Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

Auxmoney

2013-06-11T15:27:07Z

Today we are delighted to announce that we have made an investment in Auxmoney, an online credit marketplace in Germany. The CEO, Raffael Johnen was in London last week and appeared on a LeWeb panel with the CEOs of two other USV companies, Renaud Laplanche from Lending Club and Samir Desai from Funding Circle.

Like Lending Club, Auxmoney is a marketplace for consumer credit that matches consumers seeking loans with investors seeking better risk-adjusted returns than those offered by banks and other fixed income options. We have strong conviction in this business model and the power of the internet to restructure our analog financial systems.

Auxmoney was founded in 2008 by Raffael, Philipp Kriependorf and Philip Kamp and is based in Dusseldorf, Germany. Initially, the site operated much like a classified site where borrowers paid to post loan requests and investors contacted borrowers directly. Today, it is an online marketplace where qualified borrowers can post loan requests for free, and investors can invest in a broad number of loans to spread risk across borrowers.

The co-founders are serial entrepreneurs. Until USV and our friends at Index Ventures invested at the end of last year, the founders had only taken small amounts of outside capital from individual investors. The company is now well capitalized and the founders are engaged in building a scaleable marketplace, initially for the German market. We are excited to have them as partners and look forward to helping them build a large business.

Yahoo acquires Tumblr

2013-05-20T20:11:54Z

Yahoo announced today that they will acquire our portfolio company Tumblr.

In September of 2007 we, together with Spark Capital, invested in a 3 person start-up founded by David Karp, a 21 year old coder who had not finished high school. At the time, our biggest challenge was convincing David to drop the four other projects he was working on to focus on Tumblr. Once he did, he quickly built one of the world's greatest platforms for self expression. Over the last five years, Tumblr became much more than that.

Today we, as users, are all overwhelmed by the amount of content available on the Internet. It is no longer enough to know what we are searching for. More and more, we need a way to discover things we did not know we were looking for. Tumblr is one of the best, if not the best platform for discovering new ideas and inspiration on the Internet. It does this by combining creation, consumption and curation in a way that remains completely unique.

David's intuitive genius for the medium built an enormous network of highly engaged users. Tumblr now has an opportunity to be the future of entertainment media, in much the same way Twitter can be the future of news. Tumblr was well on its way to becoming a large and important company, but the hard work of building a business around this huge network remained in front of us. When Yahoo expressed serious interest in Tumblr, David saw an opportunity to combine his ability to create a compelling user experience with Marissa Mayer's experience building businesses to Internet scale. Perhaps most importantly Marissa promised Yahoo "won't screw it up". http://bit.ly/18Y7rfy

Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr is a very smart strategic move that will bring a new audience to Yahoo and create a real opportunity for them to balance the market power of Google and Facebook. That will be good for Yahoo and Tumblr, but it will also be good for the market broadly.

The Patent Quality Improvement Act

2013-05-09T10:48:02Z

This week, Senator Schumer introduced legislation that would take a whack at patent trolls: the Patent Quality Improvement Act aims to make it easier and cheaper for companies facing spurious infringement suits to defend themselves. This is not a complete fix for the software patent problem, and we absolutely need go further (more on how, below), but it's a step forward and we wholeheartedly support the Senator here.

For those who are new to this problem: patent trolls are eating internet startups. "Troll" is another word for "patent assertion entity" (PAE) or "non-practicing entity" (NPEs) -- i.e., a company that owns the rights to patents, but rather than innovating on top of them, simply uses them to sue real innovators and extract rents.

In the particular case of software patents, this is compounded by the fact that many of these patents are so broad as to be ridiculous. Here are just a few examples (someone should make a tumblr of these - ridiculoussoftwarepatents.tumblr.com is available...).

But this is no laughing matter -- it's a huge, expensive, and potentially deadly problem facing anyone building software applications. In the USV portfolio alone, roughly 1/3 of our companies have been attacked by trolls, and have spent millions of dollars and countless hours defending themselves. It's a tax on the entire sector, and it's particularly problematic for small startups who have limited time and resources.

Patent trolls operate in a pernicious way: they start by preying on small companies (55% of companies attacked have $10mm or less in revenue), and target their settlement fees at just under the cost of litigating. This puts small companies in a difficult position: spend time and money fighting in court (which can take years and cost millions of dollars), or just pay the troll and get back to work. As trolls collect settlements from small companies, they go after bigger and bigger targets.

