The Slow Hunch explores how big ideas form over long periods of time. Big innovations are often characterised as single “eureka” moments, when in fact they're often the culmination of many smaller ideas coalescing over a long period of time. On this podcast, USV's Nick Grossman explores how those ideas took shape, and the nonlinear paths of the people behind them.
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In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Clyde Lawrence, co-founder and co-band leader of Lawrence , about what it really means to build an independent career in music. Our conversation traces how Lawrence slowly evolved into one of the most DIY operations at their level: handling touring, merch, accounting, and fan engagement in-house. We talk about how that hands-on approach led Clyde to uncover structural problems in the music industry, ultimately pushing him to testify before the Sena...
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO, traces the company's journey from addressing early internet flaws like spam and jurisdiction to its present role protecting global traffic. He shares how Cloudflare's culture of curiosity, small bets, and principled decisions led to innovations like free encryption and the Workers platform. The conversation also explores the profound shift from a search-driven to an answer-driven internet, emphasizing the need for new business models that incentivize high-quality human content creators in the age of AI.
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Alex Komoroske, the co-founder and CEO of Common Tools. Alex has spent his career thinking about how individual incentives can add up to significant collective outcomes. Before starting Common Tools, he spent more than a decade at Google leading product management for the Chrome web platform, ambient computing, AR, and Search, and later served as Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe. We traced his slow (emergent) hunch from an early fascination wit...
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with MC Lader and Marvin Ammori, who spent four years together helping build Uniswap into one of the most important companies in decentralized finance. MC was President and COO; Marvin served as Chief Legal Officer after a long career as one of the internet’s leading policy lawyers. We traced their shared slow hunch that technology can shift power: first through the open internet, and later through open financial systems. We also spoke about the paralle...
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, the co-founders of Farcaster. Farcaster is a social app and protocol that is open, programmable, and crypto-native. Before starting Farcaster, both Dan and Varun spent a few years at Coinbase. That experience deeply shaped their perspective on crypto infrastructure, user behavior, and what it takes to build a “sufficiently decentralized” experience at scale. In this conversation we trace their slow hunch: the idea t...
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Ben Leventhal, the founder and CEO of Blackbird. Ben has spent the past two decades reimagining the restaurant industry, having previously co-founded Eater and Resy. The throughline that connects his efforts is a strong belief that restaurants are universally loved but fundamentally broken businesses—and that there must be a better way to run what is a trillion dollar industry in the United States alone. We talked about what’s gone wrong with the r...
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Juan Benet, the founder and CEO of Protocol Labs. Juan is best known for creating IPFS and Filecoin—two foundational technologies in the decentralized web. Through Protocol Labs, Juan wants to use decentralized protocols to unlock new ways of organizing capital, governance, and research. This conversation was recorded more than a decade after we first met, when USV seed funded Protocol Labs. Juan is one of the deepest thinkers I know, so naturally ...
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I’ve pulled together some of the best moments from Season 1. Across these conversations, what stood out was how many ‘inevitable’ ideas were, at one point, anything but. Venture veterans Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham reflected on decades of investing, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber spoke about her vision for decentralized social, and author and NotebookLM co-creator Steven Johnson unpacked the future of networked thought. We got a clearer view into how their slow hunche...
In this episode of the Slow Hunch, I spoke with Aaron Wright, the co-founder and CEO of Tribute Labs. Aaron has been exploring how to harness the collective knowledge, energy, and capital of online communities for 20 years, from his early work at Wikipedia to his current focus on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and AI agents. Aaron believes major technological shifts lead to equally significant changes in organizational structures. He sees DAOs as the next evolution after the joint...
In this episode of the Slow Hunch, I spoke with Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky. Originally conceived as an initiative within Twitter under Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was designed to transform Twitter from a closed platform to an open protocol-based network. Jay initially joined as an external researcher before being selected to lead the project, ultimately negotiating for Bluesky's independence before Elon Musk’s acquisition. Jay believes thoughtful systems design can reshape our online experiences. With ...
In this special episode of the Slow Hunch, I sat down with Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham, founding partners of USV. Since founding USV in 2003, Fred and Brad have backed companies like Twitter, Etsy, Cloudflare, and Coinbase while developing an investment thesis focused on enabling new forms of value creation through open access to networks, capital, and knowledge. Fred and Brad bring decades of investment experience, having seen multiple tech cycles from the early internet to mobile, cloud, cryp...
In this episode of the Slow Hunch, I spoke with Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, a legal tech startup that pioneered the use of large language models in the legal industry. Jake and his co-founders built Casetext over a decade — going through multiple pivots before eventually finding PMF as an AI tool that helped lawyers do better and faster legal research. In 2023, Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million. In this conversation, Jake recounted how an early relationsh...
I spoke with Amir Haleem , founder of Helium and CEO of Nova Labs , about his journey building the world's largest decentralized wireless networks. Amir started Helium in 2013, with the initial vision to make it easier to connect IoT devices to the internet. After trying the traditional telecom playbook, he realized that combining crypto incentives with community participation could actually be key to scaling a truly global wireless network. In our conversation, we spoke about how Amir came to t...
In this episode, I spoke to Zoe Weinberg, founder and managing partner of ex/ante, a venture fund focused on technology that enhances human agency. Zoe actively invests in a growing number of founders committed to empowering users by giving them control over their data and digital identities. Our conversation explored the ever present threat of digital authoritarianism, the product tradeoff between privacy and convenience, the potential of portable digital identities, and how emerging technologi...
In this episode, I spoke to Dani Grant , CEO of Jam.dev , a tool that reimagines the way software teams communicate about and fix bugs. Dani brings an infectious energy to her work. Before starting Jam, she worked at Cloudflare and was an analyst at USV, where we first crossed paths. For Dani, Jam isn’t just about making software teams more efficient—it’s about unlocking human potential and bringing the future closer, faster. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Chapters: 00:00 C...
In this episode, I spoke to Steven Johnson - one of my favorite authors and thinkers. Steven has written 14 popular books, including “Where Good Ideas Come From” which inspired the name of this podcast and my blog, The Slow Hunch. Steven has an unmatched ability to stitch together ideas from technology, science, and history to make stories come to life. He has had a significant impact on the way I see the world today. In this conversation, we double clicked on Steven's journey to unlock “network...
In this episode, I spoke to Muneeb Ali, the co-founder of Stacks — a Bitcoin L2 that aims to make BTC more programmable and scalable. At USV, we originally backed Muneeb and his co-founder Ryan Shea back in 2014. Our shared hypothesis was that Bitcoin had the potential to impact more than just finance—it could be a new foundation for the internet itself. Of course, this idea wasn't as obvious back then. In my conversation with Muneeb, we used his personal and professional journey to trace the or...
I spoke to Fraser Kelton, General Partner at Spark Capital and the former Head of Product at OpenAI. Fraser played a key role in the launch of ChatGPT, which is widely considered AI's "iPhone moment." Before his stint at OpenAI, Fraser built Koko, a platform that was initially built to provide cognitive behavioral therapy at scale, transitioned to AI-driven online content moderation, and eventually acquired by Airbnb in November 2018. At Airbnb, as Fraser experimented with early models like BERT...
