How USV Built Venture's Most Copied Content Machine — And What It Takes to Do It in 2026

In 2003, venture capital did not explain itself.

It was a classic low-Information, high-gatekeeping environment.

Deals were syndicated among a small set of firms who mostly knew each other; a founder's view into how an investor thought came from a warm intro --> meeting, if they were lucky enough to get one. Firms had brochure websites and partners were not public.

The idea that a working VC would tell you, in writing and for free, what they believed, what they were changing their mind about, and how they valued a company, was close to unthinkable.

Then Fred Wilson started writing.

He'd been an investor since the 80s, and in September 2003 he started a blog called AVC and began posting nearly every day.

What he'd learned the day before, what a deal taught him, where he thought the internet was going, why he'd passed on something. He kept it up, near-daily, for the better part of two decades.

AVC became the most-read thing in venture, and Fred Wilson was arguably the most influential VC in New York largely because of it.

Plenty of people were early to blogging - David Hornik's VentureBlog was a few months ahead, and Brad Feld started around the same time. But AVC turned public writing into part of the machinery of investing, and in doing so built a template the entire industry has spent 20 years trying to reverse-engineer: firm blogs, partner podcasts, new-media hires, the weekly shows.

Mimetically, all of them copy the output - posts, cadence, channels - missing that Fred’s content was not a lyaer on top of the work, but came directly out of it.

His firm - USV - then institutionalised the whole practice at firm level without killing the personal voice that made it trustworthy in the first place.

What follows is that machine, taken apart into 3 parts - and how in 2026, your firm can build its own.

1) one person, thinking in public, over time

In 2003, Fred Wilson met Mena Trott, whose company had just launched TypePad. She told him he should blog. He went home, signed up, called it AVC, “a VC,” and kept writing nearly every day for the next twenty years.

That sounds like a distribution story… a VC got early to blogging and built an audience. But Venture is (was) not a content business - it is a judgement business.

What a founder or an LP is really underwriting is how an investor sees the world, and whether you want to be in their orbit for ten years (vibes). That is almost impossible to convey in a pitch or a one-off essay, the thing AVC conveyed bit by bit for 20 years.

Fred described the blog as writing as a form of thinking.

In the early years, Fred posted 3-4x a day. He modelled it on Jim Cramer writing about trades but later, but settled into a few paragraphs a day and kept that up for years.

Therefore, readers were not just seeing isolated takes. They could see what he was paying attention to, and where his views changed.

Take crypto, which you can watch unfold in real time across the archive. Fred started blogging about Bitcoin on AVC in 2011, during an 18-month stretch where, by his own admission, nothing in venture excited him enough to invest.

By mid-2013 USV led into Coinbase Series A (btw, returned an est $4.6B)

Then you can read him revising his own thinking in public: in 2014 he wrote about Bitcoin as a a currency you'd spend. By 2017 he'd reversed - working through why he doesn't spend Bitcoin anymore.

His commenters argued with him about the contradiction. But that is the asset - a visible, decade-long trail of a serious investor being early, being uncertain, committing, and openly correcting himself. He did the same with open systems, developer ecosystems, web-native business models. You could disagree with any of it. You could not miss the pattern, because the pattern was on the record.

The takeaway isn't "blog every day."

The consistency - wow, every day, twenty years - was the forcing function here. But there can be other types of forcing function beyond volume.

And this imo is where most firms get it backwards. Content teams optimise the output - how much are we shipping, which channels, how often. But output is only ever as good as the input, and the input is where the leverage sits…

• How close is content to the real work, how honest is it, how willing to be wrong.

“The spiral of silence” (cc dan gray) is a good lens for what goes wrong on the input side, and how most VCs present themselves online.

The tl;dr: people are less willing to share opinions if they don't think others will agree. So ideas perceived as non-consensus get suppressed, and the vocal majority becomes even more dominant. When everything is sanitised + checked, everything starts to sound the same… Then multiply across many partners, and across many firms. The output looks fine…. but very hollow.

