YouSaid · the spoken record

Albert Wenger

lines on the record: 82
first: 2022-09-16
most recent: 2022-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We went from forger to agrarian. So from food scarcity to lion scarcity. Then we went from land scarcity to capital scarcity. And now we're going from capital scarcity to attentional scarcity.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we changed everything yet again. And so now the point of the book is guess what? We have to change everything yet again because capital, this is why the book is called the World After Capital, Capital is no longer the binding constraint. Instead, it's human attention.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Then fast forward to a couple hundred years ago, we had, so the Enlightenment, with the Enlightenment, we had big scientific breakthroughs and we figured out how to dig up stuff out of the ground and burn it and create energy and make heat and electricity and all those things. And the constraint shifted again. It shifted from how much land do you have to how much physical capital can he create? How many machines can he build? How many buildings, roads, railroads, etc.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And the constraint shifted from how much food can you find to how much land, arable land, do you have? And when that constraint shifted, we changed just about everything about how humanity lives. Like we went from being migratory to being sedentary. We went from very flat tribal societies to very hierarchical agrarian societies. We went from being clearly like polygamous, polymeric.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The basic idea is that every once in a while in humanity's history, we invent things that radically change what we as society have as a binding constraint on us. So let me make that very concrete. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were foragers. They were hunter-gatherers. They would go out and find things and eat berries and kill little squirrels.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we reserve a lot of funds for follow on, and we have a very sort of, I think, sophisticated reserves methodology that we've honed over many fund cycles now, where we actually built kind of a Monte Carlo analysis of the portfolio to see how much money we think we need to keep in reserve. But eventually, when the valuations get too high, the rounds get too large, we don't follow on, we have a separate vehicle called the Opportunity Fund, where we sometimes write bigger checks into late stage runs in some of our portfolio companies, but not always.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about why we are excited and if that aligns with you, that's great. And if it doesn't, let's go separate ways, right? So we take a kind of, I call it a high alpha approach to investing. We'd rather have really upfront conversations about what we like and don't like than sort of get married, as it were. And it actually, it's harder to get rid of UVC than is to get a divorce. So we think it's good to have these conversations up front, right?”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Largely, it's great for us because we're early stage investors. So it means there's lots of money to come in and fund later rounds of the companies we've invested in. So we haven't really spent much of our time worrying about it. And then every once in a while, these firms go, we're going to go really early. And some of them do spread money early. But we find because we're thesis driven and because we are opinionated on deals that we're really interested in, you know, can win those deals. Sometimes they'll take a small check from somebody else along for the ride, but they know that we work with early stage companies that we roll our sleeves up, that we're involved, and that we have a thesis. And, you know, we take the approach, we'd rather disagree with the founder and then not invest than sort of like be like, oh, well, whatever it is you want to do. We're like, we have a thesis as to why we think this is interesting. Let's talk about this if it's aligned, great. And obviously things may change after we've invested and we're not like stubborn, you know. But let's.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we've definitely always been disciplined on valuation and we've let a number of things go. Sometimes you let them go and they do gradient like, well, we could have made money if we had invested. And sometimes you're very happy you did that. Our approach is we've always kept our fun sizes small, so we don't need to be in everything that's out there. Our latest funds are, our core fund is $250 million. So these aren't big funds. And the scheme of things, when you have other firms that raise $3,000, $85 billion per fund. And as a result, if we think the price is too high, we can just find something else.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys approach it differently. We in our LPA, we can write checks up to $100,000. So we can't make massive investments in startups. So all of the companies you mentioned have sub $100,000 investment in. And then the only one where I've invested more is Marvel Fusion. We can invest more once the fund has passed on something. So if the fund says we're not doing this, then we can invest.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's this pattern in the world where every big technological shift starts with a bubble, right? So when we had chips, we had the South Sea bubble, right? When we had railroads, we had the railroad bubble. There was an automotive bubble, but there was the dot-com bubble, multiple bubbles in crypto. There was a green tech bubble. But now it's a decade plus later. And all the things that they were rightly concerned about are all coming true. And we are now reaping some of the benefit, but we're also now building on, we're sort of standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment. The early green tech funds, they were too early in one sense, but in another sense they were actually crucial to our having a shot at overcoming the climate crisis. Because if it hadn't been for their investments, we wouldn't have gotten on the cost curve, for instance, for solar PV, right? So the reason we have really cheap PV today, the reason we have really relatively cheap batteries today is because of some of the investments that were made back there.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I'll talk about one of the drawdown investments. We've invested in a company called Brilliant Planet out of the UK. What they do is they build ponds in the desert and they pump seawater and then they grow algae very, very rapidly, continuous algae bloom. And it takes a huge amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have completely industrialized this process. That's amazing. They drive a minivan in, and a couple hours later it drives out as an E”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely About emissions reductions. We've made investments, for example, in our first ever investment in Africa in a company called Shift EV, which Shift EV does is it takes existing delivery vans and retrofits them in the space of a couple of hours from internal combustion engine to electric.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 what they do is they predict where things are going to flood. They also measure the actual flooding. Floods are one of the biggest problems coming out of the climate crisis, and they're here today. This is not some future problem. We're getting mega floods in Pakistan. A third of Pakistan is underwater as we speak. I don't think people understand how horrific the devastation there is.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, those are all personal investments, not Unit Square of Ventures investments, but. Made those investments in the run up to us forming a climate thesis and now a climate fund. So those are all investments that go back a few years when I sort of became really interested in what kind of opportunities come out of the climate crisis. The climate crisis, if we don't get on top of it, none of the other stuff will matter. None of the money we've made will matter. It's so big. It's so much bigger than COVID, for example, in ways that I think people still don't appreciate. And so made some personal investments first. And then we started talking to our LPs about it. And then during COVID, we raised a first climate fund, $160 million climate fund.