VC Spotlight: Nick Grossman, USV
Nick Grossman, Partner at USV, will be the first to tell you he’s had, in his words, a “twisty career, landing in venture but starting far from it.”
Nick joined USV in 2012, but his tech story started long before that, as you’ll learn in our interview below.
Part of what drives Nick’s tech and investment career has been the concept of “slow hunches,” or the notion that the best ideas grow and evolve over time. For Nick, one of the slow hunches that has been core to his investment strategy has been the movement from “platforms to protocols.”
He explains:
“In some ways, this is the whole idea of the internet — that over time, we come up with common patterns for coordinating and solving problems, and that those can be very broad-based, open, and participatory, vs “platforms” which are more like a product from a company.”
We caught up with Nick to discuss his career, his favorite AI tools, his top resources for founders, and what the concept of “slow hunches” actually means.
Where did your career start?
I’ve had a twisty career, landing in venture but starting far from it. I went into college as a “techie,” assuming I’d study engineering or something similar. But in the process of moving from Brooklyn (where I grew up) to suburban California for college, I got caught with a fascination about how different places make you feel, and started pulling that string and ended up studying architecture and urban design. Out of college I landed in an urban planning consulting firm here in NYC, working with cities on the design and management of public spaces. Back in 2003-05 I worked on the redesigns of Times Square & Washington Square Park among lots of other places. That whole experience really sparked my curiosity at this intersection of how places feel (design, user experience) and what causes them to be the way (policy, governance, systems).
On the side, I kept scratching the builder itch, teaching myself to code. I did a lot of website and web app building for clients in the NYC area. One of those projects brought me into an organization called OpenPlans, which was building open source tech to help make cities more livable (walkable, bikeable, and transit friendly). We built Streetsblog and Streetfilms, a blog network and film company covering the transportation beat, and then focused on open source / open data / open standards software systems for city infrastructure. OpenPlans was a startup and I also learned a lot about what it takes to build and manage startup teams around ambitious (and sometimes amorphous) ideas.
You joined USV in 2012 — what was the catalyst for doing so?
I was at a moment of transition in my career. I had just had my first child and had moved to Boston to be close to my wife’s family (but was still commuting to NYC). The pivotal moment was a lunch with Brad Burnham, one of the USV founders who I actually met six or seven years prior in my urban planning context. Brad had been a key mentor of mine all through my startup journey. He raised the idea that he thought the internet was about to unleash a whole set of complex policy issues that might be hard to work through — things like, copyright, net neutrality, and privacy — and that my background working at the intersection of internet tech and the “public interest” might be relevant in thinking some of that through.
It was very undefined, and we weren’t sure if the output of my work would be starting some kind of new org, or working with the USV portfolio or something else.
In the end, I stayed put at USV and over time got drawn more into the operating issues of our portfolio, working across a set of issues including policy, regulatory, legal, data, & product. But all with a lens of thinking about the implications at the intersection of this world of startup and their impact on the world.
Then, starting in early 2012, we got increasingly focused on Bitcoin and what its architecture could mean. Early on, we saw bitcoin not just as a form of internet money or internet gold, but as a set of standards, similar to HTTP, SMTP, and the other core internet standards — all built on top of an open source core.
And from there, I became focused on helping our team get deeper into this theme of investing (blockchains, crypto, open source), which has become a core theme of our investing over the last dozen years or so. Now, like everyone at USV, I invest across a lot of sectors and technologies, but I’m particularly drawn to more infrastructure-layer networks, both real-world and digital.
What stage do you invest at and what's your average check size?
We invest out of two early stage funds — a “Core” fund, which is generalist across all sectors, and a climate fund which is largely focused on renewable energy and climate adaptation. From each of those funds we’re typically leading or co-leading Seed or Series A deals with check sizes ranging from $2mm to $7 or $8mm. We also invest an Opportunity Fund where we can lead or participate in later stage deals with checks of $10-20mm.
