Albert Wenger
Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures · 2 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
investorexecutivefounderauthor@albertwenger ↗albertwenger.com ↗
Albert Wenger is a Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures. He previously served as the president of del.icio.us through its sale to Yahoo and is the author of The World After Capital.
48statements → 11claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.88/5average certainty → 2.71/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 52said about them ↓
3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 8 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
7 predictions · 4 assertions · 9 opinions · 22 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Albert argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Wenger: Musk has the personal wealth to absorb Twitter's debt
“Yeah, no, I mean, look, I mean, that's tough noogies for you, but you're still one of the world's richest people, and you still could basically give any debt provider an out, and you could still basically just take a bunch of your wealth and sort of say, look,…”
Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →
4.3 / 5
directness 4.4 · coherence 4.7 ·
precision 4.1 · compression 3.8
redirected or did not address 2 of 44 assessed questions (5%). Watch them ▸
This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →
How they sound: speaking style how? →
235 words/min while actually speaking · 29.2 um and uh per 1k words · 7 false starts per 1k · 35.6% of pauses land inside a clause
English is their second language (first language: German). These numbers measure fluency in English. They do not measure thought; the argument clarity score above is read from substance alone.
Measured by listening to the audio itself: 11,152 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →
How the interview went all their pushback → series average →
Across 2 rated episodes:
host pushback ▾ 3.5/10
setup questions received 48%
host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 13:20“Can I be blunt, Albert? Do you not think this is slightly idealistic?” ▶ 9:15“My question is, does technology not make this worse?” ▶ 25:37“So if you're a politician, yeah, and you say, 50% of GDP is going to climate, or 30%, or 20%, there's the opportunity cost of budget, and respectfully, one of my mentors, I didn't …” ▶ 10:49“And is this not kind of contrary or prior investments in the Twitters, Tumblers, Foursquares of the world?” ▶ 8:11“I'm intrigued there, because you said frothy environments there, and at what stage does frothy environments become too frothy to invest in?” ▶ 19:02“Uh, so do you think this automation will not just lead to us working harder on different things, potentially more intellectual, but just on different things?”
Everything Albert Wenger said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Albert Wenger: Markets Cannot Guide Attention to Non-Priced Problems
“Some of the most important things that we should be allocating attention to don't have prices associated with them, and cannot have prices associated with them, and so as a result, we cannot be relying on the market mechanism to guide our attention. We have to…”
Wenger: January 2023 is the second-best time ever to invest in crypto
“And I said the best time to have been in crypto was January, 2009. And that was when the Bitcoin network launched. And the second best time is January of 2023.”
Wenger: The mantra "strong opinions weakly held" is a corrosive attitude
“Because it puts the burden on others to talk you out of it instead of, like, trying to get smarter yourself.”
Wenger: Universal Basic Income is essential to unlock future economic innovation
“The basic income, which is the idea of everybody getting enough money to be able to cover basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter I believe is what's necessary to make people free economic actors in the labor market, and I think that's essential for innova…”
Wenger: UBI raises manual labor costs and forces automation of dirty jobs
“And one of the criticisms that people raise is, well, who will do these sort of dirty jobs? And I think the answer to that is it means that the price that has to get paid for somebody to say clean bathrooms will go up. And that's a good thing because when the …”
Albert Wenger: Attention, Not Physical Capital, Is Humanity's Primary Constraint
“The constraining factor on humanity isn't how much physical capital there is. We can do amazing things. I mean, look at Germany. Germany just built a whole bunch of LNG terminals in, like, a few months, right? These are projects that people were like, oh, this…”
Albert Wenger funds universal basic income trial in Hudson, New York
“And Susan, my wife and I have been long-term advocates for universal basic income. We are funding a universal basic income trial in the city of Hudson in the state of New York. And we've contributed to other universal basic income campaigns and trials.”
Wenger: Trudeau's freezing of truckers' accounts set a dangerous precedent
“I mean, I thought it was a very, very bad precedent for Trudeau to freeze the accounts of the truckers during the sort of trucker demonstration.”
Wenger: The collapse of FTX will be a temporary blip for crypto
“I think it'll be a blip in the long term, and it'll be a blip, you know, much like, you know, web van imploding, or a flooz.com, or whatever, you know, pick your favorite .com, you know, thing that imploded.”
Wenger: Musk has the personal wealth to absorb Twitter's debt
“Yeah, no, I mean, look, I mean, that's tough noogies for you, but you're still one of the world's richest people, and you still could basically give any debt provider an out, and you could still basically just take a bunch of your wealth and sort of say, look,…”
Wenger: Social media server architecture creates an unacceptable power imbalance
“As long as I am basically reduced to, like, my thumbs and the sort of wetware between my ears while somebody else on the other end is operating millions of servers, that's just the wrong balance of power.”
Wenger: Cash flow positivity is the only safe place for high-valuation startups
“If you have raised at a high valuation, you, and you have a lot of money in the bank, you have to get a cash flow positive. It's the only safe place. Literally the only safe place is cash flow positive.”
Wenger: Tech downturn will bring back pay-to-play structures and startup failures
“We'll see all sorts of structure and pay to play and everything else, but we'll also just see some businesses just blow up and people will be like, you know what, I've got better things to do.”
Wenger: VC generational transitions fail when senior partners hog the economics
“By not hogging the economics.”
