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CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER COVID19 What’s Next? Innovation FTW. I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France.It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Speaking up Against Trump. I have stayed away from commenting on Trump because I prefer to address issues rather than individual politicians. But Trump’s call yesterday to block the entry of all Muslims into the US requires a broad based response. Even Dick Cheney came out saying that this “goes against everything we stand for” (and this from the man who supported torture). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Sketchup + Shapeways = My First 3D Object. One of my personal projects for 2011 was to design something and print it on Shapeways.This weekend I decided that I had a couple of hours to do that and so as the first step I installed Google Sketchup.. Having never done any 3D design before, instead of jumping straight into the program, I decided to watch some of the videos explaining how to use CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Presenting Option Grants to Boards. One of the nearly routine items at startup board meetings is the discussion and ratification of option grants for new employees and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER COVID19 What’s Next? Innovation FTW. I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France.It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Speaking up Against Trump. I have stayed away from commenting on Trump because I prefer to address issues rather than individual politicians. But Trump’s call yesterday to block the entry of all Muslims into the US requires a broad based response. Even Dick Cheney came out saying that this “goes against everything we stand for” (and this from the man who supported torture). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Sketchup + Shapeways = My First 3D Object. One of my personal projects for 2011 was to design something and print it on Shapeways.This weekend I decided that I had a couple of hours to do that and so as the first step I installed Google Sketchup.. Having never done any 3D design before, instead of jumping straight into the program, I decided to watch some of the videos explaining how to use CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Presenting Option Grants to Boards. One of the nearly routine items at startup board meetings is the discussion and ratification of option grants for new employees and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: The Problem with P-Values (Incentives) Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the concept of p-values.We looked at the example of a null hypothesis (explanation) that a coin is fair, observing heads (H) or tails (T) six times in a row and rejecting that the coin is fair because the probability of that happening with a fair coin is only 0.03125 which is less than 0.05 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Biggest Danger of the Trump Presidency: Abandoning Science and Rationality. I recently read “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson and just last night finished “The Dark Forest” which is the second book in the “Three Body Problem” trilogy by Cixin Liu.What these books have in common is that they look at a threat to humanity’s existence and probe our responses to it. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Homo Deus by Yuval Harari (Book Review) I previously wrote a review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, which I highly recommended, despite fundamentally disagreeing with one of its central arguments.Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Homo Deus.While the book asks incredibly important questions about the future of humanity, it not only comes up short on answers, but, moredisappointingly, it
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER More on Facial Recognition Regulation. I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI.It is extremely important to get this right. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Voice Platforms: Open Alternative is an Opportunity. There is a lot of excitement among startups and other companies about building for Amazon’s and Google’s voice platforms. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER COVID19 What’s Next? Innovation FTW. I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France.It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: The Problem with P-Values (Incentives) Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the concept of p-values.We looked at the example of a null hypothesis (explanation) that a coin is fair, observing heads (H) or tails (T) six times in a row and rejecting that the coin is fair because the probability of that happening with a fair coin is only 0.03125 which is less than 0.05 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER More on Facial Recognition Regulation. I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI.It is extremely important to get this right. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Voice Platforms: Open Alternative is an Opportunity. There is a lot of excitement among startups and other companies about building for Amazon’s and Google’s voice platforms. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Martin Luther King Jr Supported Basic Income. We have the USV office closed today in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day. In his book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community” he wrote: In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they areindirect.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Homo Deus by Yuval Harari (Book Review) I previously wrote a review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, which I highly recommended, despite fundamentally disagreeing with one of its central arguments.Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Homo Deus.While the book asks incredibly important questions about the future of humanity, it not only comes up short on answers, but, moredisappointingly, it
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Liberate Apps Through Protocols: Lets Update IRC! One of the apps on your phone is unlike all the others: the web browser. There are many reasons it is different but here is the most fundamental one – you tell it what to connect to! CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Bad Driving, Throughput and Waiting Times. There are two bad habits in car drivers that I find quite annoying: not pulling into the intersection and not signaling turns. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER COVID19 What’s Next? Innovation FTW. I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France.It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: The Problem with P-Values (Incentives) Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the concept of p-values.We looked at the example of a null hypothesis (explanation) that a coin is fair, observing heads (H) or tails (T) six times in a row and rejecting that the coin is fair because the probability of that happening with a fair coin is only 0.03125 which is less than 0.05 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER More on Facial Recognition Regulation. I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI.It is extremely important to get this right. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Voice Platforms: Open Alternative is an Opportunity. There is a lot of excitement among startups and other companies about building for Amazon’s and Google’s voice platforms. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Martin Luther King Jr Supported Basic Income. We have the USV office closed today in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day. In his book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community” he wrote: In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they areindirect.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Homo Deus by Yuval Harari (Book Review) I previously wrote a review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, which I highly recommended, despite fundamentally disagreeing with one of its central arguments.Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Homo Deus.While the book asks incredibly important questions about the future of humanity, it not only comes up short on answers, but, moredisappointingly, it
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Liberate Apps Through Protocols: Lets Update IRC! One of the apps on your phone is unlike all the others: the web browser. There are many reasons it is different but here is the most fundamental one – you tell it what to connect to! CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Bad Driving, Throughput and Waiting Times. There are two bad habits in car drivers that I find quite annoying: not pulling into the intersection and not signaling turns.* Home
* Archive
* Tech Tuesday
* Uncertainty Wednesday* About
AMERICAN CARNAGE
Watching what is happening in the United States, my adopted home country, is incredibly painful. I have seen the last few days coming for years based on the ever more untenable income and wealth distribution combined with militarization of the police and their ongoing unchecked brutality, especially against black people. You can browse back through Continuations and find many posts speaking to these topics, such as this one from 2014.
