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15 Oct 08

Power to the People | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

  • We do the same
    for USV and a couple of weeks ago took a day off to discuss how we think the web itself is
    changing, how the web is changing industries and society, and as a result how
    opportunities for startups are changing. One of the best ways we have found to think about change is to identify
    those principles that appear to drive the change and that themselves can
    provide a bit of a constant. In other
    words to understand what’s changing, you need to understand what is staying the
    same.
  • To us, this appears to be one of the great constants of the
    web. It is taking power away from
    existing large institutions and pushing it out to smaller entities and often
    all the way to individuals. In the
    process it is building up new institutions (such as Google), but the net result
    appears to be a distinct shift of “power to the people.” We see this at work in
    many of our existing investments: Etsy’s
    marketplace for handmade goods lets artists connect directly with buyers; Covestor enables investors to share their
    track records and discover each other; Wesabe puts folks in
    control of their finances; Tumblr facilitates sharing oneself; BugLabs lets anyone create a custom network-connected device. In each case, individuals are empowered in ways that simply were not possible prior to the web.
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