In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Since 2010, Matthew and his team have built Cloudflare into one of the most important companies on the internet: powering and protecting vast portions of global traffic.
Our conversation explores the through-line from Matthew’s initial hunch about fixing the flaws of the early internet, to Cloudflare’s present role as a foundational infrastructure provider.
We talk about the early experiments and risks that have shaped Cloudflare’s culture, and how those small bets compounded into a truly iconic company today. Matthew shares stories from the company’s pre-IPO days, the decision to make encryption free, and how Cloudflare’s infrastructure ended up running two of the internet’s thirteen root servers. Toward the end, we dive deep into the transition from a search-driven internet to an answer-driven one, and what that means for publishers, creators, and the future business model of the web.
It was especially fun to record this one with Matthew, who I’ve known since USV’s investment in Cloudflare’s Series C back in 2013.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Alex Komoroske, the co-founder and CEO of Common Tools. Alex has spent his career thinking about how individual incentives can add up to significant collective outcomes.
Before starting Common Tools, he spent more than a decade at Google leading product management for the Chrome web platform, ambient computing, AR, and Search, and later served as Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe.
We traced his slow (emergent) hunch from an early fascination with Wikipedia, through his years building internet-scale systems at Google, to his current work rethinking how AI is architected.
A big part of our conversation centered on emergence: why the most durable systems grow from the bottom up, and what that means for product design, org culture, and the future of technology - especially AI.
We also spoke about the hidden security risks in today’s AI ecosystem: why “chat” may not be the defining paradigm for complex work, how fusing data to apps risks locking us into an AI monoculture, and why policies should travel with data if we want healthier emergent effects.
It’s always fun catching up with Alex. Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with MC Lader and Marvin Ammori, who spent four years together helping build Uniswap into one of the most important companies in decentralized finance. MC was President and COO; Marvin served as Chief Legal Officer after a long career as one of the internet’s leading policy lawyers.
We traced their shared slow hunch that technology can shift power: first through the open internet, and later through open financial systems.
We also spoke about the parallels between the net neutrality battles of the 2000s and the present-day struggle over how crypto is regulated, the challenge of building in the face of policy headwinds, and why stablecoins, programmable markets, and open protocols are placed to be the next rails for global finance.
This was a fun conversation, recorded at a moment when the policy climate for crypto is starting to thaw.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, the co-founders of Farcaster. Farcaster is a social app and protocol that is open, programmable, and crypto-native.
Before starting Farcaster, both Dan and Varun spent a few years at Coinbase. That experience deeply shaped their perspective on crypto infrastructure, user behavior, and what it takes to build a “sufficiently decentralized” experience at scale.
In this conversation we trace their slow hunch: the idea that social networks needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, as decentralized protocols with credible neutrality, shared state, and a design space open to builders.
We talked about what they got wrong early on (too much focus on architecture, not enough on user acquisition), how crypto enables new interaction primitives like tipping and token-based identity, and why open programmability (not just ideology) is Farcaster’s biggest edge.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Ben Leventhal, the founder and CEO of Blackbird. Ben has spent the past two decades reimagining the restaurant industry, having previously co-founded Eater and Resy.
The throughline that connects his efforts is a strong belief that restaurants are universally loved but fundamentally broken businesses—and that there must be a better way to run what is a trillion dollar industry in the United States alone.
We talked about what’s gone wrong with the restaurant business model, why most restaurants struggle to turn a profit despite enormous consumer love, and how each of Ben’s ventures has tried to close that gap—first with content (Eater), then with mobile (Resy), and now with crypto (Blackbird).
Through Blackbird, Ben is using crypto rails to build a restaurant-native platform currency: one that rewards regulars, strengthens margins, and builds more intimate ties between diners and the places they love.
We recorded this conversation in my apartment in New York, just around the corner from a restaurant I paid for using Fly, Blackbird’s currency. Few founders have followed a hunch as consistently and creatively as Ben.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Juan Benet, the founder and CEO of Protocol Labs. Juan is best known for creating IPFS and Filecoin—two foundational technologies in the decentralized web. Through Protocol Labs, Juan wants to use decentralized protocols to unlock new ways of organizing capital, governance, and research.
This conversation was recorded more than a decade after we first met, when USV seed funded Protocol Labs. Juan is one of the deepest thinkers I know, so naturally this conversation has a wide aperture. We touched on internet history, crypto network design, public goods funding, and the future of intelligence itself.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I’ve pulled together some of the best moments from Season 1.