Wenger: Dominant incumbents have stifled innovation in search and social media
“I think, you know, we've seen less innovation than we would probably like in the search space. I think we're seeing less innovation than we might like in the social space. And that's one of the effects of having A incumbent that has very, enjoys very strong ne…”
Wenger: Anti-scraping laws reduce market competition by legally blocking custom APIs
“One is we could, by law, require companies to have proper APIs and the other would simply be to empower end users more to construct their own APIs, and at the moment, however, most of the laws run the other way, which is if you're trying to hack together your …”
Wenger refuses to use an iPhone due to Apple's centralized gatekeeping
“My primary phone is, is not an Apple phone because I think that the idea that I could have a supercomputer in my pocket that's connected to the entire world through the internet, and in order to install software on it, I really have to go through a single comp…”
Wenger: Crypto post-crash resembles web sector after dot-com bubble
“But in crypto, it feels like there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of building, there's a lot of things and this new cycle, you know, feels like the beginning of that, it feels very similarly to me, where we are in crypto today, feels very similar to me where …”
Wenger: Political effort to preserve industrial age will worsen societal transition
“I think it's politicians misreading where we are and trying to keep us in the industrial, trying to fix the industrial age that is going to make this transition bad.”
Wenger: Climate Groups Using Civil Disobedience Are More Likely to Succeed
“We have a new wave of climate movements that are much more determined than the old ones were that are much more working in kind of a civil disobedience mode. And that's much more historically speaking, much more likely to lead to success.”
Wenger: Multiple focused funds force more discipline than one large fund
“Because it forces discipline. Like if you raise one big fund, you can be less disciplined than if you have three vehicles where you have a very specific thesis for each vehicle. And each time you can ask yourself, does this fit with the thesis? Or am I just, y…”
Wenger predicts politicians will get elected on radical climate platforms
“And I believe that climate will be that kind of thing. It'll go from something where politicians feel, oh, I can't really talk about it. There's not enough voters. I'm not going to get elected and so forth. I think it's going to go from that to something where…”
Wenger: Crypto acts as an effective inflation hedge in devaluing fiat nations
“Yeah, I mean, look, if you live in a dollar denominated country, it probably wasn't a very good hedge, but There are many other countries where there's an amazing hedge, right? So, like, I mean, there are other countries that, whose currencies have, you know, …”
Wenger: Central bank quantitative easing primarily enriches wealthy financial insiders
“It's because central banks aren't these entirely benevolent, above-it-all policymakers. Cantillon wrote about this in, like, the 1700, that when you print money, basically the people who are closer to the money benefit more. Closer to the money meaning people …”
The other half of the tape: Albert Wenger's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 50 times in 21 episodes on 20VC. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 34Ed Cooke 4Bing Gordon 3Jude Gomila 2Jeff Lawson 2Jonathan Libov 1Ethan Kurzweil 1David Tisch 1
Statements about Albert Wenger, by other people (2)
Gordon: USV led edtech discourse years before making edtech investments
“And then Albert Wenger, he created the meme of hacking education, which I'm a fanboy of. And that was probably in oh nine or oh 10. He convened leading thinkers. And interestingly enough, they didn't invest in any learning and Companies for several years after…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2023 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2021 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Twilio's Jeff Lawson on What It Takes To Create a Tribe, How To Create Anti-Fragile Organisations Through Decentralised Decision-Making and Why Values Are Nice But Principles Are Better
- 20VC: The Twilio Memo: Bessemer's Byron Deeter on How a $125K Initial Check Became Bessemer's Largest Position, What The Influx of Late-Stage Capital Means For Venture Today & Why The Incumbent Advantage Is Now An Incumbent Disadvantage
- 20VC: Etsy CEO, Josh Silverman on 2 Defining Traits of Great Leadership, The Danger of Attaching Happiness To Milestones, How To Structure Teams To Optimise for Experimentation and Agility &Whether You Learn More From Success Than Failure
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Why Most The Value In Crypto Will Accrue in Governance, When Institutional Capital Will Enter The Space and How To Think About Liquidity In Crypto with Joel Monegro, Founding Partner @ Placeholder.VC
- 20VC: Top 3 Considerations When Evaluating Consumer Businesses Today | 700 Meetings, 70 LPs, 2 Years, What It Takes To Raise a First Time Fund| The Power of The Female Network In Action Today with Anu Duggal, Founding Partner @ Female Founders Fund
- 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins
- 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 16 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Coinbase's Brian Armstrong on The Rise & Short Term Correction in ICOs, The Regulatory Framework Required For Blockchain To Succeed & How The Rise of Blockchain Disrupts The VC Industry
- 20VC: USV's Andy Weissman on The Future of The VC Industry, Why USV Does Not Vote On Investment Decisions & Why VCs Should Be Invisible
- 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Bing Gordon on Lessons From Serving On Amazon & Zynga's Board, Why The Best Investors Are Good Listeners and Sceptical Optimists & The Most Important Value Add A VC Can Provide
- 20VC: Bessemer's Ethan Kurzweil on How To View Pattern Recognition and Deal With The Anti-Portfolio, The Next Frontier In Developer Focussed Businesses & Why eSports Is Interesting Again
- 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 14 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: The Future For 3D Printing? Why European VCs Are More Conservative Than US VCs & How 3D Printing Truly Changes The Manufacturing Process with Peter Weijmarshausen, Co-Founder & CEO @ Shapeways
- 20VC: Ed Cooke, Grandmaster of Memory on What Is Missing In EdTech? What Does The Integration Of AI & Education Look Like & The Core Pillars Of Optimising Memory
- 20VC: Mythbuster: Is Mobile Dying? Is AR/VR Overhyped? Is The Excitement Around Bots Justified with Sean Flynn, Partner @ Shasta Ventures
- 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
- 20 VC: David Tisch @ Box Group on The Future of Consumer Mobile, Developing Pattern Recognition and FOMO
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Albert Wenger: Elon & Twitter; Impact of SBF; Income Inequality; Will they ban TikTok? | 2 | Jan 23, 2023 | 36m |
| 20VC: USV's Albert Wenger on Automation Replacing Humans, The Universal Basic Income and T | Jul 11, 2016 | 19m |