don’t want to have to think about how they look or the perfect prompt or the ideal user flow. I don’t even really want to think about whether or not they use AI in how they deliver me the experiences I desire. Pride in my own creation isn’t worth sub par user experience. Call me lazy but despite the incredible advances in what is possible, I still want the apps that other people build to solve my many problems. I want to speak a dish into the universe and have a platform parse it into its ingredients that then show up on my door. But I dont want to connect claude code to my Instacart and prompt it to do so. I want to describe my dream vacation, have an itinerary appear, and say “lets switch up days 1 and 3, ok, looks good, lets book it.” But I dont want to make the travel planning app—I want it to exist for me and for it to feel perfect.

Much is different about this moment. The ease, the speed, the cost, the scope. But I am not sure this consumer craving to create the software–or the app or module or workflow– is one of those long term things (I feel differently, obviously, on what it does for the prosumer and certainly the enterprise.) It’s awesome to be able to build anything but the problem with the “build anything platforms” is what if I dont know what I want to build, I just know that there are solutions out there that will change how I live? The history of consumer internet value creation revolves around a series of abstractions tightened by constraints. I think that remains as true as ever.

We've been living in the kitchen, watching with amazement at how the dishes come to life, marveling at the newly discovered ease of cooking. But, long term, we want to lean back and feast in the dining room, waiting as we get served courses of delicious products. We have the ingredients but not yet the packaging and the magic for real consumer change.

I feel a bubbling of new AI-driven consumer companies and products about to erupt—new ways for us to connect, games to play, ways to buy, workflows and interfaces that make doing our daily lives easier and more fun. It’s one of the things I’m most excited for this year. But just as with every other technology shift, consumer breakouts won’t make the technology the star of the show but, instead, they’ll highlight the magical consumer moments the technology allows for. We’ve been marveling at the inners but the consumer era will be designed by the scrumptious dishes we get served, made perfectly through lots of little smart choices by chefs that are masters of the craft (with increasingly and wildly easy tools in their hands.) I’m ready to dig in.

But we also think a lot can change and quickly trying new things to figure out what that might look like has been a lot of fun and fruitful. The speed of thinking of something we can try internally to getting it into our workflows feels awesome every time. That’s why we’re doing things like rethinking our entire internal operating stack, pushing you animated cartoons of Fred as a piece of bread, doing weekly internal show and tells of things we’ve each played with or built for ourselves, hosting “New OS” demo days, and hiring a designated AI lead onto the team. AI gives us new ways to organize, synthesize, and connect information. It helps us sharpen ideas, cut through noise, spot the right companies sooner, and manage the machinery of a fund more smoothly. Board reports, LP updates, reserves management, meeting notes—all the often unglamorous but essential work of a partnership—suddenly has leverage. Tasks are faster, leaving us more time to spend on what we believe is going to change the results most significantly. And, at its best, its not only about saving time but getting closer to the weird, the edge, the unpredictable. That’s where we like it best. It’s been exciting to see the range of what new tooling can do for us but also interesting to understand where the constantly shifting limits currently sit. 

One thing we have learned is that the real gap between humans and AI is not usually in the facts but in the takeaways. A small example is board-meeting reporting. Collectively, we sit in about 300 board meetings a year (that’s a wild guess but seems directionally right.) For years, our process was simple: circulate the deck with a partner-written summary on top. The summary always had a few parts, the facts (we focused on X, the biggest challenge is Y, growth looks like Z, check out slide 12) and the takeaway (I am optimistic because the team feels tighter and more prioritized than last quarter, I am concerned because there is visible tension on the exec team, and so on). When we moved these write-ups to AI, the facts came through fine. It was definitely faster, easier, got the job done. But the takeaway, the judgment, the vibe, was missing. Reading them felt flat. Over years, we have each learned how to read the tone in one another’s notes and to catch the signals in someone’s phrasing. I missed the quick hot takes that I'd come to look for that always said far more than the summary of the data. Now we use a hybrid. AI handles the deck, the notes, the bullet points. Each of us adds a human TLDR at the top, something like a vibe report. It takes a minute or two more but the mix has been far more useful (both for the reader and the person sending around the report--that moment to capture the real point has value in it, too.)

The same pattern shows up in our thesis work. On a recent LP call, one of our investors asked: with AI, what is table stakes and what is alpha? I liked this framing. Efficiency gains like custom GPTs for portfolio tracking or automated reporting are quickly becoming baseline. Like email or Slack, they will soon be assumed. The fact that you use them is not interesting. Where the alpha still lives, at least for now, is in the quality of the ideas you put into these systems. AI can take our theses and get them out faster, push our outbound further, and process diligence deeper. But without sharp direction, it just leaves you in the middle of the pack. With it, we can use the tools we now have access to and figure out how to chart our own course. The leverage is real, but, at least for now, realer if the human input is the differentiator and the tools are the accelerator.

