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Rebecca Kaden

Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures

Search every verified Rebecca Kaden interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), appeared in an October 2026 interview alongside General Partners Fred Wilson and Michael Mignano to discuss the firm's newly raised $900 million fund, its largest fund cycle to date. In the conversation, Kaden discussed USV's investment strategy, stating that the firm does not need to underwrite companies valued at a trillion dollars, and that winners in the single-digit billions, given the firm's fund size and ownership, can produce strong returns. She also commented on the current consumer application market, describing a period where trial behavior is high but engagement is low, and emphasized the importance of user retention and product innovation in determining long-term value.

Recent appearances

  • USV’s New $900M Fund: Fred Wilson, Rebecca Kaden & Mike Mignano

    October 08, 2026 · 📺 Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

    USV spent 20 years keeping its funds small on purpose. Its new $900M raise is the largest fund cycle in the firm’s history. I sat down with USV General Partners Fred Wilson, Rebecca Kaden and Michael Mignano at the firm’s New York office to unpack why one of venture capital’s most disciplined early-stage firms is getting bigger now, and what they think the next era of AI will look like. Together with General Partner Nick Grossman, they’re leading USV into its next chapter. USV was early to Twitter, Coinbase, Stripe, MongoDB, Twilio, Etsy, Duolingo and Abridge. More than 20 years after Fred W…

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  • Rebecca Kaden: The Biggest Myth About Great Ideas l Trailblazers Podcast Episode 45

    August 05, 2026 · 📺 Trailblazers with Erica Wenger

    In this episode, we sit down with Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures, where she invests in the next generation of AI, software, and technology companies shaping the future. We discuss why AI is still dramatically underhyped, how venture capitalists identify world-changing technologies before everyone else, the future of open versus closed AI ecosystems, why the best investors think in decades instead of years, and the frameworks Rebecca uses to evaluate the next wave of billion-dollar companies. If you're interested in AI, venture capital, startups, investing, or underst…

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  • EP11 Rebecca Kaden

    July 19, 2025 · 📺 Human Unicorn Pod Official

    🎙️ Human Unicorn Podcast — Episode Title: "Conviction Over Consensus: Rebecca Kaden on Backing What Others Miss" 📄 Episode Description: In this episode of Human Unicorn, Nihal Mehta talks with Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures, about how to spot — and stick with — breakthrough ideas before they’re obvious. Rebecca shares how her path from journalism to VC shaped her investment lens, what it takes for a company to be truly venture scale in 2025, and why some of the most transformative businesses don’t look like obvious winners at the start. They explore: How she define…

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  • Union Square Ventures, Managing Partner, Rebecca Kaden

    July 16, 2025 · 📺 New York Stock Exchange

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  • Inside Union Square Ventures: Lessons from Rebecca Kaden

    July 01, 2025 · 📺 Lynx Collective

    Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures, shares how USV invests, what they look for in founders, and why focus and efficiency matter more than ever. Filmed as part of the Inside VC series by Lynx Collective.

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  • Driving Alpha: The Art of Low-Velocity, High-Conviction Investing With Rebecca Kaden

    September 03, 2024 · 📺 Alpha Partners

    🔔 Subscribe to the Driving Alpha podcast for more episodes with top investors sharing their strategies to outperform the market! 🔔 Can high-conviction investments yield the results venture capitalists strive for? What does it take to pursue an unusual and non-competitive market? With a deep understanding of the industry, a journalist turned VC specialist brings a unique perspective to the untapped potential in sectors like healthcare and the revolutionary applications of AI and blockchain technology. In this episode of Driving Alpha, Steve Brotman chats with Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner a…

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  • Redesigning School for Students To Thrive with Rebecca Kaden of USV and Garrett Smiley of Sora Sc...

    June 23, 2024 · 📺 Village Global

    Garrett Smiley (@gw_smiles), co-founder of Sora Schools (https://soraschools.com/) , and Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccakaden), investor at USV, join special guest host Anne Dwane (@adwane), co-founder and partner at Village Global, on this episode. They discuss: The story of how Sora Schools came about and how they plan to create the best high school in the world. How Rebecca and USV evaluated the business. Why a new model for education is needed today. The role of a school in the 21st century and the importance of community. What it was like fundraising during a pandemic. Other needs and prob…

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  • CPG, Defensibility, Finding The Next Instagram - Everything Consumer in 2019 with Rebecca Kaden, ...

