General Partner at Union Square Ventures (USV)
Check size: No personal check-size range is published. Michael is early-stage focused within USV's collaborative partnership; USV makes investment decisions as a group without a formal vote.
Michael is an idea-driven early-stage investor and former product founder who looks for non-obvious shifts before they become consensus. His current AI thesis favors companies that restructure a market by transferring expert capability from gatekeepers to customers—not software that merely automates the incumbent process. USV describes him as curious, founder-respectful, willing to explore weird edges, and comfortable being wrong in pursuit of what comes next.
Show the before-and-after market structure. Identify who currently gates expertise, distribution, or production; explain why AI lets the customer access that capability directly; and demonstrate the product, not merely an efficiency claim. Bring a strong view, stay curious about counterarguments, and make the non-obvious edge explicit.
Strong but curious founder opinions, products that redistribute power to users, genuinely new market structures, builders willing to get into product details, early signals before a theme becomes obvious, and weird or edge ideas with the potential to become large.
His published framework rejects simply automating the incumbent workflow when AI can remove its gatekeeping structure. It also implies caution toward consensus chasing, efficiency-only software, founders who defend opinions with ego rather than curiosity, and AI products that leave the customer's underlying access or power unchanged.
Determine whether AI merely makes the existing intermediary faster or transfers its scarce expertise directly to customers and changes the market's structure.
Identify who controls expertise, distribution, capital, or production today, why that control persists, and how a new product reallocates it.
Articulate what appears weird or wrong to consensus, what early evidence supports it, and which near-term observation would disprove the view.
Evaluate whether founders can hold a clear thesis while updating without ego when product, customer, or technical evidence changes.
“Our whole quest has been how to overhaul market structures instead of simply creating efficiencies within them.”
— https://www.usv.com/writing/obliterate-dont-automate
AI can make expert capability abundant and transfer power from gatekeepers to customers, creating startups that restructure entire markets rather than merely automate incumbent processes.
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