Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He started at Euclid Partners, moved on to co-found Flatiron Partners with Jerry Colonna in 1996, and launched Union Square Ventures with Brad Burnham in 2003. He publishes a blog called AVC daily, has done so since the beginning, and has built a reputation for thinking out loud in public about what he's backing and why.

That transparency is unusual in venture capital. It is also, by his own account, one of the things that makes deals come to him.

The USV Thesis and the Network Effect Bets

Union Square Ventures operates from a specific thesis: invest in large networks of engaged users, typically companies that create new behaviors and broaden access to information, capital, or well-being. That thesis has evolved over the years but its core has stayed consistent.

Fred Wilson investments at USV began generating outsized returns through a combination of early timing and thesis discipline. The firm's Series A investment in Twitter in 2007 is the canonical example, and a case Angel Squad members studying network effect businesses revisit often. Twitter was four months old when USV wrote the check. The network effect thesis applied: the value of the platform grew with each additional user, and the early bets on social platforms with that structure paid off significantly.

Etsy followed in 2008. The craft marketplace thesis was not obvious at the time: a marketplace for handmade goods competing against Amazon seemed like a niche play. What Wilson saw was a large network of engaged sellers and buyers with genuine loyalty to the platform. Etsy IPO'd in 2015 and remains a significant public company.

Tumblr came next, eventually selling to Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013. Zynga was a seed investment that went public at a multi-billion valuation before declining. MongoDB, the database company, delivered strong returns. Kickstarter became the world's leading crowdfunding platform. DuckDuckGo grew into a meaningful search alternative.

Then there is Coinbase. USV invested in Coinbase's seed round years before the crypto exchange went public via direct listing in April 2021 at a valuation that initially exceeded $85 billion. Wilson had been public about his interest in Bitcoin as early as 2011, calling it an "interesting investment opportunity." He was early, and he was right.

The Crypto Conviction

Wilson has been one of the most vocal institutional investors in the crypto space. USV also backed Ethereum early, Filecoin, and Dapper Labs. When the crypto winter hit in 2022 and Coinbase's valuation collapsed, Wilson maintained his conviction. USV raised $625 million in new funds during that same year. In early 2026, Wilson published predictions arguing that 2026 would be the year blockchains "disappear" behind better consumer interfaces, enabling users to transact without needing to understand the underlying infrastructure. That thesis about UX normalization is essentially the same argument he made about consumer internet in 2004.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has noted that the best investors develop a thesis about where technology is heading and stay committed to it through cycles, rather than chasing what's hot in the moment. Wilson's consistent conviction across the internet, social, and crypto waves reflects that discipline. Angel Squad members develop similar long-horizon thinking through regular deal evaluation alongside Hustle Fund GPs. Find out more at hustlefund.vc/squad.

The Current Moment

As of early 2025, USV began investing from its newest Core Fund, raised in 2024. Wilson describes himself as watching four major technological revolutions simultaneously: AI, synthetic biology, energy transition, and crypto. He has been transparent that the AI wave looks to him like the crypto hype cycle of 2021, marked by speculative excess, but that the underlying technology is real.

USV has 12 documented unicorns in its current portfolio including MongoDB and Cloudflare. Six of its funds from 2004 to 2016 ranked in the top quartile by Cambridge Associates benchmarks.

Fred Wilson is one of the few venture capitalists who has consistently shared his thinking in real time for over two decades. His AVC blog covers investment theses, portfolio company analysis, emerging technology assessments, and candid reflections on what is working and what is not. That transparency has made him one of the most referenced voices in early-stage investing, and it draws deal flow from founders who have been reading him for years.

The AVC blog continues to publish daily. Wilson's latest forecast for 2026 includes predictions about crypto UX, AI normalization, and the continued growth of USV's portfolio companies. The consistency of his public engagement over 20-plus years of blogging is itself a form of investor differentiation that is difficult to replicate.