Michael Mignano
@mignano

General Partner @USV. Building @Supertake. Co-Founder Anchor (acq. by Spotify) and @OboeLabs. Early investor in @meetgranola, @suno, @xai, others.

migna.no
Joined July 2008
565 Photos and videos
Article

Obliterate, Don’t Automate

In 2015, my partner Fred Wilson published a short blog post, Don't Automate, Obliterate, on how @USV thinks about startup investments. The post was based on a 1990 HBR article by Michael Hammer by the

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Building With No Constraints

I recently built a fairly complex, fully functional web product using nothing but Claude Fable. The product is well tested, secure, and highly polished. It is also not an MVP. It is feature rich. And

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Startups Are Bands

Before I was into startups, I was into music. I grew up playing drums, and played in bands for years. When I was young and people would ask me what I wanted to be, I'd say a rock star. While I never

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Focus Vacuums

Ever since I was a startup founder and CEO, it feels like all I do is think about work, or work related stuff. Even when I'm not working. I assume this happened because in order for our startup to

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One more card

I once met a founder of a new startup through someone I really trusted. My first meeting with the founder was great. I found the person to be deeply thoughtful about product, strategic about the

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Founder, Thesis, Momentum

There are many ways to approach VC investment decisions. Here are a few I’ve seen over the years. Founder-driven At the early stages, sometimes you invest purely based on the caliber of the founders.

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Our investment in Board

We’re delighted to share that @USV has led a $20M Series A in Board, the world’s first face-to-face game console. As technology has continued to pull us more inward, many of us feel an increasing need

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Last call for tokenmaxxing

At some point we're all going to have to justify our token spend. I run Opus 4.7 for every task. I know founders who spend more on tokens than they pay themselves in salaries. I know of zero companies

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Who picks the model? Not the developer.

The first thing a developer building an AI app does is pick a model. A few weeks after launch, they pick a router. But it wasn't always like this. A year ago, most startups picked one model and built

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The Biometric Web

Over the past few weeks, every time I open Telegram, I see a notification that another friend of mine has joined the platform. I can only assume they're there to message their agents, likely via

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Who are your agents working for?

Like most of us, I've traded my privacy for convenience many times over the past few decades. But I'm starting to wonder if handing my life over to agents will finally force me to reconsider. A lot

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It always comes back to network effects

Systems of record are no longer defensible. For decades, the information inside data-heavy apps was trapped, because moving it cost more than just living with the system you had. But now, sufficiently

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