To make matters worse, trolls often go after the customers of their target companies, blackening reputations and damaging businesses before anything has been proven or settled. So even the threat of action is enough to put companies in a serious bind, and as a result, many simply choose to just pay up, irrespective of the merits.

All of this is undergirded by two major problems: 1) software patents are too easy to get; and 2) defending yourself against trolls is outrageously expensive and time consuming. We need to fix both problems.

The Patent Quality Improvement Act is an attempt to fix #2. It allows suits over "Covered Business Method patents" (which describes most software patents wielded by trolls) to be taken out of court and fast-tracked through a USPTO review process. In cases where the patents at hand are likely invalid, this will provide a necessary short circuit to the time-consuming and expensive court process.

While we are very excited to see this moving forward, we also want to be clear that this doesn't fix everything. We must still figure out how to make it harder to win bad patents (problem #1), and to continue to make it easier and cheaper to defend oneself against trolls (problem #2).

One idea for solving problem #1 is to crack down on the phenomenon of "functional claiming", or patenting the problem, not the solution. Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School has identified this as a key driver of the software patent / trolling problem:

"This is a problem that is unique to software. We wouldn't permit in any other area of technology the sorts of claims that appear in thousands of different software patents. Pharmaceutical inventors don't claim "an arrangement of atoms that cures cancer," asserting their patent against any chemical, whatever its form, that achieves that purpose. Indeed, the whole idea seems ludicrous. Pharmaceutical patent owners invent a drug, and it is the drug that they are entitled to patent. But in software, as we will see, claims of just that form are everywhere."

According to his report on the subject, this can also be fixed relatively easily through simple clarification and enforcement of existing rules, not new law.

On problem #2, continuing to drive down the cost of defense, and drive up the cost of patent trolling, there are several ideas out there. One is the SHIELD act, which would institute a "loser pays" model for frivolous patent suits. Word on the street is that this is a non-starter in the face of opposition from the trial lawyer lobby. Other ideas include accelerating discovery, including the details of infringement claims (which are often withheld until later in the case, increasing costs); increased disclosure of the real parties of interest (who often hide behind shell corporations or licensees); and exempting end-users from infringement claims (offices using networked scanners shouldn't be sued for $1000 per user). All of these ideas seem reasonable, and would continue to take bites out of the problem.

The Patent Quality Improvement Act is one of these bites. We're happy to see it move forward and we're in full support of Senator Schumer for taking this issue seriously. If you want, you can give him some twitter love here.

Coinbase

2013-05-08T09:37:15Z

We have been thinking about and looking to make an investment in the Bitcoin ecosystem for several years. Today, we are happy to be able to talk about our first investment in the sector. We have made an investment in Coinbase along with our friends at Ribbit Capital, SV Angel and Funders Club.

We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power. It reminds us of SMTP, HTTP, RSS, and BitTorrent in its architecture and openness. Like what happened with those other low level protocols, entrepreneurs and developers are now building technology on top of Bitcoin to make it more useful, more accessible, and more secure.

Coinbase is in some ways a perfect example of that trend. It was founded by Brian Armstrong, who as an engineer at Airbnb who wanted an easier way to incorporate Bitcoin into transactional systems on the Internet. Brian was joined by co-founder Fred Ehrsam, a computer scientist and former currency trader. The two of them have quickly built Coinbase into one of the leading Bitcoin platforms in the market.

Coinbase offers three important features: an online wallet to store Bitcoin; a merchant platform that allows services to accept Bitcoin as payment; and a service that allows individuals and merchants to buy/sell Bitcoin into fiat currencies. Coinbase is located in San Francisco and the company's details and key metrics are available on its about page. Coinbase is hiring and their openings are on its jobs page. And of course, they also have a blog.

If you are a merchant and want to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment, you can do that with Coinbase. The platform for accepting Bitcoin is free and you only get charged a small fee if you want to convert Bitcoin to fiat currency, which you can do automatically.

If you would like to buy Bitcoin and store it online, you can do that with Coinbase. Coinbase is where I have purchased my Bitcoin and keep it. Coinbase has native mobile wallets for iOS and Android and works great on mobile web as well.