Across these conversations, what stood out was how many ‘inevitable’ ideas were, at one point, anything but.
Venture veterans Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham reflected on decades of investing, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber spoke about her vision for decentralized social, and author and NotebookLM co-creator Steven Johnson unpacked the future of networked thought.
We got a clearer view into how their slow hunches took shape — and where they’re headed next.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this episode of the Slow Hunch, I spoke with Aaron Wright, the co-founder and CEO of Tribute Labs.
Aaron has been exploring how to harness the collective knowledge, energy, and capital of online communities for 20 years, from his early work at Wikipedia to his current focus on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and AI agents.
Aaron believes major technological shifts lead to equally significant changes in organizational structures. He sees DAOs as the next evolution after the joint stock company that transformed capitalism centuries ago. According to him, thin layers of technology will enable coordination and collaboration at unprecedented scales - from hundreds to potentially millions of people.
In our conversation, we explored how blockchains are enabling new forms of collaboration and how embedding AI on top of these coordination layers might fundamentally change how we organize ourselves and our capital.
I've been following Aaron's work for years, and we've had the pleasure of investing in Tribute Labs at USV. Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this episode of the Slow Hunch, I spoke with Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky.
Originally conceived as an initiative within Twitter under Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was designed to transform Twitter from a closed platform to an open protocol-based network. Jay initially joined as an external researcher before being selected to lead the project, ultimately negotiating for Bluesky's independence before Elon Musk’s acquisition.
Jay believes thoughtful systems design can reshape our online experiences. With Bluesky, she wants to prioritise user choice, portability, and the ability to vote with their feet if the platform makes changes they don't like.
This was a conversation about social media’s “adjacent possible” - a potential shift from closed, monolithic platforms toward open, extensible systems that encourage experimentation and innovation at all levels.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
In this special episode of the Slow Hunch, I sat down with Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham, founding partners of USV.
Since founding USV in 2003, Fred and Brad have backed companies like Twitter, Etsy, Cloudflare, and Coinbase while developing an investment thesis focused on enabling new forms of value creation through open access to networks, capital, and knowledge.
Fred and Brad bring decades of investment experience, having seen multiple tech cycles from the early internet to mobile, cloud, crypto, and now AI. What makes their partnership unique is how they've maintained their intellectual curiosity and drive to understand emerging technologies and business models, after 20+ years of working together.
I've been lucky enough to have a front-row seat to their approach, and it was really special to have this conversation over multiple mugs of tea in my living room in New York City.
In many ways, USV has been their collective slow hunch - an exploration of how emerging tech intersects with the world and how to be part of it.
Hope you enjoy this conversation!
Chapters:
In this episode of the Slow Hunch, I spoke with Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, a legal tech startup that pioneered the use of large language models in the legal industry.
Jake and his co-founders built Casetext over a decade — going through multiple pivots before eventually finding PMF as an AI tool that helped lawyers do better and faster legal research. In 2023, Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.
In this conversation, Jake recounted how an early relationship with the research team at OpenAI got them access to GPT-4 (before the launch of ChatGPT!) and how they decided to hard pivot over the course of just two weeks.
As a former lawyer himself, Jake has a unique take on the challenges of building and selling cutting-edge software in an industry that has traditionally been a late adopter of tech.
This was a really fun conversation (you can probably tell because it’s longer than our usual episodes).
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters
I spoke with Amir Haleem, founder of Helium and CEO of Nova Labs, about his journey building the world's largest decentralized wireless networks.
Amir started Helium in 2013, with the initial vision to make it easier to connect IoT devices to the internet. After trying the traditional telecom playbook, he realized that combining crypto incentives with community participation could actually be key to scaling a truly global wireless network.
In our conversation, we spoke about how Amir came to this realisation, and how he tackled all the challenges that come with building and securing such a network, from dealing with sophisticated attempts to game the system, to managing a decentralized and diverse community of stakeholders.
Through Nova Labs and Helium, Amir wants to enable a future where decentralized communities play a major role in building and maintaining the networks that connect us.
Hope you enjoy this conversation!
Chapters:
In this episode, I spoke to Zoe Weinberg, founder and managing partner of ex/ante, a venture fund focused on technology that enhances human agency.