I have a lot more thoughts about this moment in history and where it might go, but here are some unequivocal statements I want to makeright now.
1. George Floyd was murdered by police officers who need to be prosecuted accordingly. 2. Black Americans continue to suffer from systemic racism that has its roots in slavery. 3. Americans of all races are living increasingly precarious lives, while a small group has accumulated vast wealth. 4. Police forces all around the country are overly militarized, structurally corrupt and unaccountable. 5. Demonstrations against #1 - 4 above are entirely justified and mustcontinue
6. Police violence and escalation have injured and arrested citizens who were engaged in peaceful protest in #5 in violation of their 1stamendment rights
7. Looting and burning businesses is wrong and counterproductive (while yet also being entirely understandable) 8. Some of #7 is caused by groups intent on escalating violence 9. Trump has been inciting violence from the beginning of his candidacy and is reveling in the use of force 10. We must do everything we can to remain peaceful even in the face of state and agitator violence (peaceful does include civil disobedience, such as sitting and blocking an intersection). Posted: 2nd June 2020– 51 Comments
Tags: protests blacklives matter
democracy america
politics
USV TEAM POSTS
* Fred Wilson — Jun 1, 2020A NEW MONTH
------------------------- THE SOCIAL MEDIA TRIANGLE “Two out of three ain’t bad” is the title of a Meat Loaf song but is also the idea behind triangles:
situations in which you can achieve only two of three objectives. The classic example is the idea that in manufacturing you can have any two, but not all three from fast, cheap, good. (*) Much of the current debate about social media and how to regulate it is people shouting loudly past each other because they are pursuing different objectives in what I believe is a social media triangle: Freedom: there isn’t a central authority that can exert power over individual expression or appropriate rents generated by contributorsto the system.
Openness: anyone can join a globally connected network and express themselves without being trolled or harassed. Criticism: there is a mechanism by which people get exposed to opposing viewpoints and relevant facts and by which information cascades (especially spread of misinformation) are curtailed. All the existing big systems such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube fail on the first objective, as they are controlled by for-profit corporations, which are further subject to regulation and interventionby governments.
This of course has many people, myself included, arguing for decentralized alternatives. I think we have to be clear though that this will make accomplishing objective #2 harder (although to date the bar set here by the centralized players is extremely low). More importantly though accomplishing #3 will not be possible in a decentralized system. At the current trajectory though there is a good chance that we will wind up with the worst of all outcomes, at least for a while: a regulatory environment in which massive players are perversely protected from new entrants but simultaneously hidebound because their conduct is subject to behavioral rules (which require consulting an army of lawyers for every product change). That is what stagnation looks like and we know it all too well from many other industries as well as some prior moments in information technology. In tech those moments were kept thankfully short by massive platform shifts (e.g., mainframe to PC) but there isn’t an obvious one of those on the horizon (except for blockchain but more on that in a moment). There is a clear alternative to this which helps us accomplish objectives 1 and 2, while at the same time incentivizing competition. Give a Section 230 like protection to companies in return for providing a complete set of enduser APIs.
