A year ago, USV decided to explore what an AI native VC firm would look like. We hired Spencer who built a platform and a bunch of agents and wrote this post about all of that before departing to do a startup. And we paused our longstanding analyst program last year and saw how far we could get with agent analysts instead of humans analysts.
That experiment was incredibly successful and we got a very long way without human analysts but in the end we concluded we could not get all the way without them. So we announced last week that we are recruiting for two new analysts.
That led our friend and fellow VC Yoni Rechtman to ask on Twitter, "What, the agents aren't good enough???"
To which our partner Rebecca answered:
-reserves analysis and fund modeling
-LP reporting and company updates
-board meeting summaries and reports
-decks
Of course, this was all pretty predictable. Humans are going to be better at being human for the foreseeable future.
So if you are interested in a career in VC and your superpowers include these things:
-be immersed in networks of early day founders interested in our thesis areas
-be someone those founders want to share ideas with
-have great judgement of people and have interesting and compelling points of view
-be human with other humans and an organizer of great people together
Then you would be a great candidate for our new analyst program that will emphasize these things.
If you want to apply, you can do so here.
Our portfolio company Flipcash shipped a product last month that does something pretty interesting. It takes a little bit from three well-understood crypto concepts and combines them into something new. Like memecoins, anyone can create a new crypto asset in Flipcash. But unlike memecoins, these assets have a reserve and are price-stabilized at their initial value, meaning they can't go all the way to zero. And like Bitcoin, there is a fixed supply of each of them.
The Flipcash website does a good job of explaining all of this as you scroll down the page.
Unlike stablecoins, these currencies can and do appreciate. The more they are accumulated, the higher the price goes.
And you can use these currencies to send/pay others.
I like to think of it as "Venmo With Upside".
A bunch of currencies have been created in the app and a few have grown their values above $100k already.
Some of my favorite currencies are DadCash for dads that hang out together to pay each other and BadBoys for "people who believe basketball should be played the Detroit way".
There are onramps available for ApplePay and GooglePay using debit cards and they are working on offramps now.
The idea is anything you use Venmo for, you can use Flipcash for. But when you use Flipcash, you can enjoy currency appreciation (and depreciation of course).
I am excited to use it for betting with friends on sports and golf and other stuff.
If you want to try it you can download it from the Flipcash website.
Our portfolio company Tasklet is a platform for making agents that do things for you. USV uses it to create agents that automate a lot of work for us. This post, which I mentioned last week, explains how USV uses Tasklet.
Recently, Tasklet launched a feature called Task Computer which is a Linux computer in the cloud that can do things for you and automate them.
My wife, The Gotham Gal, is using Task Computer to log into her Instagram account, go to her Instagram Collections, and pull out all of the information from them and populate a series of databases that her agent can then access to book trips and such.
Having a virtual computer side by side with an agent is such a help for non technical people that can't write API calls and that kind of thing.
If you have things in your life you want to automate but haven't found the right tool yet, try Tasklet. It's great.