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The Sunset of X2Y2

To our incredible X2Y2 community, Three years ago, on February 6, 2022, we launched the beta of X2Y2 with all of you by our side. What a ride it's been. Together, we built something extraordinary—peaking as the 2nd largest NFT marketplace behind OpenSea, racking up $5.6 billion in all-time trading volume, and even today, holding strong as the 3rd largest in the game (via TokenTerminal). I look back on those wild days—the highs of the NFT boom, the lows of its fade—with nothing but gratit...

X2Y2

The Sunset of X2Y2

Union Square Ventures

Jun 25

The Rebel Alliance

Our view on the emerging agentic stack

Union Square Ventures

The Rebel Alliance

We believe that the AI opportunity is too big and too important to be owned by any one company. Instead, we see a massive ecosystem emerging around the agentic AI stack. We refer to it as the Rebel Alliance, and we believe it's not just competing, but is structurally positioned to lead. What began as a simple "chat app" experience has matured into the agentic era. More powerful models, combined with better tooling to orchestrate and connect them, have made it possible to build truly capable a...

Continuations

Jan 21

Termination Shock (Book Review)

Over vacation I read Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Unlike many other recent books tackling the climate crisis, it is entirely focused on the controversial issue of geoengineering through solar radiation modification (SMR). The basic idea of SMR is to let slightly less sunlight into the Earth’s lower atmosphere where it can heat things up. Even a tiny decrease in solar radiation will have a big impact on global warming. To put upfront where I stand on this: I first wrote about the need...

Termination Shock (Book Review)

Continuations

Cover image for Meet the Agents at USV: Arthur, Ellie, Sally, and Friends

Union Square Ventures

Mar 25

Meet the Agents at USV: Arthur, Ellie, Sally, and Friends

Building agents and custom software that fit how we work at USV

Union Square Ventures

Meet the Agents at USV: Arthur, Ellie, Sally, and Friends

There’s a great story in Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn about how a temporary wooden structure left over from World War II became one of the most loved buildings at MIT. During the war, MIT needed a new building to house the urgent classified development of radar technology. They hastily built a three story wood structure to fit the thousands of additional researchers: You know those time lapse photographs they make of construction of skyscrapers? Well Building 20 went up like that – alm...

Cover image for Sofia Coppola Short Film Award Community Review Period Extended Through July 31

Decentralized Pictures

Jul 17

Sofia Coppola Short Film Award Community Review Period Extended Through July 31

We are deeply grateful to every filmmaker who submitted a project to the Sofia Coppola Short Film Award (our biggest award to date), shared their talent, and helped make this award such a tremendous success. The enthusiasm and creative energy surrounding this opportunity continue to inspire us as we move into the next phase of the selection process. To ensure the community has sufficient time to discover and thoughtfully evaluate the unprecedented volume of proposals received, the community r...

Decentralized Pictures

Sofia Coppola Short Film Award Community Review Period Extended Through July 31

Cover image for Obliterate, Don't Automate

Union Square Ventures

Jul 22

Obliterate, Don't Automate

On AI and the potential to transform markets

Union Square Ventures

Obliterate, Don't Automate

In 2015, my partner Fred Wilson published a short blog post, Don't Automate, Obliterate, on how USV thinks about startup investments. The post was based on a 1990 HBR article by Michael Hammer by the same name. Specifically, Fred and the rest of USV partners found that the best investments were in the companies that were not just building software to automate existing markets… but to fully obliterate them instead. Since then, it's become a defining characteristic for how USV assesses startup ...

2Bullish

Jul 16

Summer' 26 Burnt Toast

How BURNT TOAST Turns Classic Literature into a Soundtrack for Modern Lifewing from literary archetypes and contemporary behavior, BURNT TOAST

2Bullish

Summer' 26 Burnt Toast

The Books Were Never About the Books: The smell arrives before the panic. It curls through the kitchen almost imperceptibly—the faint sweetness giving way to something darker. You look up from your phone, from the email, from the message you probably shouldn't have reread for the eighth time, and realize the toast has gone too far. You scrape off the burnt edges. Butter it anyway. Carry on. It's such an ordinary ritual that it barely deserves a story. Yet it is precisely these tiny catastroph...

Cover image for Filmmaker Assistance Grant Recipient: "Oh, Gran!"

Decentralized Pictures

Jul 24

Filmmaker Assistance Grant Recipient: "Oh, Gran!"

Director Yaroslava Velychko on grief, gangsters, and family

Decentralized Pictures

Filmmaker Assistance Grant Recipient: "Oh, Gran!"

Decentralized Pictures runs on a simple idea: let the film community decide who deserves support. Rather than a small panel of gatekeepers, it's the DCP Community itself that reviews submissions and has the final say on who receives funding, currently a Filmmaker Assistance $1,500 grant that filmmakers can put towards anything, though the hope is always that it goes back into their art. For independent filmmakers like Yaroslava, this kind of community driven recognition offers something rare:...

Cover image for Practical Privacy Has a Home -- Part 2

Horizen Blog

Jul 20

Practical Privacy Has a Home -- Part 2

The Builder Case: EVM-native, privacy-architecture neutral Horizen is a privacy-first ecosystem built on Base, designed for private applications, confidential financial activity, and real economic use. Unlike other blockchain privacy projects, Horizen is EVM-native, which means developers can build with familiar tools and users can connect with the wallets and assets they already hold. The chain itself stays open and verifiable. Privacy lives at the application layer, where builders can desig...

Horizen Blog

Practical Privacy Has a Home -- Part 2

Cover image for Practical Privacy Has a Home: X Space Recap

Horizen Blog

Jul 17

Practical Privacy Has a Home: X Space Recap

This week we hosted an X Space to talk through the ideas behind Part 1 of Practical Privacy Has a Home. For anyone who could not join live, here is a recap of the conversation. The recording is available to listen back. Where Horizen started, and where it is now Rolf opened by framing privacy through ...

Horizen Blog

Practical Privacy Has a Home: X Space Recap

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