Venture Partner at Union Square Ventures (USV)
Check size: No individual check range is published. USV's firm-wide range is $1 million to $30 million, but Jared's special-advisor placement does not establish personal decision authority; the partnership discusses investments collectively without a vote.
Jared brings a repeat founder's consumer-product lens to networks at the intersection of AI and crypto. His published thesis favors strange, initially fringe behaviors that create genuinely new social and creative formats; AI tools that lower creation barriers; transparent economics that reward creators; open social protocols where users own identity, content, audience, and economic activity; and vertical search products that make expert knowledge broadly useful.
Demonstrate the new behavior live. Explain why it begins at the fringe, which creative or communication constraint AI removes, and how users or creators attract the next participants. Show ownership, attribution, compensation, identity portability, moderation, and distribution. For knowledge products, show the vertical corpus, source traceability, differentiated UX, and usage-driven improvement loop.
Products that feel weird before they feel inevitable, new behaviors rather than incumbent feature upgrades, creator-friendly economics, open developer ecosystems, user ownership and portability, excellent consumer UX, networks that compensate contribution, founders who beat their own operating forecasts, and expert information made understandable and actionable.
His writing explicitly rejects obvious incremental AI additions as insufficient for rebuilding consumer social products. It implies caution toward closed platforms that control identity and audience, creator networks built on extraction, generic horizontal search without differentiated data or UX, and crypto rails exposed as complexity without a user or economic advantage.
Identify the behavior that feels fringe or uncomfortable today, why a new technical capability makes it possible, and how repeated use can normalize it into a mass-market category.
Map creation tools to novel content, sharing and audience curiosity, creator attribution and compensation, and reinvestment of creators into the network.
Evaluate whether identity, content, social graph, audience relationships, and economic activity remain portable and accessible to users and third-party developers.
Assess corpus authority, source traceability, domain-specific completeness, user experience, and the feedback loop by which usage improves answer quality.
LLMs enable vertical search that pairs differentiated UX with authoritative domain corpora, broadening access to expert knowledge and accelerating the knowledge loop.
AI lowers barriers to new creative formats while web3-style attribution, forking, royalties, and ownership can create more creator-aligned entertainment networks.
An open social protocol can give users permanent identity, content, audience, and economic agency while supporting many competing clients and a permissionless developer ecosystem.
Breakout AI-native social products will create uncomfortable and initially fringe new behaviors rather than merely adding generative features to familiar feeds and messaging interfaces.
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