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Secrets: Do We Really Need Them?
Albert Wenger – Jan 29, 2015
I have written on and off about my ambivalent feelings about a society where we value individual privacy over collective intelligence. Whenever I bring up this argument there is a counter to the effect of “but we need secrets” or [...] Read more
Community Ownership?
Albert Wenger – Jan 27, 2015
I am very excited about what we are doing over at usv.com with the Topic of the Week. Last week we discussed undoing incumbent marketplaces and this week it is about community ownership of applications. We wanted usv.com to be [...] Read more
Undoing Incumbent Marketplaces: Lowering the Take Rate
Albert Wenger – Jan 26, 2015
A big part of our investing at Union Square Ventures is to find businesses that have network effects. Marketplaces fit with that because participating in a marketplace tends to become more valuable as the marketplace grows (that’s assuming the marketplace [...] Read more
Seed Investing At USV
Fred Wilson – Jan 25, 2015
In our most recent fund, USV 2014, five of our first six investments, have been seed investments. That is probably surprising to many people as USV is not thought of as a seed investor. I wrote a post today explaining [...] Read more
BIG and BOT Policy Proposals (Transcript)
Albert Wenger – Jan 23, 2015
Here is the transcript of my talk about a Basic Income Guarantee and the Right to be Represented by a BOT from TEDxNewYork. All of our economic theory, all of our business practice, all of our public policy, they were [...] Read more
Introducing the USV.com topic of the week
Brittany Laughlin – Jan 20, 2015
As Nick, Jonathan and Fred have shared, this January we’re busy rolling out updates to USV.com. The core idea behind USV.com is to open source our thinking -- to do in public, with the great community of people that has [...] Read more
TEDxNewYork: BIG and BOT Policy Proposals
Albert Wenger – Jan 16, 2015
In my talk at Techconomy Detroit I proposed two policy measures for dealing with the transition to the information age: a basic income guarantee (universal basic income) and what I then called the right to an API Key. At the [...] Read more
A new coat of paint
Jonathan Libov – Jan 14, 2015
You might have noticed the new look on USV.com today. We just pushed an update to make our feed more comfortable to read and interact with. I love the idea of websites and apps being comfortable, a term I picked [...] Read more
Secular Stagnation: GDP is the Wrong KPI
Albert Wenger – Jan 13, 2015
The secular stagnation discussion has a bad title and sounds wonkish but is extremely important – it is about nothing short of understanding what the economy is and should be about. If you want a lot of detail you can [...] Read more