Bethany Crystal | Union Square Ventures | Page 3 of 17

Bethany Crystal


May 27, 2019

I’ve never liked the question, “How are you?” For one, it’s an empty greeting. Most people who ask don’t care about the response. Second, it’s the most open-ended question in the world. There’s no right way to answer it. In [...]  Read more


May 27, 2019

This year, on International Women’s Day, Reshma Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who Code, shared an interesting charge for women around the world: “Be a little mediocre.” At a book release event in NYC last night for her new [...]  Read more


May 22, 2019

Stop me if this sounds familiar: You’re in a meeting at work listening to a colleague present an idea. In the middle of their pitch, they mention something — a person, another company, an example of a problem — that [...]  Read more


May 19, 2019

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about “in flux” stages at work. Maybe you have new people joining, senior people leaving, a shift of product focus, or a change in direction. We’ve had a little bit of this happening lately [...]  Read more


May 15, 2019

A few years ago, in a survey of 500+ employees across USV portfolio companies, we were surprised to see questions about best practices in management and leadership bubbling to the top. When we asked people what they expected to spend [...]  Read more


May 12, 2019

How you end big projects We hosted our annual USV CEO Summit at this week. In its aftermath, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write about the “denouement” process of refreshing yourself after a big project. In his [...]  Read more


May 6, 2019

Back in college, I used to do this crazy thing every year called Dance Marathon. Here’s the premise: Dance for 30 hours with 800 other students on campus as part of a massive fundraising drive. “It’s for the kids,” we’d [...]  Read more


May 3, 2019

My husband and I have a blind cat who needs eye drops twice a day. Sometimes he’s home to give her eye drops. Sometimes I am. But it has become a chore that we alternate between ourselves, without any particular [...]  Read more


Apr 30, 2019

About this Series: There’s a list of questions that I get asked a lot about my career and my job, so I’ve decided to turn these into a short series of blog posts that I can use for reference in [...]  Read more