I am writing this from Web Summit in Lisbon where I have just spent the morning meeting with some terrific startups. One question that was on a lot of people’s minds was what the election of Trump as the US President will mean. I think the right answer is: nobody knows and nobody will know for quite some time.
The only thing that we can know right now is that the amount of perceived uncertainty has just shot up dramatically (*). And when that happens a lot of investors put their foot on the break. So as a startup: proceed with caution. Keep your runway longer than you might have otherwise. As for USV, we have invested at a steady pace over the last decade including all the way through the 2008 financial crisis. We will continue with that tradition.
* Why the qualifier “perceived”? Because the uncertainty of Trump being elected president already existed, it was just not something a lot of investors and startups founders focused on
