Managing Partner
Union Square Ventures (USV)Check size: No personal check-size range is published. USV describes itself as an earliest-stage generalist investor and makes decisions collaboratively without a vote; round fit should be confirmed with the partnership rather than attributed to Andy alone.
Andy invests at the edge of large markets under transformative pressure. His long-running thesis work centers on engaged networks, differentiated user experience, and defensibility created by network effects, then expands to enabling infrastructure, market-specific networks, and open decentralized data. More recent writing examines patient-centered healthcare and trust, openness, and native behavior in AI.
Large or deeply engaged communities, experiences native to a new medium, services that become more valuable with participation, proprietary data or marketplace dynamics that compound, open systems, trusted brands, and products that broaden access to knowledge, capital, or well-being.
His thesis implies weak fit for products whose behavior is merely transplanted from an older medium, networks without meaningful engagement or compounding value, closed systems that block permissionless innovation, AI products without a credible trust model, and incremental tools far from a market's transforming edge.
Expect discussion rather than a scripted presentation. Explain the large market pressure, the new behavior enabled now, and why the product belongs at the edge rather than the center of the incumbent market. Show the participation or data loop, trusted user relationship, and how value compounds. Send materials in advance and be ready for a partnership-wide conversation.
Ask whether the product creates behavior uniquely enabled by the new technology or merely recreates an old workflow with a new interface.
Map how each participant, transaction, contribution, or data point increases value for existing users and raises a defensible barrier to entry.
Identify the technological or societal pressure reshaping a large market and the emerging edge where a small company can establish a new structure.
Evaluate identity, incentives, transparency, control, verification, and recourse when an AI system can plan and act on a user's behalf.
AI agents require new models of trust, and trusted brands remain central when software can observe, plan, act, and adjust in pursuit of goals.
The network thesis expands cumulatively into enabling infrastructure, domain-specific networks, and open decentralized data rather than abandoning earlier categories.
USV sought large networks of engaged users differentiated by user experience and defended by network effects, including marketplace, community, and proprietary-data dynamics.
No podcast appearances are linked yet. Ask Kit to check for interviews that reveal how this investor thinks.
“Defensibility may however arise through the growth of service that gets more valuable, and more interesting, with each new participant.”
— https://www.usv.com/writing/investment-thesis-usv
Andy began working on the internet in the mid-1990s. In 2007 he co-founded betaworks, which built and invested in social and real-time applications, before joining USV in 2011. He was born in New York City and holds a BA from Wesleyan University and a JD from Georgetown University.