Nick Grossman | Union Square Ventures | Page 7 of 18

February 17, 2020

Last week I wrote about the inherent tension between data portability and privacy, and suggested that one solution would be an exportable “privacy context” that could travel with ported data. Such an approach, however, would require a notion of cryptographic identity.

February 15, 2020

Earlier this week, I spoke at a Justice Department / Stanford conference about antitrust issues in the tech sector. Our panel included Patricia Nakache from Trinity Ventures, Ben Thompson from Stratechery and Mark Lemley from Stanford. If you are interested, you can read more data portability and privacy.

February 10, 2020

Last week, the Blockstack team formally rolled out their proposal for a new mining mechanism for the Stacks blockchain called Proof of Transfer (PoX). In addition to the blog post, you can read the full PoX white paper here.

February 3, 2020

Last year around this time, I had a major medical scare which shook me pretty hard. The details don’t matter, but the takeaway was that afterwards I felt lucky to have not had a more serious problem, despite a bad outcome. Read more.

January 31, 2020

I am flying home from Europe today (by way of Reykjavik) and as a result, have a lot of time to catch up on things. I have spent the bulk of the day writing up a handful of strategy docs here.

January 29, 2020

I am in the Netherlands this week, catching up the Leap engineering team which is based here in Utrecht, and attending an IoT conference that Helium will be at in Amsterdam. I have always loved it here, primarily because of its innovative tech landscape. Read more.

January 27, 2020

Azeem Azhar has a great post up about the brewing conversation about regulation and the tech industry. There are two main points that stand out to me: 1) In digital systems, ML/AI and data network effects create feedback loops. Read more.

January 17, 2020

I spent time over the past few days with several entrepreneurs who are building crypto or “web 3” applications well outside of the financial space. One of the takeaways for me was of the important role that digital “bearer” assets play in this new ecosystem. Read more.

January 16, 2020

When USV started looking closely at the energy sector, we were excited to find networks on multiple levels: at the grid level, a network of electrons; at the market level, a network of transactions and financial products; and at the regulatory level. Learn more.