Nick Grossman

Our view on the emerging agentic stack

A conversation with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince about the shift from search engines to answer engines, the future of content monetization in an AI world, and why original human creativity may be more valuable than ever.

A conversation with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about building an open social network on the AT Protocol, giving users real control over their experience, and why protocol design decisions shape everything downstream.

A conversation with USV co-founders Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham about the early days of their partnership, how their investment thesis evolved with technology, and the curiosity-driven approach that has defined the firm.

Catching up on the latest episodes

A conversation with Jam CEO Dani Grant about her journey from USV analyst to founder, cultivating curiosity, and building tools that make bug-fixing and team collaboration not just efficient but joyful.

A conversation with author Steven Johnson — the originator of the "slow hunch" idea — about his path from Hypercard in the 1980s to building NotebookLM at Google Labs, and the dream of a digital commonplace book.

Leverage is tricky.

Screens are everywhere and screen time is exhausting.

Raise less, spend less, ship faster.

The most durable network effects often come from being the system of record.

A conversation with Stacks co-founder Muneeb Ali about his decade-long slow hunch that blockchain networks will be used for far more than financial transactions, and why Bitcoin makes sense as the base layer.

Introducing The Slow Hunch Podcast.

Instead of just strengthening your weaknesses directly, look for ways to move them into your strengths column by changing how you approach them.

It’s going to get interesting, fast

After a decade of crypto-native exploration — DeFi, DAOs, NFTs — we're entering the era of crypto-enabled apps that look like normal web apps but have superpowers under the hood.

A story from USV's Brad Burnham about a startup exec who got fired and cashed out right before the bubble popped — a reminder that bad days sometimes turn out to be the best ones.

Why we write

I think of AI and crypto as two very different, but very much related, elements of society moving from the industrial age to the digital age.

My favorite song from the past two years was Chris Stapleton’s Starting Over, the second verse of which goes like this: This might not be an easy time There’s rivers to cross and hills to climb Some days we might fall apart And some nights might feel cold…

I find myself today flying across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, en route to Denver for ETH Denver followed by LA for the Upfront Summit.

I am traveling home today from Switzerland, having been there for a week for a few board meetings (and also some amazing skiing in between, notching a life goal I’ve had since I was a teenager).

Part of the USV investment thesis is “Access to Knowledge”.

For the last 15 or so years, I’ve been blogging occasionally on this website.

One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.

Sometimes, an answer to a hard problem is so simple and elegant that you’re surprised it wasn’t obvious earlier.

This summer, we moved into a new house.

I’ve written before about how re-structuring identity is one of the most interesting opportunities on the web today.

It has been a stressful year, in so many ways.

Several years ago, I started volunteering at Defy Ventures, a program that helps formerly incarcerated individuals start their own businesses.

One of my favorite ideas from the last 10 years is “The Slow Hunch” which my friend Steven Johnson popularized in his book Where Good Ideas Come From.

It has been a long few months, and many people’s lives have been turned upside down in untold ways.

In the wake of the events of the past few weeks, I am trying to focus my efforts on listening.

Continuing to look for glimmers of hope and positivity in the middle of this crisis, one area that is for sure glimmering is at-home creativity.

It’s an overwhelming time right now.

It has been astonishing (and largely encouraging) to see nearly every activity that can be shifted to video begin to go there.

I think a lot about systems — for personal organization, for business automation, for urban information, for financial infrastructure, for the internet, etc.

I’m supposed to be in Europe this week to speak at a conference and attend another one, but I decided to stay home, to be safe.

Sometimes things can get overwhelming.

Last week I wrote about the inherent tension between data portability and privacy, and suggested that one solution would be an exportable “privacy context” that could travel with ported data.

Earlier this week, I spoke at a Justice Department / Stanford conference about antitrust issues in the tech sector.

Last week, the Blockstack team formally rolled out their proposal for a new mining mechanism for the Stacks blockchain called Proof of Transfer (PoX).

Last year around this time, I had a major medical scare which shook me pretty hard.

I am flying home from Europe today (by way of Reykjavik) and as a result, have a lot of time to catch up on things.

I am in the Netherlands this week, catching up the Leap engineering team which is based here in Utrecht, and attending an IoT conference that Helium will be at in Amsterdam.

Azeem Azhar has a great post up about the brewing conversation about regulation and the tech industry.

7 years ago on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, I wrote this post about the ideas in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

I spent time over the past few days with several entrepreneurs who are building crypto or “web 3” applications well outside of the financial space.

I spent the morning today at MTA headquarters, judging the “Accessibility” category of the NYC Transit Tech Lab competition, organized by the Partnership for NYC.