In other words, require Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. to be fully programmable in order to have their liability limited. How does this accomplish objective 1? By reducing the network effect lock in of the incumbents. In a fully programmable world new interfaces can be created that let me interact with multiple systems transparently, so I don’t need to keep track for example of which social network my friends are on. Some of these alternatives may be new centralized systems but others may be decentralized ones. What about objective 2? In a fully programmable world, users can control what they see and what they don’t. So while that will not prevent trolls from getting on a system it allows endusers and coalitions of endusers to filter what they see. Of course this immediately shows that objective #3 will be challenging. Again centralized players have done a horrendously bad job at this to date, largely because they are optimizing for total attention gathered. To get a glimpse of how hard that will be one need to look no further than information cascades on WhatsApp. Why do I still think this is better? Because the misinformation problem is much larger than any one social media system and reaches all the way back to such fundamentals as how people learn and what value systems they internalize. In other words, it has been and will continue to be one of the central problems of human progress. For more thoughts on that I have an entire book which you can find at WorldAfter Capital.
(*) It turns out that you can achieve all three if you start with quality but only if you build a culture of quality. Similarly here I believe you can eventually accomplish all three if you build a cultureof criticism.
Posted: 29th May 2020– 8 Comments
Tags: social media api decentralizationsection230
#DIYINTERNSHIP
I have been getting a large number of requests for help with internships. Many students either never got one for this summer or had theirs canceled. My advice to them is: create your own. Figure out what it is you want to learn, start learning it, write about it online and find others to join your effort. These days there are amazing resources online on almost any topic plus you can social networks to find like minded DIYers. I propose that everyone who pursues this path use the same hashtag #DIYInternship so that folks can more easily find each other. I realize that not everything can be done that way for example if you need access to machinery or to a lab. And yes initially you will start by yourself and you have to build your own contacts. Also, of course internships are part of the path towards finding employment. But here it is quite clear that a #DIYInternship will show more initiative than simply doing nothing this summer. Finally, if this takes off, I am pretty sure there will be people with experience who will jump in and answer questions or provide advice. So stop waiting for someone to give you an internship and startingcreating your own.
Posted: 20th May 2020–
13 Comments
Tags: learning
internship diy
diyinternship
COVID19: RESETTING OUR PRIORITIES Towards the end of 2019, which feels a decade ago, I wrote a post ongrowth . It was
an attempt to get away from the blanket term “growth” and its counterpart “degrowth,” which have become stand-ins for entire philosophies and move the discussion to specific categories such as knowledge (need more) and consumption (can do with less). The COVID19 crisis, while causing immense pain, also provides a unique opportunity to reflect on what we need in our lives and what we can do without. And that examination should guide how we rebuild our economyand society.
The lockdown has resulted in the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression. In one shocking statistic, it appears that almost 40% of people earning under $40K have lost their job.
This is a massive disruption to what in my book World After Capital I call the job-loop: the vast majority of people spend most of their waking hours in a job and much of the rest on consumption of goods and services, which in turn are produced by other people having jobs. Now lots of people are asking how will we bring these jobs back? But the more fundamental question to ask is: what can people spend their time and attention on if they don’t need to have that specific job? Or possibly any paid job? Or if they are empowered to start their own business? So far the government stimulus amounts to $3 trillion, which could easily pay for more than 1 year of Universal Basic Income (UBI).
What about the other side of the job loop, consumption? We are seeing more clearly than ever right now that health and freedom of movement are deep human needs. Having dozens of pairs of sneakers, by contrast, is not. It may be cool, hip or even constitute a valuable collection, but is clearly a want. If you are sick from COVID19 or locked up in a tiny apartment, this distinction between needs and wants will becrystal clear.
Way too many of our productive resources are aimed at making and selling stuff to people that they do not need. And we are seeing how hard it is and long it takes to retool those resources to instead produce masks and tests and everything else we truly need. The crucial reason for this is that we have become overly reliant on the market for allocation, especially the allocation of human attention. This is deeply problematic because prices do not and cannot exist for crucial needs, such as pandemic preparedness and finding purposein life.
So here too our question shouldn’t be, how can we bail out all the businesses and keep making more stuff, but rather what is it that we need and won’t get from the market? We know some of these areas already and the crucial one of course is solving the climate crisis . But there is a lot more, such as the opioid crisis, which in turn is just part of the larger crisis of individual purpose. There is no shortage of issues and people deserving more of our attention than we are giving. Susan and I have been incredibly fortunate (so far) to be healthy and have our loved ones be healthy. We are financially secure and can do our work remotely. And on top of that we are in a place with good internet connectivity where we can just walk outside whenever we want to and be in the woods. But we know many others who are not nearly this lucky and much of our time has been focused on helping where we can. Being able to do so has been fulfilling and has made us shift our priorities towards doing more ofthat faster.
