The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 …”
Wenger: Twitter's blue checkmark system erred by mixing identity with status
“Because the blue checkmark, it completely confounded two things. It confounded the identity thing with the importance thing, and the importance thing, I think, was complete BS, always. Like who's supposed to say who's important, who's not important. It should …”
Wenger: TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook must be user-programmable
“I don't feel different about TikTok than I feel about Twitter or Facebook for that matter. These systems need to become programmable. If they're not programmable, we're being programmed by them.”
Wenger: Downrounds are incredibly hard; he has done three in 30 years
“I've been doing this for nearly 30 years, and I've done, like, three downrounds in that entire time period. Downrounds are incredibly hard to pull off.”
Wenger: Achieving massive success on your very first endeavor warps you
“I think the people where the very first thing that they ever did became a monster success I think that's really warps you.”
Wenger: Speculative tech bubbles benefit society by rapidly funding foundational infrastructure
“These sort of frothiness in the installation phase is good from a social perspective, because it means that A lot of capital is allocated very rapidly to a sector, and then subsequently you can build interesting things on top of that.”
Wenger: Google's re-implementation of the Java API created healthy market competition
“In that regard, it's very positive that in the Oracle versus Google lawsuit about the definition of Java it was made pretty clear that the API wasn't as protectable as Oracle claimed it was. And it's a good thing because as we've seen, you know, Google re-impl…”
Wenger: Service automation will shift human work toward knowledge and caretaking
“And now I think we can automate a lot of, not just industrial production, but also a lot of services whether that's shopping services or insurance services or transportation services. We can now automate those and that will free us up to participate more in kn…”
Wenger: Cultural and intellectual inertia is the biggest barrier to UBI
“I think the biggest challenge to getting to basic income is purely a intellectual and cultural challenge that has to do with Having constructed a system for over a hundred years or so, or several generations that, you know, has a specific perception of how the…”
Wenger: Passionate pursuits will remain infinite, but paid labor will not
“No, absolutely. We will never run out of things to do. We'll never run out of things that we will pursue passionately, but that's very different from being able to get paid for it.”
Wenger: Smartphone owners subsidize extended compute power for centralized tech platforms
“On mobile, it's a lot less clear, because on mobile, you're downloading these apps that are controlled by the companies, and you're downloading them onto a phone, where nominally you control the But because you don't control the apps, you're really, by buying …”
Wenger: Effective operators require singular focus and managing people
“To be a good operator, you have to really stay on one thing with a kind of a singular focus for a prolonged period of time, and you also have to deal a lot with people, and I'm not really a people person at the end of the day.”
Wenger: USV's Opportunity Fund has no minimum revenue requirements
“We don't have a growth fund, for example, we have a fund that we call the Opportunity Fund. And why do we call it the Opportunity Fund? Because things we put in there need to feel like they're actual opportunities. And so it doesn't have any revenue requiremen…”
Wenger: Developing nations will leapfrog legacy energy grids like mobile banking
“I think that developing nations can leapfrog. They don't have much of an existing infrastructure that needs, like, If you look in big parts of Africa, they don't have a grit. They can lean right into decentralized energy production. Just like, you know, why do…”
Wenger: Earth traps 4 to 7 Hiroshima bombs of heat per second
“The reality is it's four to seven per second, right? So of every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day, it's like four to seven Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs worth of heat.”
Wenger: Twitter is hard to kill because it's a network of networks
“I still believe that there's an opportunity today, even after all the damage that has been done both by the prior regime and by the current one, I still think it's not too late because Twitter is Hard to kill. It's a network of networks.”
Wenger: Every startup investment needs a clear, one-sentence thesis
“Best investment advice is to have one clear thesis about an investment. Like, why, like, what is the one sentence thing, why this investment makes sense?”
Wenger angel invested in Tumblr and Etsy before bringing them to USV
“Started making some angel investments, some of which became USV investments, and some of which were USV investments, so it's an angel in Tumblr, and it's an angel in Etsy, and I brought that deal to Union Square Ventures”
USV focuses investments on the technology deployment phase rather than installation
“The bulk of our investment Investing tends to be in the deployment phase, which is the phase of all the things that become possible once you have the infrastructure of the new technology installed.”
Wenger: VR and AR are still in the installation phase in 2016
“We are in the installation phase for VR and AR. You know, people are pouring lots of money into Both handset headsets, displays, other periphery software tooling and distribution but we are, it's not yet broadly deployed, and so it's not yet that there's an in…”
Wenger predicts only a small number of self-driving car companies will survive
“If you think about self-driving cars, how many self-driving car companies will there ultimately be? It's probably not a large number, and so if you're in the installation phase, you know, you have to get very lucky to pick the winner, and then even within pick…”
Wenger: A board member's top duty is helping founders recognize personal weaknesses
“I think the best board member is somebody who can help the team be the best team that it can be. That has many aspects to it, but one of the crucial aspects to that is helping founders and the management team, but especially founders and CEOs, understand what …”
USV backed Clue because smartphones will outscale traditional birth control access
“Invested in a company called Clue, based in Berlin, an app that lets women track their health and their fertility, and said yes because there are more women in the world who will have smartphones than have access to traditional birth control, and there's a hug…”
Wenger: USV will not raise new funds for a while after 2022 vintages
“No, I mean, look I think we have brand new, 20, 22 funds. We have a new opportunity fund, a new core fund, a new climate fund. And so we're probably not going to be in market for a while because we've kept our funds very small.”
Wenger had multiple failed attempts entering VC before joining USV
“I first tried to start a venture capital arm for Telebank, and then Telebank got acquired by E-Trade, and then I started my own incubator with very bad timing at the sort of height of the bubble, just before the bubble burst, and then I tried to start a ventur…”