Partner at Union Square Ventures (USV)
Check size: No personal check-size range is published. USV invests at the earliest stages and supports companies throughout their journey; investment decisions are made collaboratively by discussion rather than individual vote.
Nick's work connects open, decentralized systems with the infrastructure needed for the next computing cycle. His current 'Rebel Alliance' thesis argues that agentic AI will favor a modular ecosystem around foundation models—spanning orchestration, harnesses, memory, browsers, routing, identity, and payments—because production agents cross services, models, data environments, and trust boundaries.
Locate the company precisely in the agentic stack and explain why that layer factors out from model providers. Show open interfaces, composability, cross-model or cross-system demand, control of a critical asset such as context or identity, production requirements, and the mechanism by which an ecosystem compounds around the product.
Open interfaces, composable specialist layers, ecosystems that outscale an integrated incumbent, production requirements such as compliance and auditability, user control of context and identity, cryptographic trust, and businesses positioned where value accrues as a technology stack unbundles.
His published thesis argues against assuming all value will accrue to vertically integrated model providers. It implies caution toward thin applications wholly dependent on one model, closed components without interoperability, infrastructure with no clear value-accrual layer, and agents that cannot meet production needs for control, compliance, identity, or cost.
Place the product in models, orchestration, harnesses, memory, execution, interface, routing, identity, or payments and define why that layer supports an independent company.
Test whether open interfaces let specialists improve faster, combine across providers, and create ecosystem breadth an integrated incumbent cannot match.
Evaluate data residency, compliance, audit trails, cost control, provider substitutability, reliability, and security across every system an agent touches.
Identify which application demand reveals a missing infrastructure layer and how the new infrastructure then unlocks another generation of applications.
“Open interfaces invite composability, and composability invites specialization.”
— https://www.usv.com/writing/the-rebel-alliance-2
The agentic AI stack will be modular and composable, creating investable layers in orchestration, harnesses, memory, browsers, routing, identity, and payments outside vertically integrated model providers.
Applications and infrastructure co-evolve rather than arriving in a simple sequence; each wave of applications exposes the infrastructure needed for the next wave.
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