    June 21, 2024 · 📺 Village Global

    Erik is joined on this episode by Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccak46), investor at Union Square Ventures, Nikhil Basu Trivedi (@nbt), VC at Shasta Ventures, and Jonathan Yoni Regev (@jyonni), CEO and co-founder of The Farmer’s Dog. They talk about where we are in the evolution of the consumer packaged goods space. Rebecca explains why this is a unique moment where consumers are eager to try new things from new brands. They discuss the three types of defensibility in a CPG startup and Nikhil points out that it’s difficult to figure out whether a business model can really be defensible at such an early…

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  • Union Square Venture’s Rebecca Kaden on How the Firm Develops Their Theses

    December 26, 2023 · 📺 Turpentine VC

    In this episode of Turpentine VC, Erik Torenberg sits with Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures. They discuss USV's partnership-driven model, different venture strategies, whether automation in venture is imminent, and what USV looks for in investors. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/momentofzen for a $1/month trial period. --- SPONSOR: SHOPIFY | NETSUITE Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global fo…

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  • How to Capture an Investor's Attention with Rebecca Kaden

    November 29, 2023 · 📺 Bolster

    Tune in to The Daily Bolster as Matt Blumberg and Rebecca Kaden of Union Square Ventures discuss the art of capturing a VC's attention in a sea of inbound pitches. 👓  Lead with a clear description of your venture💡 Demonstrate alignment with the firm's focus🤝 Consider strategic pathways for introductionsListeners can expect valuable advice to help maximize your chances of standing out and securing investor interest in your startup.

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  • The State of Venture w/ Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures

    September 10, 2023 · 📺 All Raise

    The venture and startup ecosystem are constantly dynamic and right now in a state of change. With current market shifts, both investors and founders are adjusting to a new economic reality and refocusing their work to support it. They are also thinking about the realities of a remote world, the growing role of the climate crisis and how it impacts investing, what can be done to change the troubling trend lines in diversity in the industry, the emergence of important new technologies, and where the most interesting opportunities can be found in this market. ​Join All Raise CEO, Paige Hendrix B…

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  • Psychedelics, Micro Nuclear Reactors & the Venture Downturn (with Rebecca Kaden) | Newcomer Podcast

    July 25, 2023 · 📺 Newcomer

    Union Square Ventures has some of the best performing funds in the venture capital industry. As I’ve reported, USV-backer UTIMCO disclosed in a recent filing that USV had delivered the public investment fund an internal rate of return of 59%. And that number will likely go up over time. (For instance, USV portfolio company Casetext sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million after the UTIMCO performance update.) I invited USV partner Rebecca Kaden onto the Newcomer podcast to talk about how USV consistently invests in unconventional companies. We started off our conversation talking about Jour…

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Notable quotes

“I don't think a trillion is what we need to underwrite to at USV. I think if our biggest winners are in the single-digit billions given our fund size and our ownership, we can produce really really healthy returns for our partners. Yeah, there have been some outliers at 50 billion or 100 billion, but a lot of our biggest winners are in the $10 billion range and that's produced enormous returns for us.”

“What interests me about technology isn't technology itself. It's the hypotheses about human behavior that it enables. And that's where that really happened. And it's you know, you sit at this moment and you see all of the installation that's happened pretty quickly in the last kind of couple years and then you feel this bubbling of this deployment cycle about to happen and it's pretty exciting. You're like, this is w”

“The idea of the rebel alliance is the idea of a stack, and that a consortium can take on the big guys. And if you look at the history of the internet, one thing we love about it is it's built bottom up. It's actually not built top down. And there are things that you would do on the internet if it was built top down that would have been really nice, right? Like packaged neatly, and things would have made sense. But ac”

“I'm an optimist in America in general. I think we're resilient and I think it can uphold a lot. But my belief is this is also a reminder that institutions are only as strong as the commitment we all have to them and that it's not only what the ideas are but how they're executed and how we respect the systems in place and everything's pretty fragile. So I don't know, I think we're in a moment of turmoil. I think turmo”

“I think AI has a massive impact on the labor market and I think some of it is scary and we have to figure out whether that's new structural pieces of a system or whether that's jobs that get reformed. I think it's probably both. I do believe AI will replace jobs. We are seeing it, right? I think we can't bury our head in the sand. It might. And we're spending time on that, right? Where we have companies that have bui”

“We're really excited to be here with Rebecca Kaden, who is the managing partner here at Union Square Ventures, uh maybe the most storied VC firm here in New York and one of the best performing VC firms. So, USB, a um small collection of very thesis driven partners um to do things a little bit differently. So um six partners equal partnership what we think of as um low velocity high conviction investing. So we don't d”

Other executives at Union Square Ventures

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →