Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based thesis-driven venture capital firm, where his investments have included Etsy, Twilio and MongoDB. Before joining USV, Albert was the President of del.icio.us from founding through the company’s sale to Yahoo. Albert graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. In his new book The World After Capital, Albert discusses how, “Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.” In this interview, I speak to Albert Wenger, Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures, about our shift from the industrial to the knowledge economy, and what that means for all of us.

Thought Economics

Free market capitalism is one of humanity’s greatest inventions and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But this success has been costly. Capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilising society as wealth rushes to the top. The time for action is running short. Rebecca Henderson is an economist, and one of the world’s most influential thinkers in economics, psychology, and organisational behaviour. She is the John & Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard and for more than thirty years, has worked with some of the world’s largest organisations around purpose-driven capitalism and the role that business leaders at every level can play in reimagining our current system. In her seminal book, Reimagining Capitalism, she debunks the worldview that the only purpose of business is to make money and maximise shareholder value. She shows that we have failed to reimagine capitalism so that it is not only an engine of prosperity but also a system that is in harmony with environmental realities, striving for social justice, and the demands of truly democratic institutions. In this exclusive interview, I spoke to Rebecca Henderson on whether our system of capitalism is broken and what can be done to re-imagine it for a better future.

Thought Economics

I meet Thor Björgólfsson, an Icelandic entrepreneur who made one of the greatest comebacks in modern entrepreneurial history- losing close to 100% of a $4 billion fortune, dusting himself off, starting again, and eventually re-joining the billionaire-class with a current fortune estimated (conservatively) at $2 billion.

Thought Economics

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