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:

  • ChatGPT and Hedonic Adaptation

    ChatGPT is incredible. It’s only the first iteration of a consumer LLM product, and I already use it everyday. Ordinary internet tools like search and wikipedia are still best for quickly finding a fact or going deep on researching something, but until ChatGPT’s release, I hadn’t realized their inadequacy for grokking concepts. There’s no guarantee…

  • That was then, this is now

    I mentioned before that I’ve been reading a ton of old blogs since I started this blog. It’s actually a very fun activity – regular blogs from decades ago are really fascinating artifacts. Anyway, I was recently reading 2005 AVC posts: Howard’s list of problems with the venture business is at least three years old…

  • Fortuna and Facebook

    In the early consumer web days, venture firms started investing in businesses that looked very different from the kinds of businesses they were used to. Apparently Accel in particular had some problems building conviction in the new crop of startups In the end, “Skype looked too weird to us,” [Kevin] Efrusy recalled. “We decided not…

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  • Liberalism and Desire

    Immanuel Kant gets a reputation for having an especially austere theory of the good life. Anyone who has taken an intro to philosophy class might point to his argument that one should never lie, even to a murderer at the door, as an example of the peculiarity of his moral thought. Perhaps more extremely, Kant…

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  • Vision Pro

    I’m super excited about Apple’s new AR headset, the Vision Pro. I can’t stop thinking about how cool it will be to blow up my computer screen and enmesh it in the world around me. [NOTE: I still haven’t been able to find a way to try a Vision Pro. If you’re reading this and…

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