**Becoming a fast expert in a new topic is still a big challenge.**  
There are a lot of open resources available on the web, but finding, qualifying, and navigating them--let alone combining them into a self directed system--is a challenge. In the classroom, the syllabus plays that role. The syllabus is a learning map. There's a big opportunity to reinvent the syllabus for the internet. [Read more](/content/writing/2018/11/looking-for-syllabus-2-0/index.html)

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**Alibaba founder Jack Ma has announced that he plans to retire at age 54 and turn his attention back to education.**  
He started his career as an English teacher. It seems, from reading the piece I linked to and [...] [Read more](https://avc.com/2018/09/reinventing-education/)

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**Modern Fertility is building a trusted consumer brand in fertility.**  
Starting with their launch today of at-home testing for women. In the comfort of their own homes, and for a fraction of what it would cost at a clinic, women can have their key fertility hormones tested through a few drops of blood. [Read more](/content/writing/2018/05/our-investment-in-modern-fertility/index.html)

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**We believe we are still at the beginning of the opportunity to broaden access.**  
As a result, we decided to revise our thesis into a third version:  
USV backs trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. [Read more](/content/writing/2018/04/usv-thesis-3-0/index.html)

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**Everyone knows the big Web 2.0 companies use hundreds of data points to determine which ad we might prefer.**  
And yet — in the deathmatch against disease, we reduce human health to single variables. [Read more](/content/writing/2017/02/call-for-genomics-and-software-driven-biology-startups/index.html)

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**Even back when I was in graduate school, I found the price of textbooks to be high and their quality to vary widely.**  
Now that I have children taking college courses, I was shocked to find textbooks that cost over $200 and are still large physical objects that have to be lugged around! The high prices and lack of innovation are the result of a market structure which has become highly concentrated among just a few textbook publishers. That's why I am excited to announce that USV has led a new round of financing for Toronto-based Top Hat, which last year launched a content marketplace for higher education. [Read more](/content/writing/2017/02/top-hat/index.html)

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**There are some investments that take years to make.**  
They are often our best investments. Quizlet took something like five years to go from a company we got interested in to a USV investment. In March 2009, we hosted an [...] [Read more](/content/writing/2015/11/quizlet/index.html)

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**Social applications leverage the network structure of the Internet to connect people, places, and media.**  
Over the last decade, we’ve seen the origination and maturation of these services, from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Tumblr to many more. At [...] [Read more](/content/writing/2014/08/figure-1/index.html)

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**One way to build something big is to build something big.**  
Like a pyramid. Or a multifaceted bank. Or a university. Another way is to build something that is architected to be full of small pieces, small things, small units. Khan Academy is one [...] [Read more](http://blog.aweissman.com/2013/11/small-pieces-khan-quizlet.html)