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Jonathan Libov

SVP of AI Product, Alpha School · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestoroperatoranalyst@libovness ↗whoo.ps ↗

Jonathan Libov served on the investment team at Union Square Ventures and led product management at companies including Appsfire, Figure 1, and Bloomberg. In 2020, he founded the edtech startup Antimatter, which was subsequently acquired by Alpha School.

17statements → 6claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.71/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources →

4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 3 assertions · 4 opinions · 6 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 2 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 Jonathan 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

Prediction Held up
OpenBazaar Could Drive Marketplace Take Rates to Zero
“You could drive that all the way down to zero if you're using something like Open Bazaar.”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 28:16 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.5 · precision 4 · compression 3.6

answered every one of 14 assessed questions directly

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? →

238 words/min while actually speaking · 36.1 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,132 words across 1 episode 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 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 0/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10
setup questions received 60%

Everything Jonathan Libov said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Held up
OpenBazaar Could Drive Marketplace Take Rates to Zero
“You could drive that all the way down to zero if you're using something like Open Bazaar.”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 28:16 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Prediction Not checkable as stated
SMS Will Not Become a Primary Interface for Mobile Services
“I do also think that in in a variety of cases, I, you know, I'm not a believer. That SMS is going to, because there are people who are quite a bit more optimistic than I am that SMS is going to be one of the primary ways that we interact with services on our p…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 9:47 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Opinion
Twitter Provides Smarter Sports Analysis Than Mainstream ESPN Commentary
“There's a lot of great content on Twitter, and about Pro football and sports in general, and as someone who's very into Twitter, it's easy for me to curate you know, a timeline or lists of people who have smart things to say about football beyond the kind of b…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 13:22 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Opinion
USV Operates as a Thesis-Driven Firm Rather Than Deal-Flow Driven
“We're thesis driven, which means that we operate, we look out at what's happening based upon are sort of core beliefs about the internet and how to grow a business on the internet. So in contrast to some firms, which I which are more, I think, deal flow orient…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 16:06 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Assertion Supported
Polling Shows Most Uber Drivers Prefer Independent Status Over Employee Status
“If you actually look at some of the polls, it's actually not the case. I mean, if you even talk to a lot of Uber drivers, they're not even aware of it, and if you ask them if they prefer to be W-II or T-Nine-I mean, not necessarily in those terms, they say tha…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 24:56 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Insight
Network Effects Are the Primary Defensible Quality of Internet Businesses
“I think they had a real belief that networks would be the defensible quality of the internet, or the defensible thing about building a business on the internet. Whereas, let's say, In prior businesses like, ah, Microsoft Office or Windows or any other software…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 5:27 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Insight
Writing Publicly Forces Deep Thinking and Drives Self-Learning
“When you're formulating it for a blog post and something that's meant to be consumed, you really need to think deeply and figure out every single angle so that you're, you know, you're communicating something which is coherent and clear and powerful. And I thi…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 7:47 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Opinion
SMS Is Becoming More Relevant on Mobile, Not Dying
“I certainly don't believe SMS is dead, and in some ways you could argue that it's relevance, it's becoming ever more relevant as we move from the desktop to mobile.”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 9:10 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Insight
Sports Tech Is Tough for VCs Due to IP Lockup
“And a tough one for VCs just because a lot of that industry is locked down by intellectual property and things like that, which actually is something that we had to deal with 50.”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 14:36 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Insight
Kuhn's Paradigm Shift Concepts Directly Apply to Venture Investing
“And I think that's actually, you know, I hate to sound too grandiose, I think some of those ideas are actually applicable in investing, where, you know, you bring with you a certain framework for looking at the world and then the, then that framework breaks do…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 19:54 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Opinion
Apple Music's Sterile Design Gives Reason for Pessimism
“That's actually the exact analogy that I made, and it's sort of, that's one reason to be not so optimistic about Apple Music. As soon as, I mean, it just, that struck me immediately as not at all the way that I think about music, you know, just choosing betwee…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 22:07 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Uber Is Capitalized Well Enough to Adapt to Worker Classification Rules
“I think they're so well capitalized that they can figure out a way to make their model work with W-II's or ten-ninety-nines.”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 24:26 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Insight
USV Evaluates Startup Pitches Using Broad Historical Network Frameworks
“When the term network comes up, we're talking in the most, let's say, Literally talking about networks of all types. I mean, it could be, it could go back to the railroad, railroad network. It could be actual social networks. And that gives you a real sort of …”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 3:55 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Insight
Visual Win-Probability Graphs Convey Game Dynamics Better Than Box Scores
“If you look particularly like at the past Super Bowl, which had a lot of wild swings, you get a visual graph of the game Which really tells the story of the game in a way that the score, the box score doesn't. You actually get a really quick visual snapshot of…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 12:54 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Assertion Supported
USV Required Short Video Submissions for Analyst Applicants
“Well, the initial screening involved, ah, recording two two-minute videos. I think the questions were, ah, what aspects of tech most inspire you, or what are your greatest inspirations? And the other question was, ah, I think just to tell you, tell them a litt…”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 2:38 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Disclosure
Libov Built a Pre-iPhone Tinder Prototype on Windows CE
“When I was in college, a friend and I had an idea for what is basically Tinder now, but this was pre-iPhone, and we and try to get a start off the ground where we had a prototype working on a Windows CE phone.”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 26:03 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
Assertion Supported
Amazon's Third-Party Marketplace Take Rate Is Approximately 15 Percent
“You know, I think Amazon's take rate for their marketplace is something like 15%.”
Jonathan Libov Jul 13, 2015 ▶ 28:11 20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures Jul 13, 2015 21m
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