Matthew Mandel

I’m an investor at Union Square Ventures in NYC. I write about the things I’m most excited about like technology, philosophy, business, and culture. If you’re interested in following my writing, you can subscribe below:

  • The Top Three AGI-Proof Careers and What They Reveal About Our Humanity and The Future

    I’m very interested in what society looks like if we achieve AGI but don’t end up in a totally unrecognizable utopia/dystopia. One question is what work will be meaningful in such a world. A lot of what we do today will be rendered irrelevant, but I’ve developed some conviction that at least three professions will…

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  • Volteras

    One of the most exciting trends in energy is the rise of programmable power. Energy devices have become increasingly software-controllable. Developers can now build large virtual energy systems out of many small decentralized assets. We’ve been investing across the programmable power stack from foundational hardware to app-layer networks. At present, app developers have to navigate…

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  • You Can Just Program Biology

    The Information Age was a consequence of two developments: the ability to work with information programmatically and the democratization of that capability. We are now entering a similar period in biology. We can now program life itself with the ever cheaper tools of synthetic biology. We believe this era of programmable biology will spark a…

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  • Bell’s Inequality

    I recently finished Quantum Computing for Everyone, which is a great intro to the basic ideas and math behind quantum computing. I particularly enjoyed its account of Bell’s inequality, which offers a great lesson in the history of science. In the early 20th century, physicists worked out the core of quantum mechanics. They developed a…

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  • Humane Genomics

    We recently announced our first biotech investment at USV in a company called Humane Genomics. They engineer viruses that can be made to selectively infect different kinds of cells. To start, they’re focused on viruses that kill cancer cells (“oncolytic viruses”). The first oncolytic viral therapy to be approved in the US was in 2015.…

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