20VC: USV's Albert Wenger on Automation Replacing Humans, The Universal Basic Income and The Instalment & The Deployment Phase

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the world’s leading VC firms with investments in Twitter, Twilio, Zynga, Soundcloud, Tumblr, Lending Club and many more. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert also writes a fantastic blog at Continuations.com and did a brilliant Ted X Talk here!

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Albert made his way into the wonderful world of VC?

2.) Albert breaks down the differences between the instalment and the deployment phases of technology? At what stage USV choose to invest and why?

3.) How much of a role does valuation play in Albert’s investment decision making process? At what level does speculation become irrational exuberance?

4.) Why does Albert want to limit network effects that are provided to winning companies? What does Albert think makes a contestable market? What are the characteristics?

5.) Why is Albert such a protagonist for the basic income guarantee? What are the challenges? How will this affect human’s relationship to automation? What will mankind do with this increased abundance of time?

6.) Why does Albert believe that every individual has the right to be presented by a personal bot? What are the prominent use cases? How does it invert the power relationships between networks and their participants?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Albert’s Fave Book: Beginning of Infinity 

Albert’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Azeem Azhar: The Exponential View

Albert’s Most Recent Investment: Clue: Period and Ovulation Tracker

As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Albert on Twitter here!

If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Snapchat here!

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