But now we’re in a time where maps are being tossed aside in favor of running straight into new territory, rapidly testing the tools that can help as we go. In a world where channels, tools, and tactics shift at warp speed, playbooks quickly become worthless. 

The winning hire today isn’t the one who has done it before but, instead, the person who can figure it out first and fast. We are seeing a dramatic shift in what the best founders are looking for when we talk through key hires. Instead of prioritizing experience, the focus is on horsepower, hunger, and speed: the tinkerers who dive into new tools before the documentation is written, the marketers who sense a cultural shift and ride it, the builders who will ship fast and furiously. 

This shift has made hiring fuzzier. The old “find the expert” filters no longer work when the expertise you need today didn’t exist six months ago. For founders, the aperture has widened dramatically. You can now hire from unexpected backgrounds, across geographies, and from industries that don’t yet realize they’re relevant. For candidates, that uncertainty can be unsettling; the ladder rungs are less defined, and the value of “years of experience” feels less solid. But its also freeing and exciting, an opportunity to rethink about what skills mean and where you want to focus time and energy as the landscape shifts. If you want to be a leading marketer in this AI age, your lack of experience owning SEO or Facebook ad channels doesn't matter. Prove you are fast and fluent on every new tool hitting the market and have a point of view on breaking through the noise as the speakers and amps are being built real time.

Underlying this change is a deeper shift in where knowledge lives. Increasingly, it’s moving from our heads into large models and the tools they power. Access is no longer the constraint; execution speed and creativity are the new moats. There will no doubt be new playbooks, built over time. But while we are map-less and navigating all new terrain with fury and excitement, we need the people who have big imaginations, ceaseless determination to keep trying, quick turns, and lots of desire to dive headfirst into the newest opportunities. 

1) Large and established markets. The opportunity here is to take a behavior currently happening in the market and make it some combination of easier, cheaper and faster to do. AI, for instance, makes lots of existing behavior a lot better. Examples may be the legal market where companies like Casetext (a USV portfolio co) make legal research much faster and easier to do. The taxi and black care market was an example at one point. Or new payments platforms where shifting behavior into easier, cheaper and even more fun options makes the movement of money better. This isn't new behavior but it can be, often dramatically, improved and thereby expanded. The challenge is the energy involved--time, cost, work--to compete with the existing norms. Behavior change is hard so the bar is high but exceeding it creates equity value and sometimes a lot of it. There are moments in time, including this one, where emerging technologies make the gap of where behavior is and where it can be enormous. And you get the benefit of working in known and unquestionably large markets.

2) Nascent markets. Here, the bet is on a market that currently doesn't exist becoming a new fixture of how we live. The prize here is huge and the work involved equally so. You are creating current and motion out of thin air. Sometimes there is a small or unorganized cauldron of behavior but you need to create the market around it. An example might be AirBnB. People slept on each others' couches but there wasn't a market to support the behavior. Bio-tracking may be another emerging example. The behavior was largely unsupported or impossible in a mass consumer way so building in the space requires training users on how to do it and why they care about it as well as providing excellent product to make it possible. If you succeed, some of the biggest prizes may sit in this category because you've created net new opportunity. Sometimes they require a lot of capital to get there because behavior training is very expensive.

3) Markets in motion. This is the category where I have recently been spending a lot of time and thought. I've been thinking about them as markets in motion--they aren't established and built out but they are sitting on tipping points with current moving them forward. The current may come from societal or behavior changes or needs, technology, regulation. At best, they are on the ledge of a tipping point--a market outside the main stream that's being propelled toward it. Examples here include leveraging psychedelics as treatment for mental illness, the electrification of increasing parts of our world, virtual and nontraditional schools, or owned identity built on the blockchain. One challenge is these markets are often messy. They haven't quite figured out exactly how they will work. Increasingly, they intersect areas with regulatory complexity or uncertainty. And if you underwrite them to where they are today, some of them will seem too small and stop you before you start. There's also timing risk. How fast is that current really moving? Despite all of that, the benefit of forward motion is tremendous. The energy you put in--time, cost, work--is amplified by momentum outside of what you create. Forward motion creates room for mistakes and missteps while market pull keeps you going anyway. And, if timed right, there's huge opportunity to be an early market leader.

I can think of great opportunities and companies formed across all three markets in the USV portfolio past and present. But I think we are at a moment where there's some unique opportunity in markets in motion.

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