Writing – Union Square Ventures

When I first met Ed Johns and the Machenta team, Ed said something that now sounds obvious but has shifted my thinking: intelligence isn't about existing scale of knowledge and capability. It's how quickly you can learn to do something new. By that measure, the most impressive thing about humans isn’t our set or depth of skill but how well we can pick up new ones.

At USV we now work alongside agents all day. They run in our terminals, browsers, servers, apps, and chats, across many harnesses and using many models. Most of us aren't working with one agent, we're working with several at once, and soon it will be dozens, or hundreds, or more.

Today, we’re excited to share that USV is leading a $30M financing in Tolan, alongside existing investor Khosla Ventures.

In 2004, USV founders Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham published a memo to the Limited Partners of our inaugural fund. In this memo, they wrote, “we believe that we will generate superior returns by investing in early stage companies that exploit the now ubiquitous Internet infrastructure and add value to broadly available core technologies.” It was this original thesis that enabled...