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Macron Wins in France: Time for an Independent / a New Party in the US?
Albert Wenger – May 8, 2017
I was happy to see Emmanuel Macron solidly defeat Marine LePen in yesterday’s French elections. What is most interesting about his victory is that he started his movement En Marche! only last year. The received wisdom in the United States [...] Read more
Matching Donations to Planned Parenthood
Albert Wenger – May 4, 2017
Today the House may be voting on an act that would have the effect of taking away access to healthcare for many Americans. If it passes that will happen through a variety of mechanisms which make care too expensive for [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Independence (Coin Flipping)
Albert Wenger – May 3, 2017
In the last two installments of Uncertainty Wednesday we looked at the concept of independence and concluded that it was actually quite a strong assumption. Now as one of the comments pointed out, independence is normally introduced in the context [...] Read more
May Day 2017: A New Social Contract with Basic Income
Albert Wenger – May 1, 2017
Last Friday morning I appeared on a panel about the future of work. This is of course a topic I have covered extensively here on Continuations and is a central subject of my draft book World After Capital. One of [...] Read more
Time to Explore Alternative Ownership Structures for Network Effects Businesses including Twitter
Albert Wenger – Apr 24, 2017
At Union Square Ventures, network effects have been central to our investment thesis for a decade. From an investor perspective network effects are one of the few, possibly the only, source of sustainable competitive advantage in a world where almost [...] Read more
Venture Capital is a Capacity Industry with Boom and Bust Cycles
Albert Wenger – Apr 21, 2017
A long time ago when I worked as a management consultant, I did a study for Lafarge which has a huge cement business. The study involved real sleuthing as we were trying to determine the operational capacity of cement plants [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Independence
Albert Wenger – Apr 19, 2017
Last week, I provided a recap of what we have covered so far in Uncertainty Wednesday. To go on from here we need to introduce some more concepts that are usually covered earlier but that I believe will make more [...] Read more
Copying and Competition in the Tech Industry
Albert Wenger – Apr 14, 2017
Yesterday Instagram announced that it has 200 million users for stories, which exceeds Snapchat’s 160 million users from their S-1 filing. Never mind that nobody outside these companies knows what those user definitions really mean or how to compare them. [...] Read more
goTenna
Albert Wenger – Apr 13, 2017
Disruptive innovations often start out as worse versions of something that already exists. Worse along all dimensions except for one, but one that turns out to really matter because it unlocks a new use case for which the incumbent does not work at all or is not affordable. The PC was slower, had less memory and less storage than a minicomputer. But it was massively more affordable and could be set up and run without the help of the centralized IT department ... Read more