Fred - and more broadly, USV’s - archive runs the other way. The store-of-value is taking early positions in public and letting readers argue about it. It wasn't sanitised. It was close to the work, close to the truth, and willing to be wrong and uncomfortable.

“The work” is the input for good content - and no amount of output optimisation manufactures it.

2) teach from founder pain, not a syllabus

In January 2010 Fred started MBA Mondays, a weekly series walking through the real mechanics of building a company - finance, equity, boards, hiring, M&A.

Over a few years it became a free, searchable, open curriculum, and it is the single most copied idea in venture content. Every "VC explains X" thread you've ever read is descended from it.

MBA Mondays wasn't a syllabus assembled to demonstrate how much Fred knew.

It was him teaching, week by week, the exact things his own founders were struggling with as they struggled with them.

The employee-equity material for example, endured, and was revived years later as a standalone project, because it solved a recurring founder problem.

MBA Mondays would often take the next week's topic from the comments - a workshop as much as a curriculum.

Compare that to the dominant move now. A firm decides to "do education," picks a grandiose subject, and produces an explainer - largely redundant now by chatgpt.

Once again, if these are devoid of “the work” (i.e. real operating experience, real founder relationships) - the reader can feel the absence. It's teaching as positioning rather than teaching as help, and it teaches the reader nothing except that the firm would like to seem smart.

The rule is simple and I've written about it before: teaching that compounds is pulled from what you're solving with your portfolio, or from something you're learning yourself and narrating honestly as you go.

Your curriculum already exists - what you are doing creates a continuous cycle of learning, improvement, and teaching that benefits the entire ecosystem.

3) the firm

I have also written before about how to manage outsized partner brands - a challenge USV has successfully navigated.

It did not absorb Fred into the firm. It built an architecture around named human voices. The USV people page still points to partner-owned homes - Fred's AVC, Albert Wenger's Continuations (started 2008), Andy Weissman’s blog (started 2007), Nick Grossman’s blog, where partners writes about technology, science, and philosophy in their voice.

On top of those it built a central publishing hub, sorted so you always know whose mind you're reading: USV blog posts, team posts, network posts, spanning everything from the thesis to fund structure to AI. A house of distinct, named voices held together by a shared doctrine.

That doctrine is “the firm”, USV treated its thesis as a living public document rather than something fixed.

Brad Burnham wrote back in 2006 that the firm had relaunched its site around the blog (it still is) precisely because the market was too volatile for a fixed thesis/angle and it made more sense to "publish the conversation."

So the thesis evolved, in public, in stages: early internet-enabled services, then applications defensible by network effects, then "trusted brands" that broaden access, and now investing "at the edge of large markets being transformed by technological and societal pressures."

Each restatement kept the firm legible without freezing it - content is how a thesis stays alive without going vague. Most firms either never write the thesis down or carve it into stone and let it rot. USV kept rewriting it in front of everyone.

Beyond "have a firm blog."

You cannot make personal trust portable. Fred's credibility is Fred's. What a firm can do is build institutional continuity around personal trust - a structure where the public can clearly tell apart Fred's mind, Albert's mind, the firm's thesis, the portfolio's voice. Make everything "Fred" and the brand is fragile. Make everything anonymous firm copy and the brand is DOA. The answer is the house of named voices. Some funds like Slow or Scale do this well, and on a smaller scale, Massive vc.

It isn't frictionless: even Fred's philosophy of blogging drew public pushback over the years, and AVC eventually moved its comments off-site as moderating a full community became too much. The voice survived; the apparatus around it kept changing.

How the machine runs in 2026 - same mechanism, new medium

The strongest evidence that all of this is a living mechanism and not a nostalgia piece is what USV has been publishing lately.