Even though Bitcoin has been all over the media lately as its exchange rate has surged, collapsed, and surged again, we believe that we are in the very early days of Bitcoin and other digital currencies. There is much that must be built on top of of these digital currencies to make them work well enough to support real business at scale. And we are thrilled to be invested in a team that is well suited to do that work and build a large and successful business in the Bitcoin sector.

CircleUp

2013-05-06T21:14:40Z

As venture capitalists, we understand how valuable an injection of capital into an early-stage, fast-growing business can be. But our industry has a particular set of economics, one that has skewed the availability of equity investment towards startups in the technology sector. Yet, despite a lack of access to upfront capital, entrepreneurs are constantly innovating in all areas of our economy. One of the most vibrant verticals is consumer products, with over 50,000 new consumer and retail companies started every year. These businesses are drivers of economic growth.

CircleUp has created an equity crowdfunding marketplace, enabling investors to own pieces of small but fast-growing consumer and retail businesses. Since last April, entrepreneurs have used CircleUp to raise over $10 million in equity, each in an average of only 61 days. The list of successful companies include Episencial, a producer of skin care products developed by its CEO, Kim Walls, a skin-care expert; Peeled Snacks, natural snack foods, founded by Noha Waibsnaider after working at a larger consumer products company; and Raen Optics, a maker of awesome eyewear started by two friends out of their boutique creative agency. These companies average over $1 million in yearly sales and more than 70% in annual growth.

This technology-enabled marketplace has created an entirely new system of allocation of capital and expertise. CircleUp has standardized the investment process (no paper is used), provided transparency and the ability to easily share data, and lowered the cost of investing for both investors and companies. Plus, these are products that investors can use themselves (making due diligence fun). For investors, the platform is designed to create trust and provide information in an open manner. For companies, the marketplace gives them efficient access to interested investors to help them grow, saving them months of manual fundraising time.

This kind of peer-funding network has the potential to expand the types of investors and entrepreneurs that can participate in private investing. We are excited to announce that we have become investors in Ryan, Rory and the team at CircleUp.

Science Exchange

2013-04-29T19:36:45Z

Right now, there are thousands of scientists whose research is being held up
because they lack access to the experimental expertise needed to test a hypothesis
or verify a result. But while we have seen how online marketplaces can dramatically expand and create new businesses in many other diverse areas, it is still too difficult for those scientists to access the right experimental expertise.

Help is on the way. Techniques that some label "science as a service" are making specialized resources and institutional expertise available on demand and with openness and transparency. Science Exchange is applying these market-based principles, having created an online community for scientists to list, discover, access and pay for experimental services from research institutions around the world, thereby creating the world's first true online marketplace for specialized scientific expertise.

Almost 5,000 scientific services are listed on the Science Exchange platform, including the latest genomics and proteomics services, micro- and nanofabrication techniques, and even access to a microgravity research facility on the International Space Station. The providers already offering services on Science Exchange
range from labs at the top U.S. research institutions, like Harvard, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas Health Science Center and Duke, to small independent research companies or individuals, such as Reveal Biosciences and the Voss laboratory. Using the Science Exchange platform a scientist or researcher can search for a service, compare providers and their reputations, choose a provider, pay for the transaction and manage the projects.

For maybe the first time, with this type of marketplace, individuals, labs and companies can market their core expertise, providing efficient access to the world's scientific expertise in an open manner. The easy access to scientific expertise offered by Science Exchange not only lowers the cost of research, it also significantly lowers the barrier to commercializing scientific discoveries. This makes scientific entrepreneurship more attractive. Furthermore, the platform offers new methods to fund research and evaluate reputation, and, finally, to provide equal access to all types of research expertise.

Science Exchange's mission is to democratize access the global network of scientific resources and expertise. We are excited to be investors in Science Exchange. You can read more about the company here.

Shapeways Restocks

2013-04-23T12:29:23Z

In the Fall of 2010 we helped spin Shapeways out of Philips. At the time, the founders made a gutsy choice: relocating the company headquarters to New York City. They arrived here in a cold December with their families and little else. Since then it has been an amazing journey.

Here are just some of the achievements of the Shapeways team along the way: They launched production facilities in both Eindhoven and Long Island City. Last year Shapeway printed well over 1 million unique products and is now on track for 60,000 model uploads per month. Shapeways World Meetup day in February had meetups in 90 cities globally.