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. There's a strong relationship between some of the ideas in the book and some of the ideas that inform our investing”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concrete. So let me just pick one of them building trusted brands. For us, a lot today is about is your business model fundamentally aligned with your customer or not? The advertising model, as we have learned, is not aligned with customers' interests, right? If you're YouTube, you want to serve the most engaging video so that you can show more ads. You don't want to serve the most appropriate video, right? But if you have a subscription model, let's say like Netflix, you want to show something that somebody actually really, truly, deeply is going to relate to so that they stay a subscriber long term. So each part of this thesis means something and we use these sort of high-level thesis to then look for very concrete things. So for example, I said broadening access to capital. So we've done a lot in lending. Like how can we do better underwriting, better, cheaper, faster loans, for instance, to small businesses, investment like a company like Funding Circle or to individuals, like a company like Upgrade, in a way that actually helps people. So where you're not dragging them into a dead hole.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this has been an evolution over time. I would say what we call thesis 1.0 was that we invest in large networks of engaged users differentiated by user experience. And those were investments like Twitter and Tumblr. And then we started to focus on companies that had less obvious network effects, so more data behind the scenes, companies like Sift, for example. And then we added to our thesis sort of infrastructure and infrastructure investments included Twilio and MongoDB, Cloudflare, Stripe. There's a whole bunch of infrastructure investments, infrastructures for building digital businesses. Our current iteration, what we call thesis 3.0, is about broadening access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging existing networks and protocols and building trusted brands. And each part of that thesis actually means something very”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, it's no longer that. So, you know, Andrews and Horowitz has people on the ground here. So New York City is now today one of the epicenters. When we started, that wasn't the case. When we started, people were like, oh, there's been no tech company in New York City, there's been no IPO. Of course, you know, we were involved with two of the major IPOs. We led the CRSA and Etsy. I also led the CRSA. Square ventures led the CRSA and MongoDB, the big New York City-based success story. It was incredibly healthy, though, because we were never caught up in the, oh my God, FOMO of we have to have one of these or one of those and everybody else is investing in the sector. It was always a, let's form our own thesis. Let's figure out what we believe and let's find companies that fit with that. And we've always been extremely competitive in winning deals on the West Coast. I mean, Twilio, I led the series for Units Croventures, and it was a San Francisco-based company.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's also important to how the venture capital model works overall, right? So the most you can ever lose in venture capital is the amount of equity you've put in. But the upside is nearly limitless. I mean, it's what Nassim Taleb calls convicts tinkering, right? It's the perfect example of that. You take many small, relatively small positions in any one of them can become very, very large. But you also learn a lot from the things that don't work. Sometimes you learn a lot more from that than you learn from the ones that do succeed.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's an integral part of the business. And if you can't deal with failure, you can't be a VC because many of the startups you invest in fail.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that had really been my goal since my own first startup in 96, 97, which was a company called W3 Health that ultimately failed. From that experience, I realized that I really loved startups, but that I was never going to be a good operator. But I thought I could maybe be a decent investor.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were also acquired by It was a very, very lucky landing for Tumblr because Yahoo really was the only bidder and they were bidding against themselves. They didn't really know that.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I knew both Brad and Fred really well. And so it was kind of a natural thing to do. I did these angel investments. I led the Unix School of Interest investment in Etsy. I became a venture partner for that. And then became a GP in the 2008”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I had a little bit of money and I met Rob Kalin, the founder of Etsy. He had just come back from the West Coast. He had tried to raise money on the West Coast, was unsuccessful with that. And so I wrote an angel check here. And then I brought Union Square Ventures in as the first CRZ investor”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Delicious team was tiny, it was up 10 people, basically, and it was a very rapidly growing service. I made myself sufficiently unpopular during the acquisition because I insisted on certain things. I'm like, we're not doing this, we're not doing this, we're not doing this, that they, at the end, they were like, we want all of you except for this Winger guy. We don't want him, which was perfect for me, mind you, because I didn't want to relocate out to the West Coast. So I got to just take my marbles and start making angel investments.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was an early whip to a darling. Joshua Schachter had started, he was working in Morgan Stanley actually full-time and had started this as a side project. And it was kind of this idea that you would share your bookmarks with others because bookmarks were kind of an indication of something that was actually interesting on the internet. And Joshua added tax to that. And so you could browse things by tags. And at that time, Union Square Ventures, Fred and Brad, had started the firm. They had just raised the first fund. I had just finished another project I had been working on, and they were like, hey, we're talking to this guy, Joshua. What do you think? So I met up with Joshua. And they wound up investing and I wound up becoming the president.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was really fascinated with the web from when I first discovered it, which was in a computer lab at MIT while trying to do my stats homework.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, the web was really exploding while I was at MIT. And I actually finished my PhD in 99, but I started a company in late 96, early 97, and I was kind of doing the company and the thesis at the same time, which wasn't great for either and also wasn't great for our marriage. We kind of managed to get through that.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I fell in love with computers very early on when I was a young teenager. And my parents were super indulgent of this at a time when that was very unusual. And they bobbed me an early Apple II computer. One of the earliest Apple II's to be sold in Europe, actually. And I've stuck with that my entire life. I've studied computer sciences and undergraduate and as a graded student, and I've been investing in a lot of computer companies over the years. So it's been central to what I do and who I am.”
2022-09-16 · Masters in Business · Albert Wenger on Global Venture Capital Firms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source