Our Focus
Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund located in New York City. We focus on web services. We look to back passionate, experienced entrepreneurs who are focused on creating highly scalable services and significant value propositions for their end users.
The below posts frame our investment thesis and explain what we look for.
The Mobile Challenge
We are fascinated by the disruption underway in mobile applications. Carriers seem to have lost their role as gatekeepers for applications as smartphone sales are rapidly ramping and "app stores" or direct downloads are the new distribution models. This is exciting as it opens up a whole new arena...
ContinueWhy We Don't Invest In Competitive Businesses
I was trading emails with one of our portfolio company CEOs last week. The subject was a company that was looking for venture capital that offered a service that was similar to one of the services our portfolio company offered. The CEO was encouraging me to take a close look....
ContinueFounders and Management
It's been a while since our last post on this blog. Year end activities got in the way. We were in the midst of a string of posts on what we look for in our investments when we went radio silent. We've addressed issues like the stage we like to...
ContinueGeography
Each month we see something like thirty to fifty new investment opportunities that generally fit our investment strategy. They come from all over the place. Just in the past month, we've seen opportunities in Israel, Australia, China, London, San Diego, Boulder, Atlanta, Boston and the Bay Area. It seems like...
ContinueLead Investor
My good friend Charley says that I "don't follow very well". He means that I don't like to participate in the Series B and C rounds of deals that have been funded by other venture capital firms in the Series A rounds. He's right. I've never been very good at...
ContinueEarly Stage Investing
I thought I'd lead off my series of posts on "other things we look for" with a discussion of our preference for early stage investing. Most of our investment approach is built on top of our foundation as early stage investors. But what does early stage investing really mean? It...
ContinueScalability
One of the common concerns about IT enabled services generally and web services specifically is that they do not have the potential to scale. When the focus of venture capital was on IT infrastructure, this criticism was often voiced as " that's a feature not a company". Today, a lot...
ContinueDefensibility
Historically the defensibility of information technology companies has been based on intellectual property – usually patents, sometimes copyrights. From the late 70s until the late 90s many venture backed start ups contributed key components to the information technology infrastructure we all now depend on. These businesses required a big R&...
ContinueInformation Technology Leverage
Not all IT enabled services businesses get the same value from their IT investment. We look for companies that have substantial technology leverage. When we make this point in conversation with an entrepreneur, it is usually enough to say “think Craigslist not Webvan”. Webvan was a huge and expensive grocery...
ContinuePotential to change the structure of markets
We invest in IT enabled services that have the potential to change the structure of markets. We see many plans that claim to incrementally improve the efficiency of an existing company or market. Some of these have pretty compelling economics, but in our view the upside here is capped by...
Continue