Nick Grossman, Partner at Union Square Ventures

Union Square Ventures is one of the most prominent east coast VC firms and is also one of the most notable mainstream investors in the bitcoin market. On this episode of The Scoop USV partner Nick Grossman joined us to discuss the firm’s approach to investing in the market — he was recently promoted to partner to lead blockchain investments after 5 years with the firm. We spoke about Libra association which USV is a member of, we examined USV’s portfolio and talked about the future of venture capital and the future of capital formation.

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Union Square Ventures built its reputation on early bets on companies like Twitter, Etsy, and Coinbase, and under Grossman's involvement the firm developed one of the more thoughtful institutional theses around blockchain technology, rooted in USV's longstanding focus on open protocols and network effects. By late September 2019, with bitcoin having pulled back from its summer highs and the broader market digesting a wave of new blockchain infrastructure projects, the conversation offers a venture investor's view on which parts of the crypto ecosystem still merited serious long-term investment.

Grossman discusses USV's evolution from investing in open web protocols and marketplaces to backing crypto-native projects, and how the firm thinks about decentralization not as an ideological end in itself but as a structural feature that can produce better incentive alignment and reduce platform risk for users and developers. He talks through specific areas of interest at the time, including decentralized naming and identity systems, open financial infrastructure, and the broader debate over how regulation should treat different categories of digital assets.

He also addresses the tension venture investors face between funding highly speculative early-stage protocols and the more traditional equity or token structures typical of USV's portfolio. The conversation also touches on the aftermath of the 2017 to 2018 boom-and-bust cycle and how it filtered out weaker projects while pushing founders and investors toward more sustainable models focused on actual usage rather than token price appreciation.

Grossman shares his perspective on the role institutional and retail investors should play in emerging crypto markets, and what regulatory clarity would need to look like to unlock more mainstream participation from both. The episode offers a window into how a firm known for backing foundational internet companies was thinking about which blockchain projects might earn a similar place in the next generation of open networks.