But the best is yet to come. Shapeways is working on many exciting initiatives such as making new materials available, speeding up delivery and further empowering creators and designers everywhere. We are therefore thrilled to announce a new round of financing for Shapeways led by Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz. You can read more about it on the Shapeways blog.

Foursquare Checks In

2013-04-11T04:51:41Z

Today Foursquare announced that it has raised $41 million coming from its existing investors (including USV) and adding Silver Lake's Waterman Fund. This puts the company in a great position to continue executing at the intersection of local, mobile and social. That opportunity today is larger and clearer than ever before as smartphone adoption has skyrocketed and the couponing craze has abated.

As an avid user of Foursquare though what's more exciting is the latest Foursquare experience which is now available on both iOS and Android. The latest releases put search and discovery right on top with a prominent search box. This past Sunday, my wife Susan and I went to an outdoor furniture store in Soho which promptly turned out to be closed. I pulled up Foursquare, typed furniture into the search box and got an awesome map of results around me and we wound up visiting five stores, four of which I had never even heard of before (here is the web version of that search although your/logged out results will be different from mine).

Foursquare is leveraging billions of checkins to power these search results and customize them for individual users. The app now also surfaces interesting location context right on the home screen. This could be news about a restaurant that has just opened or places nearby that are of interest. During development the Foursquare team referred to these internally as "radar cards" and the name is apropos. It really is like having a personal radar that lets you see through buildings and around corners to get a complete context for the location you are in. That experience too is tailored to you personally which makes it feel quite magical.

The next few months will see further enhancement to the many ways in which Foursquare can be used. A little while back the company introduced the ability to link credit cards to one's foursquare account. These cards can then be used to seamlessly redeem specials. The number of specials available for "load-to-card" redemption will grow significantly in the coming months and will eventually be available to all businesses through a self service solution. Unlike any other solution, this does not involve showing your phone to a waiter or someone at checkout. You simply pay and any promotion is applied back to your card.

So if you have never tried out Foursquare, or used it some time back and stopped, now is a great time to give it a whirl. You can even get started by just doing a search on the web, but it is the native mobile experience where the new and improved Foursquare really shines.

Kitchensurfing

2013-04-04T13:00:00Z

What's in your kitchen? Probably a stove, sink, running water, oven, refrigerator, cutlery and other utensils, sometimes a microwave oven. Precisely the same things as every commercial restaurant kitchen. Every kitchen is indeed an ad hoc restaurant waiting to happen. What do you do in your kitchen? Do you cook or express yourself? Probably a combination of both; and sometimes you don't feel like doing either. At the same time, most chefs have few outlets for expression outside of working in a restaurant. And very few of those restaurant cooks are able to create their own singular platforms.

Of course, this is the kind of mismatch that the Internet - which enables frictionless discovery and sharing of information - was made for. And Kitchensurfing was developed to fill this gap. The service allows anyone to find and book a chef (in an environment you control) whose expertise is varied and diverse, professional and amateur, at prices that are competitive with restaurants. Ranging from Alexander T (the Breakfast Bachelor), who just does brunches, Melissa Danielle (Badass Blender Woman) who makes drinks using only a Vitamix blender, to Retno Pratiwi, Indonesian street food. Closer to home, if you have specific food restrictions in your life like my family does, you might find the whole food business to be intimidating and impenetrable. Or, using Kitchensurfing you can find a "renegade" cook named Dan who can handle any kind of food allergy and create an incredible safe meal.

Kitchensurfing's managed to create a peer Internet marketplace and a community that unbundles and redefines the very idea of eating local. Chris, Lars and Bo have built a simple to use solution that, like themselves, reflects the diversity of what it means to cook. Available in three cities now (New York, Boston and Berlin) with more (Chicago, Washington, DC) coming online in the next few weeks, Kitchensurfing is making it far easier for cooks to be entrepreneurs by matching them with people and homes. It empowers chefs to create the life they want to lead freed from the constraints of a restaurant. There are now thousands of cooks on the platform and this unique and varied marketplace has tripled in size since the end of last year.

We are pleased to be investors in Kitchensurfing. Kitchensurfing is giving people amazing meals and experiences in their homes, thereby democratizing the business of restaurants and changing their definition.

Sift Science

2013-03-19T02:00:08Z

As more and more economic activity moves online, fraud is never far behind. Online fraud is in many ways more attractive to criminals as it can be committed at a safe distance from its targets and scales far better. It is therefore not surprising that online fraud has been growing rapidly, is well organized and technologically sophisticated.

