Mike Mignano is a General Partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the most iconic venture firms in the world, whose investments include Coinbase, Stripe, Etsy, Twilio, Cloudflare. Before joining USV, Mike was a Partner at Lightspeed, where he backed breakout AI companies including Granola and Suno. Prior to investing, he co-founded Anchor, acquired by Spotify. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:57 Fear of Failure vs Thrill of Winning 05:34 Why Mike Left Lightspeed for USV 07:43 We're Past the AI Infrastructure Phase — Now It's About Applications 09:50 Is AI "Always On" the Future? 12:07 The Rebel Alliance: USV's Thesis on Open Weights & Human-Aligned Agents 15:07 What Happens If We Hit Recursive Self-Improvement? 16:17 The S-Curve Future: AI Plateaus & the Market Commoditises 18:28 Who Is Your Agent Actually Working For? 21:04 Engineering Teams Are Getting Smaller 25:18 80% of Enterprise Tasks Don't Need Frontier Models 26:00 China's Open Sou...