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:

  • Climate Tech Policy And The Inflation Reduction Act

    This week is Climate Week in New York. There’s been an awesome density of interesting founders, policy people, and other investors in the city, and I’ve had an absolute blast meeting everyone. Today we hosted an event at USV on the impact of the IRA on climate tech startups. Sophie Bakalar from Collaborative Fund moderated…

    , , , , ,

  • Optimizing SSBM

    I had a friend in college who was a competitive Super Smash Bros Melee player. Though I’d played Smash before, I realized that the casual play I was used to is a different game altogether. It turns out there are many ways to exploit the game’s relatively simple physics to make your character move faster…

    , , ,

  • Michael Nielsen on ASI

    Michael Nielsen published a blog post on existential risks from AI. A lot of AI risk discussion is kind of rote, so it was refreshing to hear Nielsen’s especially first principles-y perspective. Some highlights below– On p(doom) as a “conceptual hazard”: The term “probability of doom” began frustrating me after starting to routinely hear people…

    ,

  • Is Deep Tech More Capital Intensive?

    Something exciting about investing in deep tech startups is that the playbooks are still unwritten. It’s still a fairly small world with people trying a diversity of strategies that will be tested by the market and refined in the coming years. One thing I’ve found basically every investor agrees on, however, is that deep tech…

    , ,

  • Making Machines Smart

    I did a bunch of computer science in high school and college but never really got to do much robotics. I’ve recently been spending some time thinking about the space and wanted to get my hands dirty to understand it better. Thankfully, our portfolio company Viam makes it super easy to make machines smart, even…

    , ,

Follow me on Twitter

Subscribe to get new blog posts and essays in your inbox