If ever there was a time to reset personal and collective priorities,this is it.
Posted: 15th May 2020– 57 Comments
Tags: covid19 climatecrisis job loop
purpose
COVID19 AND THE DECENTRALIZATION OF MONEY One key lesson from COVID19 is that we need a lot more decentralization. This is especially true when the center is as inept at managing the crisis as the US federal government has proven to be. For example, the power of agencies such as the CDC and the FDA has turned out to be problematic, e.g. in giving guidance on mask wearing or trying to increase the availability of testing (both central to the road back).
This is not just a critique of current leadership but rather of the accretion of excessive federal power more generally. The size of the economy of New York State is roughy $1.7 trillion as measured by the equivalent of GDP (an admittedly bad measure). That is about 150 times the GDP of the entire United States in 1800 (assuming I did my math right on that). Or if New York were a country, it would rank 11th in the world,
ahead of over 150 other countries. California is even bigger coming in4th in the world
(and ~275 times the size of the United States in 1800). It is completely unclear why outside a few crucial topics — that can only be regulated at the federal level — states of this size should not be making independent policy decisions. For example, why shouldn’t New York and California approve their own at home tests? COVID19 may, however, turn out to be a catalyst for the ultimate decentralization, that of money. The dollar’s role as a global reserve currency has for many years put the US in a position of strength. But dollar dominance has proven to be a massive problem in this crisis — everyone who has dollar denominated debt, which includes not just US corporations and states, but also foreign sovereigns and corporates was relying on economic activity, including international trade, to produce the dollar necessary for debt service. With the COVID19 lockdowns that source of dollars has suddenly dried up which has forced the Federal Reserve to step in, producing an extraordinary 2.35 trillion dollars in the space of 6 weeks.
For a super clear explanation of this see Jill Carlson’sgreat post
.
The Fed is effectively making a last ditch attempt to prevent a massive global debt collapse. Even if we can stave that off in the near term, the crisis will make many entities around the world accelerate their search for an alternative to the dollar. This isn’t just idle thinking as the extraordinary speech by then Bank of England governor Mark Carney shows and is further illustrated by the massive freakout that central banks had over Libra’s plan for a stable coin based on a currency basket (the search for an alternative clearly does not include one that was feared could be controlled by Facebook). One of the most interesting ways the decentralization of money could really pick up steam is with community currencies. US States cannot print money but will find themselves with massive budget holes from a combination of increased crisis response spending with a massive loss in tax revenues (footnote: there may be a way for states around this, but it is likely complicated and might result in an ugly fight). But there is a long history of community currencies in the US.
And of course there is the famous “Miracle of Wörgl”
in which a town helped lift itself out of economic depression by creating its own currency. This is also an opportunity for crypto technology to really come into its own. For example we have been spending time upstate New York in Columbia County. It would be fantastic to have a local digital currency that is created on and settles via a blockchain. The county, or even a single city like Hudson, could issue it. Or better yet, citizens could create it for themselves. If anyone is aware of such experiments, I would love to learn more about them. H/T to Tamar and Pete for getting my thinking on this going earlier today with an email exchange starting with this post by the Schumacher Center.
Posted: 2nd May 2020– 48 Comments
Tags: covid19 cryptoblockchain
decentralization
money
A PLAN FOR RAPIDLY RAMPING COVID19 TESTING Since I wrote my post on “The Road Back from COVID19″
we have made lots of progress on two out of the three pillars: masks and tracing. Masks went from a discussion of their merits to being mandatory to wear in public in several states,
including New York. Tracing went from a hodgepodge of approaches to an API supported by both Google and Apple.
On the third pillar of testing, however, we are massively behind. It is by now well understood that the virus is transmissable for several days before the appearance of symptoms. To be able to reopen without immediately heading back into a steep infection curve that would once again overwhelm ICU capacity, we must ramp up testing dramatically with a target of many millions of *daily* tests. Ideally people could test themselves at home and/or at work several times a week with results in minutes. Is that just crazy or can we get there? Yes because the required technology already exists, we just need to approve it and manufacture it at scale. Here are just two examples of machines, the MicrosensDxand the Accula
.
There are many more startups and established companies that have tests and there are fascinating proposals for super high throughput cheaptesting
.
