Back when we started USV in 2003/2004, we used to see a lot of side projects that had taken off and were turning into companies. We funded at least one such side project, Delicious, which ended up getting sold to Yahoo! a few years later. But I remember that we would see one or two […]
A Different Approach To VC - AVC
I wrote this to my partner the other day. I’m not going to provide the context. It doesn’t matter. It could have been about almost anything in the startup sector right now. “the biggest thing that is wrong with the startup sector right now is entrepreneurs and their teams are too focused on valuation and […]
UK Horizons: FRC — Renaissance Philanthropy – A brighter future for all through science, technology, and innovation
Successful coordinated research programmes, like those at ARPAs, have often resulted from exceptional contractors. Many of the best contractors leveraged organisational models uncommon in academia or VC-funded startups. They combined technical ambition, a willingness to build real technology for actual users, and flexible management structures all under one roof to tackle ambitious R&D problems which made the programs a success. These organisations were driven by the pursuit of an ambitious North Star technical vision, not revenue-maximisation. And they pursued this vision with a mix of contracts and grants. We call organisations that do this Frontier Research Contractors (FRCs). Two of ARPA’s most impactful programmes, the original internet and autonomous vehicle projects, were both led by FRCs. FRCs are also often referred to as 'BBNs' by researchers, inspired by the early internet (ARPAnet) contractor, Bolt, Beranek & Newman.
Hard Forks - AVC
The crypto-currency Ethereum completed a hard fork on Wednesday. The Ethereum core developers, after getting a vote of support from the Ethereum community, hard forked Ethereum to “get back” the roughly $40mm of Ethereum that was taken in the hack of The DAO. Hard forks are a bit of a lightning rod issue in the […]
Redesigning source control at Anthropic
As our merges per day grew more than tenfold, source control became our biggest development bottleneck. Here, we share how we migrated to an in-house version control system in five months.
Startup Program: Support for Growing Businesses
The OVHcloud US Startup Program offers startups and scaleups complimentary cloud credits and technical support to expedite their transition to a secure, reliable, and cost-effective cloud.
Most of the funding of research efforts I've been involved in since ARPA-Parc have been with various profit making companies -- Atari, Apple, Disney, HP, SAP, Infosys, etc. And there have been various kinds of compromises involved. And some good work on smaller scales did get done. Others of my colleagues in the diaspora that started in the early 80s wound up at Microsoft, DEC, IBM, Bell Labs, etc.
Mini-Conference on Open Source, AI and Entrepreneurship · Luma
Co-create the Future Now Join us at our Mini-Conference on Open Source, AI and Entrepreneurship. Connect with thought leaders, innovators, founders, investors,…
in progress works
lightweight accountability community and journal for your side projects
A letter to tech CEOs
A letter to tech CEOs
Feature / Product / Business: A Framework for Sustainable ATProto Projects | ATmosphereConf VODs
The ATProto community built a ton of great features and products over the past year! For our next trick, let's mature them into products and businesses. In this talk, you'll get a practical framework for understanding whether what you're building should be a feature, product, or business, plus concrete funding models at each layer to keep your work going and growing. (More in this thread: https://bsky.app/profile/mosh.bsky.social/post/3mckiat2ne22q)
Front page · Saturday, June 6, 2026
On ThinkStack: Linux kernel adopts no-embargo policy as LLMs flood maintainers with CVEs · Evan You ships Vite Plus to unify Rollup, Oxlint, Oxformat, and Vitest into one Rust/Go toolchain · 88% of firms use AI coding tools but only 5.5% see business impact, PlatformCon study fin
Open-Source EDA Birds-of-a-Feather: Open-Source EDA, Data and Collaboration Summit
This “Open-Source EDA, Data and Collaboration” Birds-of-a-Feather session is the seventh in a series that began at DAC 2018. As semiconductor design confronts the mounting complexities of advanced nodes, Augmented AI is transitioning from an experimental concept to an indispensable engineering co-pilot. The DAC 2026 session explores the transformative intersection of AI, open-source software and hardware, and the engineers who build them, serving as an informal forum for anyone to share ideas and the latest updates on our open-source ecosystem.
Peopleware: productive projects and teams
Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of…
Introducing Sponsorware: How A Small Open Source Package Increased My Salary By $11k in Two Days
<p>After digging deep on SQLite during a pair programming session with a client/friend, I had an idea…</p> <p>About 45 minutes later, a proo...