Start with the Librarian. Faced with 20+ years and ~15,000 articles written across its partners - USV built an internal tool, that writing plus meeting transcripts, so the firm's own accumulated thinking stays queryable and compounding. (fwiw Sequoia did something akin to USV)

Then in March 2026 they published "Meet the Agents at USV," introducing the next layer - named internal agents that run the unglamorous work.

They turned the internal build-out into a public post and let the agents introduce themselves in it. That is MBA Mondays, 16 years on - take the real thing you are doing and learning, and narrate it in public so outsiders can learn from it too.

This build in public legacy is still pulling people in.

In April 2026 USV added a new general partner, Michael Mignano, ex-lightspeed who co-founded Anchor (sold to Spotify in 2019).

He describes himself as having learned to build his startup as a daily reader of AVC, and the conversations stuck with him for years. He also calls USV "a conversation," and argues the thesis-driven approach is exactly the right playbook for an AI era of abundant software and abundant founders.. USV marked his arrival with a beautifully shot 40-years-of-Fred video, walking through the firm's story location by location across New York.

The whole thing is the mechanisms closing a loop = a founder who knew the firm through its writing —> pitched them —> later success, became an LP —> now a partner! … and it'll be worth watching what he builds with that media instinct inside USV.

So what's the 2003 move in 2026?

If writing a daily blog was the unclaimed, slightly-ridiculous, obvious-in-hindsight move in 2003, what's the equivalent today?

The mistake is to answer with a format. The right question is: does the format force genuine contact with the firm's real work?

A plain blog isn't dead, but in 2026 it's rarely enough on its own, because the default blog post has become too polished, too occasional, and too easy to fake.

The modern equivalents that work are the ones that force recurrence, specificity, and accountability. This is why series work because they force all 3.

• A fund could run weekly "Workflow Autopsies" - pick one boring industry workflow and break down where the money, time, compliance pain, or user frustration sit.

• A nicher fund could run "Deals We Didn't Do," with real reasoning. The form doesn't matter but prove forced contact with real work.

Underneath the format sits a directional choice most firms dodge

• upstream or

• downstream.

Downstream is content pitched at the median knowledge level - accessible, broad, culture-meets-tech, built to grow a large audience fast.

It works… Atlas Bray has built a following north of 200,000 on Instagram as an emerging manager making exactly this kind of accessible tech content, reach he'd unlikely have assembled on VC-Twitter, and he's bridging it back into M13's brand through a newsletter.

Claire Zau ran the same playbook… and is now at Lightspeed. For some firms it's right.

Upstream is the harder (less competitive), more valuable (founders) direction - climbing the technical stack to make the content the technical founders every fund claims to want would actually choose. Harder to execute, which is precisely why the prize is bigger. I wrote last week about how open that ground still is, and also suggested ways funds like Neo can build upstream technical content.  

The lesson from Fred isn't which direction to pick. It's that he picked one thing and did it with an obsessive consistency - and that the picking, and the not-stopping, is the entire game.

Most firms won't choose, so they do a little of everything and compound nothing.

The part you can't copy

Every mechanism above is copyable.

• Own your domain and archive.

• Write from real founder pain.

• Build a house of named voices around a living thesis.

• Wire the content into the firm's actual work.

Do all of it well and you'll have a genuinely good content operation inside a year.

1. What are you actually good at? What resources and individuals do you have in your firm? Don't force video if you can't tell stories. Don't force long-form if you can't write. Don't force memes if you're not funny. Play to your firm’s strengths.

2. Where is your audience? Are your founders reading 5,000-word essays or scrolling Twitter? Meet them where they are - see the VC content audience pyramid.

3. What can you sustain? Content compounds. Pick the approach you can do consistently for 3+ years.

#3 is essential - what you can't copy is the 20 years of AVC. A* demands a patience and a focus that can't be shortcut. Everyone wants the compounding. Almost no one will do the unglamorous, unscalable, daily thing for long enough to earn it.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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