Your podcast and blog focus on “slow hunches,” or the concept that the best ideas evolve over time. What are some of the best “slow hunches” you’ve seen as a VC?
Ever since reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come from, I’ve been really intrigued by this idea of a “slow hunch” — an idea that grows over time, accreting understanding and finding direction along the way.
I’d say the biggest slow hunch we’ve been pursuing, for at least a decade, is the idea of platforms to protocols. Our friend Mike Masnick wrote this article a few years ago which gets at it pretty well. It’s also the core idea behind all of the investing we’ve been doing in crypto, blockchains, and decentralized protocols. In some ways, this is the whole idea of the internet — that over time, we come up with common patterns for coordinating and solving problems, and that those can be very broad-based, open, and participatory, vs “platforms” which are more like a product from a company.
Of course, we need both and we invest in both — and at different moments in technology life cycles different approaches make more sense. But as a long running slow hunch, this idea of a pendulum swinging between platforms and protocols has probably been the most core to my thinking over time. Actually, the latest episode of my podcast, where I talk to Brad and Fred from USV, gets into this topic quite a bit.
What's an investment from the last 12 months that you're especially excited by? Why?
We just announced our investment in Pluralis Research, which is an AI company taking a platforms-to-protocols approach for foundational AI. Pluralis is building a system for training AI models — like those created by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, etc. — but taking an open-source, protocol-based approach. In the Pluralis system, anyone can contribute data, model architecture, and compute resources to collectively train new AI models, and then can share in the economic outputs (revenues) of those models.
What’s exciting to me about this is that it combines two of the biggest ideas in tech right now — foundational AI technology and decentralized/crypto architectures — and has the potential to really broaden access to, participation in, control over, and transparency into probably the most important layer of technology we’ve ever encountered.
You’ve worked a lot on urban issues — where cities, data, and innovation meet. What sparked your interest in this area?
Growing up in Brooklyn, I kind of took the idea of the city for granted. But when I moved out to California at age 18 and was dropped into the middle of what felt like endless, faceless, placeless, concrete stripmall suburbia, I didn’t like it. I felt kind of lost, isolated, confused. And it sparked an interest in me about why I felt that way. And that pulled me down a rabbit hole of how places become the way they do, driven not just by things like design and architecture, but by policy, community, technology, and lots of other factors.
The huge unlock for me was reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a junior in college. This was the book that helped me see the process more clearly, and build a framework for top-down vs bottom-up approaches to building things, including cities. And it really reinforced for me that there’s a certain kind of innovation that’s only possible in a more chaotic, open, collaborative, bottom-up environment.
I think this whole exploration was also fundamental to my later interest in open source technology and systems, platforms vs protocols, etc. It’s all kind of the same idea.
What are some of the top resources you recommend for founders who are beginning their startup journeys?
There are so many great resources out there now — it’s so different than 10 or 20 years ago. Not to date myself, but one of my favorite books is still Brad Feld’s Venture Deals which is like a field guide for understanding term sheets and the venture investment process, geared toward founders. I love this book for founders because it tries to balance out the dynamic where VCs do these deals every day and understand all the nuances, but founders — especially first-time founders — are encountering all of it for the first time.
What’s your favorite/most frequently used AI tool?
Changes all the time. Right now I’m loving Shortwave as an AI assistant connected to my email (we are investors in the company), Replit for vibe coding mini-apps (I built an internal app last weekend without writing a single line of code), Claude for writing/outlining/brainstorming.
You have a founder or LP in from out of town… where are you taking them?
Really depends. I like to get out and walk the city. My favorite thing to do with people new to NYC has always been a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Choose one: power breakfast, power lunch, or work dinner. Where?
Leon’s on 12th & Broadway!
And, because we always ask our founders… what's the best slice of pizza in NYC?
This is a tough one. I’ve always been partial to Joe’s on Carmine St. Growing up, my #1 slice was Roma Pizza on 7th Ave in Park Slope. Instagram makes me want to go to Krispy Pizza in Dyker Heights but I haven’t actually made it there yet.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
