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The Open Web is Under Attack
Albert Wenger – Nov 17, 2009
Yesterday, Tim O'Reilly published a provocatively titled post: “The War for the Web." In it he discusses the dangers to the web as an open platform from the attempts by the biggest players to own more and more of the [...] Read more
Content Capital
Albert Wenger – Nov 16, 2009
Had a great discussion at dinner last night about the future of publishing and the role of authors and agents. My believe is that agents have to start providing content capital. The idea behind content capital is pretty much the [...] Read more
Hiring: Lack of Diversity Becomes Self-Reinforcing
Albert Wenger – Nov 13, 2009
The first startup I was involved with was a management consulting company in Germany. I had been out of college for less than a year when I joined four much more experienced guys in forming Bossard Consultants Germany (some initial [...] Read more
Achieving Excess Returns
Albert Wenger – Nov 11, 2009
One of the persistent questions for anyone investing money (whether in the public or private markets) is how to achieve excess returns. I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the last weeks as we have prepared for [...] Read more
Welcoming Founders Collective
Albert Wenger – Nov 10, 2009
Yesterday, Chris Dixon announced on his blog (http://cdixon.org) the formation of Founders Collective, a $40 million seed stage fund. I have known about Founders Collective for some time and am excited about the launch. I have written on several previous [...] Read more
Launching a New Site for Union Square Ventures
Albert Wenger – Nov 9, 2009
This morning we have launched the new web site for Union Square Ventures at usv.com. We are very excited about all the dynamic elements on the site. For instance, if you visit the page for a portfolio company such as [...] Read more
Network Effects And Scale Economies (aka Spolsky vs. Heinemeier)
Albert Wenger – Nov 5, 2009
David Heinemeier at 37signals published a post titled “Bug tracking isn’t a network-effect business” in response to a piece by Joel Spolsky in Inc. asking “Does Slow Growth Equal Death?" Heinemeier’s post is a possibly intentional misreading of Spolky’s so [...] Read more
ad:tech Panel On State of Digital Economy
Albert Wenger – Nov 4, 2009
I will be participating in an ad:tech panel this afternoon with the title “Digital Economy 2010: A Robust Recovery or Another Year of Trench Warfare?" I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what that means, but in [...] Read more
Unemployment and Structural Change
Albert Wenger – Nov 3, 2009
It is likely that the unemployment rate is going to hit 10 percent when the next monthly report comes out on Friday. That is 1 in 10 people without a job (in fact it is worse because the official statistics [...] Read more