500 Photos and videos
We asked @usv's Nikhil (@uninsightful) one question: why NYC?
0:25 How Nikhil joined USV
1:15 Showcasing the USV office
1:54 Lessons learned from @fredwilson
2:50 SF vs NYC from a builders perspective
3:46 USV's investing approach
4:40 NYC's culture & lifestyle
5:42 NY is the place to get customers
14
10
173
60,623
This is the story of four proteins that can rewind aging, and the $4 billion racing to put them inside a human being.
For a century, biologists treated aging like a rusting car. Parts wear out, damage piles up, no reverse gear. A small group now argues that's wrong. Much of what looks like permanent damage, they say, is really a software problem, and software can be rewritten.
Every cell in your body carries identical DNA. What makes one a neuron and another a skin cell is a second layer of information sitting on top, telling each cell which genes to run. The heretical claim is that aging is the slow corruption of that information. And in 2006, a failed orthopedic surgeon named Shinya Yamanaka found four proteins that can retrieve it.
His recipe could take a fully specialized cell and walk it all the way back to a blank, become-anything state. It won him a Nobel. Then scientists found something stranger. Turn the factors on briefly, not long enough to erase a cell's identity, and old mice get younger by every measure, and live about 30% longer. A heart cell stays a heart cell. Just younger.
The boundary with cancer is razor thin. Run the factors too long and you manufacture tumors in bulk. The whole trick depends on not finishing.
Now the money has arrived. Bezos backs @altos_labs. Sam Altman seeded @RetroBio_. Brian Armstrong co-founded @newlimit. David Sinclair's Life Biosciences got through the door first. In January 2026, its eye therapy became the first cellular reprogramming treatment ever cleared for human testing.
The realistic prize isn't immortality. Nobody's living to 300 on an eye injection. It's compression of morbidity, squeezing the sick, declining years at the end of life into a shorter window. The question has finally narrowed. Not "can a cell be made young?" but "can a patient be made well?"
By the early 2030s, we'll know.
Read @QwQiao's essay on the Yamanaka factors below.
23
36
267
30,059
Read the essay.
alliance.xyz/essays/yamanaka…
1
4
18
2,043
Alliance retweeted
Jun 7
I’ll forever be bullish on crypto.
I think we overestimated how quickly crypto would become the next major computing paradigm. A lot of people were searching for the next platform shift and assumed it would be crypto, but in many ways that ended up being AI.
Over the past decade, ton of capital flowed into crypto, and much of it went toward overbuilding. Instead of focusing on a handful of narrow sectors where crypto had a clear advantage, the industry tried to reinvent everything all at once. What we’re seeing now is a natural pullback and consolidation after that period of excess
I don’t think the core thesis is broken by any means. Crypto’s biggest success may not be apps first (even though we have a few), but rails first. As stablecoins, wallets, tokenized stocks and onchain financial infra via neobanks reach every human and eventually every AI agent, crypto becomes the default settlement layer of the internet.
Once those rails are everywhere, many of the ideas that arrived too early like DAOs, decentralized marketplaces, machine to machine payments, and the ideas Vitalik wrote about in the early days of Ethereum may finally have the distribution needed to get it off the ground.
99
89
805
71,914
Less than 24 hours left to apply, get $500,000 and prove everyone wrong → alliance.xyz
63
34
327
110,409
The deadline is tomorrow at midnight pacific.
3 days left to apply to Alliance
‣ Receive up to $500k
‣ Pitch Paradigm, a16z, and Founders Fund at Demo Day
‣ Join a network of 300 startups
Apply at alliance.xyz/ and tag a founder who needs to see this ↓
21
7
86
19,334
3 days left to apply to Alliance
‣ Receive up to $500k
‣ Pitch Paradigm, a16z, and Founders Fund at Demo Day
‣ Join a network of 300 startups
Apply at alliance.xyz/ and tag a founder who needs to see this ↓
62
38
574
113,572
The ALL18 Early Application Deadline is 1 Week Away.
Apply at alliance.xyz
19
13
207
69,414
Apply Early by May 27 at alliance.xyz to:
→ Receive $500K in Funding
→ Pitch Tier-1 VCs at Demo Day
→ Join the Alliance Founder Network
1
1
15
2,355
Apply Early by May 28 at alliance.xyz to:
→ Receive $500K in Funding
→ Pitch Tier-1 VCs at Demo Day
→ Join the Alliance Founder Network
2
28
2,680
Alliance retweeted
May 13
Seismic Testnet is live.
We built it alongside 30 financial services companies, from fintech startups, to regulated institutions, to local governments.
428
415
1,514
243,228
New essay from @DangerWillRobin on distribution strategy.
Pasteur was only able to convince us of the importance of bacteria through an unlikely ally. His struggles mirror what I see every day with founders looking for distribution. Here are the lessons I learned from Science and Technology Studies and pass on to founders.
3
1
21
4,633
Congrats to @USDai_Official (ALL7) on the launch of $CHIP.
USD.AI is a synthetic dollar protocol that generates yield from GPU-backed loans.
Apr 21
13
15
59
12,687
Alliance retweeted
Apr 12
Seeing a wave of tweets claiming crypto VCs aren’t deploying.
From our side, not much has changed. Alliance runs three batches a year and backs ~75–100 teams annually.
What has changed is VC behavior. A small subset of funds remain aggressive, but the majority feel more passive, taking meetings and staying warm without deploying with the same conviction as before.
If I had to guess why, crypto as a VC category generated strong and obvious returns in its early and middle cycles, which drove focused attention on finding fund returners. Today, that attention has shifted to AI, which is capturing a disproportionate share of attention, outcomes, and talent.
Talent begets liquidity and drives capital inflows, and I believe the talent pendulum is slowly swinging back toward crypto with the success of Hyperliquid, Polymarket, Rain, Fomo, Pump, Aave and many others.
My view is that crypto has several broad narratives that make it easier for generalists to understand and invest in, such as prediction markets, stablecoins, tokenization, and fintech infrastructure. This, in my view, means crypto is being absorbed into broader tech, and many previously crypto specific funds will evolve into generalists.
Both crypto and AI are becoming layers within startups rather than standalone categories, so focusing on just one may be limiting for larger funds. However, every time it feels like crypto is over, a startup emerges that returns 100x and becomes the golden child of the next cycle. This is why I continue to believe the best domain focused crypto VCs will capture the outliers and not get swayed by public sentiment.
22
11
201
16,850