Albert Wenger
Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
24statements → 5claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.88/5average certainty → 2.5/5average debate potential →
4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 4 assertions · 9 opinions · 7 insights · 2 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 1 names 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
Basic income trials show recipients invest in education and family care
“And there is literally no evidence to support that. All the evidence from all the basic income trials that have ever been run are that people like, wow, I can take better care of myself. I can invest in education. I can take better care of my family. Of my fri…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
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
Everything Albert Wenger said on Top Founders that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Central banks should distribute newly created money directly to individuals
“We can't be creating the money and giving it to banks. We have to create the money and give it to people.”
Wenger advocates taxing all income and capital gains at a flat rate
“Like you could have a flat tax rate. Every dollar is taxed the same way, by the way, independent where it comes from. I would tax every dollar. You get a dollar, whether it's from interest rate, capital gains, work, whatever, just you get a dollar, you pay tax…”
Digital tech shifts humanity's binding constraint from physical capital to attention
“Digital technology is exactly like those two prior changes. It shifts the binding constraint and the binding constraint is no longer physical capital, but it is attention. Like what are humans paying attention to?”
Market systems fail on vital issues that cannot have price mechanisms
“And the reason it's not true is because the market-based system for it to work, it needs prices. And the most important things that we could allocate attention to don't have prices, and more importantly, cannot have prices. There is no system that you could co…”
The global banking system must transition to full reserve banking
“I just think that we need to move to what's called whole reserve banking from fractional reserve banking.”
Basic income trials show recipients invest in education and family care
“And there is literally no evidence to support that. All the evidence from all the basic income trials that have ever been run are that people like, wow, I can take better care of myself. I can invest in education. I can take better care of my family. Of my fri…”
US infrastructure deficits stem from lack of political will, not machinery
“Mind you, we have terrible infrastructure problems in the US, but it's not because there is a lack of machinery somehow. It's because there's a lack of political will to invest in infrastructure.”
Major platforms should allow programmatic API access to all app features
“Anything you can do in an app, you need to be able to do programmatically. Anything I can do in the Twitter app, I need to be able to do through a program. Anything I can do in the Facebook app, I need to be able to do through a program.”
Tech giants will never voluntarily open APIs without government regulation
“This will shift the power balance substantially. But it has to be a regulatory act because as you rightly point out that act is going to potentially destroy some of the market value of these companies. And so the companies aren't going to do this by themselves…”
Prizes and reputation can replace patent incentives to drive technological innovation
“That combination of those three factors, intrinsic motivation plus reputation plus price, is a improvement extraordinarily powerful, and the amount of progress that's been made in math is mind-blowing. And I think we can use that same system in many other area…”
GDP is completely outdated because it misses free digital consumer surplus
“I very much think that we need to move away from sort of praying at the altar of GDP. It's just become a kind of a measure that is, is completely outdated now that so much of what we can do with digital technology is explicitly about making things either free …”
Lawmakers of any party should fight for UBI over minimum wage
“Well, I don't, it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you should fight for UBI instead of fighting for minimum wage.”
US welfare recipients often face effective marginal tax rates over 100 percent
“You have zero work incentive because you start working, you lose all your welfare, but you only make a little bit of money. So the taxes that you effectively face, people who are on welfare today often face tax rates that are above a hundred percent. So like i…”
Token-funded protocols and hybrid venture models will remain permanent fixtures
“The idea that in principle, you could fund a, the development of a protocol through selling some of its currency that is, Then integral to the running, to the integral to the operation of the protocol I think is a really fascinating idea. And I think it will b…”
Albert Wenger argues economics has little to say about modern business
“Economics has not all that much to say about business.”
Open order books suffer from zero-cost millisecond phantom orders
“Today, one of the biggest structural issues we have in the market is that even though we're trading often with open order books, many of the orders in these open order books are basically phantom orders. They're orders that can be withdrawn from the market at,…”
Today, Delicious would likely use founder secondaries instead of early M&A
“One of the things that has really changed dramatically since that time is that founder secondaries have become completely customary. And so I think that there are many alternative paths in which delicious would have raised another round and where secondary wou…”
Modern digital technology traps human attention rather than freeing it
“I think we have fundamentally Created a situation where we're using this new set of technological capabilities, digital technology, and instead of freeing up human attention, we're sucking it down a rabbit hole.”
Union Square Ventures focuses its recent investments heavily on subscription businesses
“And I think today, if you look at the investments we've made in the last few years the vast bulk of those revolves around subscription businesses where we think the incentives between the company and the end user are actually aligned, right?”
Albert Wenger and Brad Burnham failed to raise a fund before USV
“Brad and I tried to raise a fund together after the .com bubble burst and we couldn't get it done. And so he had to bide his time a little bit. I had to bide my time. And then he teamed up with Fred to in 2003 to raise USV, the first fund, which got going in 2…”
Venture partners get deal-specific carry while GPs share the entire fund
“But as a first approximation, if you're a venture partner in a firm, you tend to tend to have economics primarily in the deals that, or exclusively in the deals that you lead. Whereas when you're a general partner, you have economics in the entire portfolio. I…”
Cloud credits swung early startup infrastructure economics by $200,000
“Today you can get a 100,000 dollars in credits to be on the internet. Like you can get a 100,000 dollars from AWS or from Google cloud and probably also from Microsoft cloud, right? So, so we've swung from being negative a 100,000 to being positive a 100,000. …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Albert Wenger on Work After Capital | Jun 17, 2020 | 39m |