Zoe actively invests in a growing number of founders committed to empowering users by giving them control over their data and digital identities.
Our conversation explored the ever present threat of digital authoritarianism, the product tradeoff between privacy and convenience, the potential of portable digital identities, and how emerging technologies impact democratic values.
I hope you find this conversation insightful.
Chapters:
The Slow Hunch is produced by the team at Spectral.
In this episode, I spoke to Dani Grant, CEO of Jam.dev, a tool that reimagines the way software teams communicate about and fix bugs.
Dani brings an infectious energy to her work. Before starting Jam, she worked at Cloudflare and was an analyst at USV, where we first crossed paths.
For Dani, Jam isn’t just about making software teams more efficient—it’s about unlocking human potential and bringing the future closer, faster.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Chapters:
The Slow Hunch is produced by the team at Spectral.
In this episode, I spoke to Steven Johnson - one of my favorite authors and thinkers. Steven has written 14 popular books, including “Where Good Ideas Come From” which inspired the name of this podcast and my blog, The Slow Hunch.
Steven has an unmatched ability to stitch together ideas from technology, science, and history to make stories come to life. He has had a significant impact on the way I see the world today.
In this conversation, we double clicked on Steven's journey to unlock “networked thought” through the use of tools, and the micro insights that gradually led him to NotebookLM, a tool that he is currently co-creating with the team at Google Labs.
Hope you enjoy this conversation!
Chapters:
The Slow Hunch is produced by the team at Spectral.
In this episode, I spoke to Muneeb Ali, the co-founder of Stacks — a Bitcoin L2 that aims to make BTC more programmable and scalable.
At USV, we originally backed Muneeb and his co-founder Ryan Shea back in 2014. Our shared hypothesis was that Bitcoin had the potential to impact more than just finance—it could be a new foundation for the internet itself.
Of course, this idea wasn't as obvious back then. In my conversation with Muneeb, we used his personal and professional journey to trace the origins of this idea—starting with his PhD in computer science at Princeton leading up to his fascination with Bitcoin and work on Stacks today.
Muneeb offers insights into the technical and cultural challenges of innovating within the Bitcoin ecosystem, and shares his vision of a future where BTC serves as the foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.
Chapters:
00:00:00 Cold open
00:01:35 Muneeb's background in computer science and peer-to-peer systems research
00:06:29 Transitioning from academia to entrepreneurship
00:09:00 The "aha moment" - Bitcoin solving the global state problem
00:11:16 Evolution of Muneeb's vision for Bitcoin
00:15:00 Comparing different approaches to blockchain architecture
00:22:48 The current landscape of blockchain ecosystems
00:26:29 Challenges of building on Bitcoin and navigating community resistance
00:29:43 The Stacks Nakamoto upgrade and its potential impact
00:32:44 Decentralization versus user experience
00:37:38 Future vision for Bitcoin L2s and a decentralized internet
—————
The Slow Hunch is produced by the team at Spectral.
I spoke to Fraser Kelton, General Partner at Spark Capital and the former Head of Product at OpenAI. Fraser played a key role in the launch of ChatGPT, which is widely considered AI's "iPhone moment."
Before his stint at OpenAI, Fraser built Koko, a platform that was initially built to provide cognitive behavioral therapy at scale, transitioned to AI-driven online content moderation, and eventually acquired by Airbnb in November 2018.
At Airbnb, as Fraser experimented with early models like BERT and GPT-2 to scale Koko's content moderation efforts, he realized that transformer models could "turn all of the internet into training data," dramatically accelerating the progress of AI.
Fraser cold emailed Ilya Sutskevar and ended up joining OpenAI—helping them transition from a research lab into a company that ships compelling consumer and enterprise products. He offered a behind-the-scenes look at the development of GPT-3 and ChatGPT, and the decisions that led up to their release.
Looking ahead, Fraser discussed how transformer architectures could be applied to biology, disrupting traditional medicine as we know it. He spoke about how we are overestimating the short-term impact of AI, and under-appreciating the scale of change over the next 10-30 years.
Throughout his career, Fraser has been driven by a mission to support brilliant technologists in creating a better future. His insights offer a glimpse into the past, present, and future of AI at a pivotal moment in the technology's development. Enjoy!
Chapters
—————
The Slow Hunch is produced by the team at Spectral.