There are two different possible responses to online fraud. On the one hand there is legislation and enforcement. That has proven difficult and problematic. Difficult because much of the fraud emanates from different jurisdictions altogether, some of which have shown little to no interest in enforcement. And problematic because of the unintended side effects of legislation, such as the overly restrictive CFAA.

On the other hand there is fighting fraud with technology. Almost two years ago a small team formed Sift Science with the goal of using the latest advances in machine learning to provide a fraud fighting solution to anyone operating on the Internet. Today Sift Science is making their solution publicly available with a self service sign up. Behind the scenes it has already been fighting fraud at such companies as AirBnB, Uber, Listia and Affirm as well as a several mobile applications, payment processors and online retailers.

Sift Science's machine learning algorithm constantly uncovers new fraud patterns. Because Sift Science operates as a network of participating companies, a pattern that is discovered in one part of the network is immediately recognized for all other participants. The results have been outstanding, with fraud losses reduced by as much as 90%. By offering such a powerful solution in a self service model, Sift Science is helping to address the large fraud protection gap that exists today. According to the Lexis Nexis 2012 "True Cost of Fraud" study, less than a quarter of merchants use automated transaction scoring. Sift Science's self service signup and an easy to use API can make a big difference here.

For all of these reasons we are thrilled to be investors in Sift Science. You can read more about Sift Science's technology and service offering on their blog. Or you can simply go ahead and sign up for their service.

Hailo

2013-02-05T15:29:54Z

We're excited to announce today that USV led the recent round of financing in Hailo, the e-hail company based in London and New York. Hailo is rapidly becoming a global platform for regulated taxi service and we are delighted to join existing investors Accel, Atomico and Wellington, as well as new investors Phenomen, KDDI and Sir Richard Branson.

For more than a year, we have watched the Hailo management team roll out their service. The team did an extraordinary job of execution. They first launched the app in London in the fall of 2011 and were the seventh or eighth app in this market. By the end of 2012 they were the dominant app, with half of London's 23,000 London black cab signed up for the service and consumers downloading the app at strong month over month growth rates despite minimal marketing. Similar trends are evident in the next two markets the company entered, Dublin and Toronto.

This financing will enable Hailo to enter markets in the United States, including our hometown New York City later this month, as well as Japan and Continental Europe. While every city has different customs, dynamics and regulatory structures, the basic need is the same: providing a service that directly connects drivers and riders in real-time at reasonable prices.

With Hailo you no longer have to worry about whether the cab you are trying to find will make an unexpected turn or pick up another passenger before it gets to you. With both the drivers and the passengers changing location all the time, this is truly a native use case for mobile apps.

The company has six founders, three of whom are executives and three of whom are former London taxi drivers. They have a sense of humor and call themselves The Big Wigs. There is a good interview in the Wall Street Journal published this morning with Jay Bregman, Hailo's CEO, that is worth reading and gives a sense of why we chose to invest. We are happy to be along for the, er, ride.

Joining Union Square Ventures

2013-01-16T21:14:28Z

Hi, I'm Brittany Laughlin. I'm the new General Manager of the USV Network. As Gary wraps up his two year rotation, I'll be taking the reins, working to strengthen relationships among the community of people that work for our 40+ portfolio companies.

I've spent the majority of my career learning to support, start and grow businesses, so this is an exciting opportunity to learn more by doing. I studied Marketing and International Business at NYU Stern and minored in Film at Tisch. After graduation, I joined American Express OPEN to work on customer acquisition and new product development.

After a few years at AmEx, my increasing involvement in the NY tech community inspired me to co-found a social travel recommendation engine, gtrot. We raised over $1.5M from Lightbank, grew to become a 10 person team and attracted tens of thousands of users. After two years, I left to focus on a problem that had been central to my role as COO of gtrot: sourcing quality development talent.

Having grown up in a Navy family, I found an untapped market in our military. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were beginning to wind down, I founded Incline, a program to train military veterans in web development and offer job placement opportunities in the technology sector. Today, the program works with 80+ NYC companies, including a few USV portfolio companies, and is currently accepting applications.

I am excited to explore topics on talent, hiring/training, company growth and user acquisition in my role as GM. I also look forward to learning as much as possible from the USV team, our portfolio companies and from you, the USV community.

