The best products at each layer will be built by teams who are obsessed with that layer.

Hiring 2–3 designers for ongoing contract work. The job: turn complex ideas into clean, simple diagrams. Often. You: enjoy translating into pictures, ship fast, want your work to be seen. NYC-based and up for collaborating in person now and then. Me: Shouldn't be designing diagrams anymore. Can provide clear scope, real work, and pay on time every time. Reply or DM of stuff you're proud of.

It's a wildly exciting time. We believe the Rebel Alliance will produce many of the most important companies of this era — not despite the power of the large model providers, but because of the ecosystem dynamics playing out around them. We are actively investing across this stack and want to hear from founders who are building in it. If you're working on any of the layers listed in the article — or ones we haven't thought of yet — we'd love to talk.

Wrote this in March and the part about open weights models potentially throwing a wrench into the economics of Anthropic and OpenAI has gone up in likelihood since

Looking for venue ideas for the first general assembly

One of the more fun pieces we've worked on in a while. Made the decision at the last minute to invite a lot of people in to give feedback before publishing. Incredible how much it sharpens your thinking and how it pushes you past the nerves of putting your ideas out there.

The biggest risk in AI is concentration: of power, capabilities and economic wealth. Who can doubt it with trillion dollar companies and government now already controlling a massive part of it? So we need more rebels and more rebel alliance like this one from @usv and friends. Beautiful message!

“the Rebel Alliance will produce many of the most important companies of this era — not despite the power of the large model providers, but because of the ecosystem dynamics playing out around them.” agree.

bringing early technologies to market often requires a vertically integrated strategy to show whats possible and smooth rough edges of the infra (think AOL which bundled an ISP, content, email and instant messanger) As tech/markets mature, solutions often unbundle into specialized services, creating room for startups that can counterposition on UX, customization, control, et al. a chefs-kiss framework from @usv. a big believer in the rebel alliance as a way to enable more autonomy in the age of automation.

Great piece by our friends at @USV.

There are large pressures building that will shift demand away from the frontier labs towards a more open AI ecosystem. We at @usv call this The Rebel Alliance. Both consumers and enterprises are becoming more price sensitive and are leveraging custom agent harnesses and routing to manage token costs. They're also thinking about their context and weighing the pros and cons of blindly sharing all of their data and control with large incumbents (vs. running everything locally or on sandboxed cloud solutions and with user-aligned models). And they're using powerful orchestration tools to manage many agents in parallel which both gives them greater efficiency and intelligence that borders on frontier (without needing to use the labs' frontier models). There's a lot of proof that the alliance is starting to take shape. My partner Nick's post below gives the full picture of how we're thinking about it and the types of companies we're excited to meet.

"...the best products at each layer will be built by teams who are obsessed with that layer." "Payments: Agentic commerce is in the very early innings but will become enormous. Agents will embrace payment protocols for digital micro-payments and eventually become major actors in generalized e-commerce. Much of the payments stack will need to be redesigned agent-first." 🏴‍☠️

Come and join the rebel alliance!

At USV, we’ve long been students of the cycles of technology development and deployment, and the way in which value accrues at different layers at different points in the cycle. In the early 2000s, after the deployment of the physical internet, our belief was that value would accrue at the application layer. In the early 2010s, after the invention of bitcoin, our belief was that value would accrue in open source protocols below the application layer. Today, after the invention and deployment of AI foundation models, the question is: will all value accrue to the models, or to a broad ecosystem around them?

LIVE: in the trenches with @fredwilson from @usv + guest host @seyong nitter.app/i/broadcasts/1DxleeWbn…

🚨 2-HOUR WARNING 🚨 in the trenches with @fredwilson from @usv @seyong will also be joining me for this one perhaps the most goated episode yet DO NOT MISS IT