Writing
Choose
Foursquare: Personalized Recommendations Unleashed
Albert Wenger – Aug 6, 2014
Today’s release of the latest version of Foursquare has me super excited. It puts together all of the data and capabilities the team there has built over the last five years to provide the best local recommendations: based on lots [...] Read more
It is OK to Worry about Work (& Doesn’t Make you a Luddite or Socialist)
Albert Wenger – Aug 4, 2014
In venture capital we come across startups all the time that are building something that has been tried in the past and failed. It would be very easy to dismiss these opportunities based on a naive “pattern matching” approach to [...] Read more
The Unbundling of Scale
Albert Wenger – Jul 30, 2014
During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large [...] Read more
Strong AI: Employment Impact Doesn’t Depend on “How” Computers Think
Albert Wenger – Jul 28, 2014
There was a fun Twitter convo about strong AI between Patrick Collison and Marc Andreessen. I also love speculating about this topic but before I engage in that I want to point out that from an employment perspective this is [...] Read more
Is it 1880 or 1914?
Albert Wenger – Jul 23, 2014
I haven’t been posting much the last couple of weeks. There are a variety of reasons for that including spending extra time reading and learning new things but the main reason is that I am trying to understand better where [...] Read more
Looking for a Personal Assistant
Albert Wenger – Jul 21, 2014
Susan and I are looking for a personal assistant to help with many different organizational tasks. If you know someone who might be interested, please point them to our Craigslist ad. We built a simple video application process using Ziggeo [...] Read more
CPU and Memory are the New Crude Oil
Albert Wenger – Jul 15, 2014
The definition of a commodity is a good that is “supplied without qualitative differentiation." You can’t charge more than others for crude oil, you have to turn it at least into gasoline. And if you really want to charge a [...] Read more
SeeChange: Video Will Be Everywhere (What Do We Want?)
Albert Wenger – Jul 14, 2014
I recently finished Dave Eggers’s “The Circle” which provided a good challenge to my baseline view that more transparency is good and that data protection is a futile effort. One of the systems in the novel is an easy to [...] Read more
More On Basic Income (and Robots)
Albert Wenger – Jul 7, 2014
Marc Andreessen recently wrote a post titled “This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs …” – like all of Marc’s posts it is full of good ideas and worth [...] Read more