It’s been a busy week on the USV news front. On Tuesday we rolled out our new thesis and yesterday we announced our latest investment, ShopShops.
I was talking to a young woman this week who we are interviewing for our two-year analyst program. I asked her why she was interested in working at USV.
She told me she liked that we posted our investment memos on our blog so that everyone knows why we made the investment, how it fits with our thesis, and why we are excited about it.
That is something we have been doing since the early days and is core to how we approach investing at USV.
You can go back and look at what we were thinking when we invested in Twitter, Twilio, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and pretty much any USV investment.
We don’t write investment memos for the files at USV, something I used to do at earlier VC firms I worked at. We just write them to the world. It puts our thinking out there and it stays there in perpetuity.
So yesterday Rebecca did that for our newest investment, ShopShops.
I like to think of ShopShops as what QVC would be in a global decentralized world where everything is live streamed on our phones.
This graphic from their website explains how it works:
Basically, hosts go into stores and livestream shopping experiences to viewers all over the world who can buy from stores they aren’t able to shop in.
This is a screenshot of ShopShops founder Liyia Wu doing a shopping event for viewers in China.
Time will tell if our investment in ShopShops lives up to everything we are expecting from it.
But I am excited by this idea, this founder, and this investment and I am thrilled we made it and told the world why.