When I'm not working, you'll likely find me planning a trip to somewhere new (7 continents and 39 countries so far), trying new food, or finding new athletic challenges (snowboarding, yoga, surfing, CrossFit). I also blog about my interests in education, artificial intelligence, art and design at likesandlaunch.tumblr.com. You can also find me on Twitter @br_ttany.

Behance Joins Adobe To Scale Creative Network

2012-12-20T21:09:46Z

Earlier this year we invested in New York based Behance. We had known and followed Scott and the team for several years and kept an active dialog about the network of creatives that they have been building. As it turns out, we are not the only ones who believe that this will be an important network. Today, the company announced that it is joining Adobe.

As part of this transaction Adobe is making a major commitment to build out its presence in New York which will be led by the Behance team. This is terrific news for New York as yet another major West Coast company sets up shop here following the likes of Google, Salesforce (Buddy Media), Twitter and eBay (Hunch). Behance will remain an independent brand within Adobe and continue to focus on building out the features and scale of the Behance Network, now backed by the resources of a large public company.

You can read a more about what it all means over on Behance's blog. Our congratulations to the teams at Behance and Adobe!

Visualizing our Investments

2012-11-30T21:17:14Z

Union Square Ventures is a thesis driven firm. We don't really invest in the consumer web, networks, mobile, the cloud, or any specific technology. We invest in the disruption of the global economy caused by the increasing liquidity of information enabled by the internet. Our thesis allows us to find opportunities as the investment landscape changes.

We recently created the USV Portfolio Timeline so that we could better understand how our approach to investing has evolved with the market. We often reflect on these trends, and we wanted to create an alternate view of the USV portfolio that organizes our investments by "Theme" and "Stage."

A couple of current trends jump out from this presentation. First, USV is investing more frequently in Series B rounds and fewer seed rounds. Second, that we are finding interesting opportunities in enterprise, finance and education.

Zach, our hacker-in-residence and I developed the timeline using an open-source project, TimelineJS. The theme view arranges our portfolio into six investment areas: Advertising technology, Developer tools, Education, Enterprise, Marketplaces, and Social & Search. The stage view organizes our investments by the stage (Seed, Series A, Series B, or later) of our initial investment. We will continue to improve and update the timeline as we invest in more companies.

We hope you'll enjoy playing around with the Portfolio Timeline as much as we do. We are sharing it with you, because we have always learned much more by sharing our work than we have by keeping it to ourselves. The timeline has been helpful to our team, and we hope that it provides more context around our approach and the types of opportunities that we're looking for.

Looking for Design Talent

2012-10-10T12:46:18Z

We are excited to announce a Behance talent audition to identify five designers that will be commissioned to update the look and feel of USV's identity. You can find a detailed design brief at Behance. We have decided on a network-based approach, leveraging our portfolio company Behance’s design community, because it is a natural fit with networks as our central investment thesis and our rethinking of USV.com as more of a network.

Rather than spec work, we are using Behance to conduct a talent audition based on existing work first and will then commission five designers. This means that everyone creating new work for this project will be compensated -- not just the one winner who will carry out our complete brand identity. This model has a storied tradition, dating at least as far back as the design competition for the dome of the Florence Cathedral. We believe that it strikes the right balance between open access and properly valuing the work of all participating designers.

Central to our overall investing thesis is the belief that the internet enables the creation of new networks that can replace traditional hierarchical organizations across the economy and society. Networks tend to be powerful because they are more resilient, more effective and more inclusive. Steven Johnson’s new book Future Perfect coins the term “peer progressives” to describe this position.

Most of our portfolio companies have some kind of network effect in which the services become more valuable for everyone as the number of people or companies using them increases. We are also trying to use the network as much as possible for the day-to-day operation of Union Square Ventures. For instance, we use an open process for hiring new analysts and recently published our background materials and investment theses for online education. We are also facilitating networks among our portfolio companies by organizing in-person meetings and online forums.

Our network, including the portfolio companies and their employees, all produce a vast amount of interesting content across the web. Our current web presence was launched as a blog in 2005 to facillitate a more open dialogue; but it does not reflect this broader network. We are working on a new version that will aggregate and surface content from across our network.

So if you are interested in participating in the design please head over to Behance for instructions. If you know someone who should participate please let them know. And everyone can influence the selection process through appreciating (a “like” on Behance) the work of participating designers.