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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
Programmer-Archeologists Needed
Albert Wenger – Nov 2, 2009
I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over [...] Read more
One Truth About Technology Architecture: Loose Coupling
Albert Wenger – Oct 30, 2009
One of the great things about being focused on investing in web services is that the technical challenges faced by almost all of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio tend to be the same. The solutions on the [...] Read more