The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Albert Wenger embodies The Visionary by reframing venture capital's purpose around civilizational stakes rather than returns. The Union Square Ventures managing partner subordinates market logic to existential priorities, treating human attention, climate, and democratized knowledge as the true scarce resources of the era.
“Almost done investing that. And so the climate thesis is very simple. We want to invest in companies that either reduce emissions, draw down existing emissions, or help with adaptation. So I'll give an example of adaptation investment. We invested in a company out of Australia called Floodmap.”
“And then roughly 10,000 years ago, we had a bunch of inventions. We figured out that you could plant seeds, that you could irrigate them, that you could domesticate animals, that you could use the dung from the animals as a fertilizer. We figured all those things out and we got agriculture.”
“We went from having religions where everything was a spirit, a tree, a rock, everything had a spirit in it. We went from that to theistic religions where there was some defined number of gods.”
“And it will Iran, they built the B17 Liberator bomber. Now, that is a four engine bomber with lots of gun turrets to defend against fighters. At peak production, they finished. They finished one of these every hour. Finished a complete airplane every hour.”
Masters in Business: “Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms”
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