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:

  • Tradle

    After seeing a bunch of people on fintwit talk about it, I’ve recently gotten into playing Tradle. Like Wordle, Tradle is a daily guessing game. Instead of guessing words, however, you have to guess countries based on their exports with warm/cold feedback based on their location. I’m by no means an expert on global trade…

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  • Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost”

    I recently had occasion to read Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost”. Coase’s really radical idea in the paper is the economic symmetry of responsibility in property disputes. According to Coase, when two people’s preferences collide, each is equally responsible for the suboptimal outcome. The chocolate gets in the peanut butter just as much as…

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  • Philosophy and VC

    As I was reading Mallaby’s The Power Law, I was tickled to learn that Paul Graham gave his iconic “How to Start a Startup” lecture in Emerson Hall at Harvard. Although the lecture was for the Harvard Computer Society, it was delivered in the philosophy building. And Graham himself was a philosophy major in college…

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  • Sama on AI

    I’ve been reading the archives of other blogs in preparation for writing this one. As I was digging around Sam Altman’s old posts (which I will admit felt weirdly invasive), I found a record of his thoughts on AI from about two years before he founded OpenAI. In the post, Altman writes Yesterday at lunch…

  • VC Mythology and Branding

    Sebastian Mallaby on the origins of venture capital: Rock and Coyle met Kleiner and his comrades at a San Francisco restaurant for dinner. The visitors from Wall Street understood that the rebels wanted to operate as a team, without Shockley’s suffocating oversight. They further understood that the engineers wanted to remain in the Santa Clara…

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