We need to take three steps right now: (1) approve lots of these test immediately and (2) manufacture at scale and (3) monitor ongoing results. Here is how to accomplish thisStep 1: Approval
The regular FDA approval process needs to be completely sidestepped. Instead we either go a decentralized route, allowing states to approve their own tests, or we put together an approval task force recruited from the leading test scientists. The goals for that group should be to greenlight dozens of tests within the span of days and to then define follow-up reporting requirements to enable ongoing monitoring(step 3 below).
Step 2; Manufacture
There are lots of components to these tests and they are not easy to manufacture. But there is definitely manufacturing capacity that could be repurposed. To do so quickly I believe we will have to invoke the Defense Production Act as well as be willing to spend a lot of money. Every dollar spend on testing will unlock a multiple in economic activity so this is among the best money we can spend, even if some of the tests we buy don’t work well (or maybe not even at all). Having more different tests approved in Step 1 means we can lean into manufacturing much harder with a portfolio approach.Step 3: Monitor
Finally we need to set up a reporting and stats infrastructure to monitor the performance of the tests as they are deployed so that we can hone in on the ones with the best sensitivity and specificity.
With the right reporting protocols we will rapidly learn what workswell.
Essentially this amounts to reversing the normal approval process which takes a long time with the goal of having only high quality tests in market. Here we want to optimize for speed and massively over allow, then pull back later. Because this is so essentially a 180 from the FDA’s normal operations we need a special one-time panel onthis.
Governors should be exerting public pressure right now calling for this and if it has not been put in place by end of next week they should proceed on their own. Posted: 18th April 2020– 20 Comments
Tags: covid19 testing HELP PROMOTE EARTH DAY LIVE 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day,
an annual event supporting environmental protection and increasingly dedicated to fighting the climate crisis. Much had been
planned, but due to COVID19 those plans had to be scrapped. Instead there will now be a global live stream at Earth Day Live 2020 and you can help promote it by adding some code to your site as I have done here on Continuations. While it may be hard to muster the energy to think about anything other than COVID19, the climate crisis hasn’t gone away but is continuing to unfold. There are many parallels between the two crises: the both show the limitations of capitalism and market based solutions.
There was no price mechanism for maintaining adequate emergency supplies of PPE and ventilators. That would have required government action (which we failed to take). Similarly, there is no price mechanism for greenhouse gases unless we create one through collective action (e.g. a carbon tax for polluters, payment for drawdown). Scientists have long predicted a major global pandemic and we had two big warning signs specifically about coronaviruses with SARS and MERS. Yet we ignored the science. Similarly we understand the science of greenhouse gases and we have ample warning signs all around us, including rising temperatures and increases in extreme weather events. Both of these are global problems impacting all of humanity. We cannot solve either through individual action – they require policy changes. And policies are made by governments. Therefore a major thrust of Earth Day Live will be voter registration. So please take a few minutes today or in the coming week and help promote Earth Day Live.
Posted: 12th April 2020– 2 Comments
Tags: climate crisisearth day
THE ROAD BACK FROM COVID19: MASKS, TESTS AND TRACING FOR ALL The lockdown measures put in place have started to flatten the curve, but they are hugely disruptive and even if we were better about freezing the economy than we are, we cannot possibly maintain them until we have a vaccine (which is many months off at a minimum). So how do we get back from here? There are three essential ingredients that need to be in place: masks, tests and tracing for all. How do we get these at the time of a dysfunctional federal government? Well here are some possibilities. MASKS FOR ALL: This is the easiest one as it turns out that reasonably effective masks can be homemade. Kudos to the team behind #Masks4All for popularizing this straightforward solution. You can also find tonsof masks on Etsy
.
TESTS FOR ALL: Masks will not prevent all infections, so we need massive testing. Thankfully there are a lot of new ways to test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus at scale. For instance there is a new assay to use existing sequencing capacity to ramp to 1 million tests per day and another proposal for using “barcoding” to pool samples which can get us to the 10s of millions of tests per day. The cost here is low enough that these can all be privately orstate level funded.
TRACING FOR ALL: Then of course once someone tests positive we need to notify everyone they may have infected. That requires tracing. The solution for that are mobile apps because our phones are always with us and know where we have been. There are several credible teams working on centralized approaches such as Coronatrace,
as well as the emerging TCN coalition for a decentralized system. Both Apple and Google should put their considerable resources behind these efforts immediately. Update: Apple and Google have announced a tracing approach.
