Now is a great time to be an internet entrepreneur. While much of the global economy sputters, tech companies post growth numbers other industries havent seen in years. Their success hasnt gone unnot...
We have previously written about why the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is bad for innovation. The same is true of the House version of this bill which is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In fact, SO...
A few weeks back, Ryan Bubinski, who co-founded Codecademy with Zach Sims, said to me that he thought learning how to code should be a fundamental skill on par with learning how to read or write or d...
Codecademy was created out of the frustrations Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski felt with learning how to program. Tired with less effective text and video resources, Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Cod...
DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine that is intended to be your starting place when searching the Internet. DuckDuckGo was solo-founded by Gabriel Weinberg in February 2008 and is based out...
A few weeks ago, we announced were looking for someone to join the USV team as an analyst. We accepted applications for two weeks, until October 14, using Take The Interview. We hoped 14 days was eno...
For many years, I have been a reader of this blog. Im excited, and humbled, by the opportunity to now be a contributor and to announce here that I have joined Union Square Ventures. In early 2007, wh...
When I first got into the venture capital business in the early 90s, it seemed to me that half of the deals I brought to the partnership were dismissed with the line "sure its cool but what the h...
A reminder were closing applications for the investment analyst position at 6pm Eastern time Thursday, Oct. 13. After applications close, well review each one before beginning to reach out and schedu...
Union Square Ventures has a long history - in internet time at least - of hiring off this blog (posts here, here, and here.) A fundamental assumption of the way weve hired is that were able to get to...
turntable lets you play music together with your friends and other people online. Each DJ takes a turn playing a song and the entire virtual room hears the song. You can vote on whether the song is a...
Sometimes you end up loving something you dont want to. When turntable.fm launched, I wanted to avoid it. There was the Facebook login button that I didnt want to use. There was another music service...
Wattpad is the best place to discover and share stories. On Wattpad youll discover a new form of entertainment where you can interact and share stories across text, video, images and through conversa...
Stories have been with us probably as long as language has, and the need for stories appears deeply rooted in all of us. We have come a long way from quite literally sitting around a fire to sophisti...
When we first announced our investment in what was then called Tasty Labs we provided no indication as to what the team was building. Thats because they were just getting going on a problem that Josh...
Skillshare is a community marketplace to learn anything from anyone. The company was founded in 2010 by Michael Karnjanaprakorn and Malcolm Ong and is based in New York City.
The Internet has been an amazing platform for creating and distributing educational content. Khan Academy has become the canonical example cited here but terrific free content is emerging from many d...
Have you ever wondered why a bank charges an 18+% interest rate on credit card balances (regardless of credit history), but only pays depositors 1% on their balance? These are fantastic economics for...
Lending Club is an online financial community that brings together creditworthy borrowers and savvy investors so that both can benefit financially. Lending Club opened in 2007 with one simple mission...
As venture capitalists, we believe deeply in the value of decentralized, emergent, start-up innovation. The Internet has been an unusually fertile ground for this type of innovation largely because, ...
Canvas is a community platform for sharing and playing with media, built for modern web browsers. Canvas was founded in 2010 by Christopher Poole, and is based in New York City.
We are big fans of communities at Union Square Ventures. The partners in our firm have been investing in Internet communities for almost 15 years and we are constantly reminded of the power of the co...
Tasty Labs is building social software thats designed to be useful. The company was founded by Joshua Schachter, Nick Nguyen, and Paul Rademacher and is based in Mountain View, CA.
Kickstarter is a platform for funding creative projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and more. The site was launched in late April 2009, and the company i...
In the fall of 2009, we met the founding team at Kickstarter. Perry, Yancey, and Charles had built a marketplace where anyone could fund and follow creativity of all kinds. We were immediately taken ...
We are thrilled to announce that Stack Overflow has closed a follow-on round of financing led by Index Ventures with participation from Spark Capital and ourselves. Neil Rimer and Bijan Sabet will jo...
Today, President Obama will visit TechBoston Academy together with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Melinda Gates. The President is likely to renew his call for more innovation in education, wi...
Kik Interactive is all about sharing and connecting. Kik Messenger is a cross-platform application that allows real-time instant messaging for individuals and groups, as well as photo sharing. Kik wa...
At Union Square Ventures, we seek to invest in large networks of engaged users. And we believe that the new beachhead for creating large networks is the mobile device. When you look at the engaged us...
We founded Union Square Ventures in 2003 to invest in the applications layer of the web. Over the last seven years, we have refined that investment focus. We now invest almost exclusively in Internet...
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