I believe we can have all three of these firmly in place some time in May at which point many of our regular activities can resume. To be clear, people will still get infected and some people will die from those infections. But with hospitals not overwhelmed treatment will be significantly better and mortality rates lower (also new treatment options are emerging). What can we do as individuals? To the extent you can based on your skills and where you work, please contribute to one of these initiatives. If you can’t, make sure to put pressure on your local or state government to embrace this approach. Posted: 10th April 2020– 78 Comments
Tags: covid19 masks4all NORMALCY BIAS: WE LIVE IN A DYNAMIC WORLD (BUT PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVEIT)
Something that consistently surprises me is how many people have a fundamentally static worldview. Their motto appears to be: Things are as they are and nothing will change. Never mind that history is full of massive change. And even more surprising: once a huge change has occurred the new situation becomes the new accepted normal. The COVID19 crisis is case in point. The force of change, in the form of a virus that can be spread asymptomatically, was already clearly visible in January. The majority of people, however, were going after their lives as if nothing was happening and as if no change would be coming well into March. It was a small minority who were screaming about the need to prepare and to take drastic measures. This bit of recent history is reasonably well understood. Now that we are in the depth of the crisis, however, the lockdown and fear are rapidly becoming the new normal. Now I hear from friends how they are “settling in for the long run.” I see forecasts that this crisis will prevent students from going to college in the fall. Very few people now seem to believe that this could actually be overfaster.
And yes, to be clear, there are definitely scenarios where the crisis drags on and certainly where the economic downturn is extended, especially here in the US due to lots of personal and small business bankruptcies. Still, it is worth considering the factors that could contribute to a faster recovery. There is now tons of work on possible treatments. There are massive efforts underway to create a vaccine. Testing will be available widely and contact tracing will be facilitated by mobile phone location (and/or bluetooth handshake). There will be masks for everyone. We have made some wild technological progress in the last decade that might come into play here. We can now write DNA (not just read it), which lets us create precise synthetic viruses. While that has potentially scary applications, it also means we can crank out vaccinecandidates
in totally new ways. There are also breakthroughs in growing and reproducing antibodies,
where we can leverage antibodies from people who have developedresistance.
The tendency to see the current state of the world as the normal that will not change is sometimes called “normalcy bias.”
This is fundamentally about the difference between a static and a dynamic conception of the world. Entrepreneurs and startups investors have that dynamic conception that change is possible and even more that they can bring about that change. That’s why they were among the ones who pointed out we were headed for crisis and that’s why they are now the most optimistic that we will get out of it. Posted: 6th April 2020– 17 Comments
Tags: covid19 biasnormalcy bias
dynamic
static
VC BACKED STARTUPS AND PPP: DO YOU REALLY NEED IT? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). I don’t want to rehash the arcana of affiliation rules here but make a totally different point instead: there is a money grab going on right now by some venture backed startups that this program absolutely shouldexclude.
Let me start by writing about the kind of business that I believe this is spot on for: the local construction company that has to stop all projects or the barber shop that has zero business right now. These businesses tend to be low margin and operate on very little cash (2-4 week maybe). Their revenues have gone to zero. They don’t have equity investors and are largely shut out from the credit markets. Their only alternative is bankruptcy. By contrast many venture backed companies have many months or maybe even more than a year of burn sitting in their bank accounts. Their investors are often deep pocketed funds who should be well reserved for follow on investments. They can get sophisticated financial advice and can access the venture debt market (admittedly not right now but probably again in a couple of months). Many of these businesses operate in the digital realm and have seen limited impact on revenues – some have even seen their revenues explode. Just to be clear. I think that some venture backed companies have a legitimate claim that they should be part of PPP. For example, we have some companies in our portfolio for which revenues have collapsed. But I fear that many more will apply and with a program that’s first-come first-served that will squeeze out small businesses for which this is the only lifeline. I have been an entrepreneur myself and I understand the worry that maybe things look OK now, but what if my company falls off a cliff and I haven’t taken this money. All of these are legitimate considerations, but so is the realization that millions of small businesses already have fallen off a cliff and they need those funds. In this context it might be useful to keep in mind that there will be a public record of every company that avails itself of PPP. So: I urge everyone who is running a venture backed company with a lot of money in the bank and limited COVID19 impact to think twice about applying for PPP. In the end this is obviously a difficult decision but we are in a crisis where true leadership means thinking beyond one’s own concerns. Posted: 4th April 2020– 32 Comments
Tags: venture capitalvc
startups
ppp
covid19
cares act
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About Albert Wenger
I am a partner at Union Square Ventures . My wife Susan Danziger co-founded and runs Ziggeo . Together we have three wonderful children. Enjoy reading!Details
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