Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, and you're listening to Recode Media with Peter Kafka, powered by digital media.

Before we launch Recode Media as its own podcast, you may have heard Peter over at my podcast, Recode Decode.

Here's one of the fantastic interviews he did for Decode. Let's listen.

Recode Radio presents Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, powered by digital media.

Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about tech and media's key players, big ideas, and how they're changing the world we live in.

This is our special weekly segment

with host Peter Kafka, Recode's senior editor and producer at the Code Media Conference. Joining

Peter each week are some of his favorite movers and shakers in the media world. Peter,

who would you chat with in the media world this week? This week I talked to Albert Venger,

who's an investor at Union Square Ventures, which is well known for investing in properties like Twitter, Tumblr. Albert's invested in For Square and some other interesting businesses. And also he's got a very interesting perspective on the way that venture capital should work and how companies should structure themselves. And if that sounds sort of esoteric, he explains it in a much more coherent version than I'm doing right now. So he's a coherent venture capitalist? He's a coherent and thoughtful venture capitalist.

That's unusual.

Yeah.

It's like a unicorn.

That's why we're talking to him.

All right then.

Hi, I'm Peter Kafka, and I have a really cool job. I get to talk to smart people and then try to pass their thoughts off as my own. And what I thought I did today is sort of skip that step and just bring a smart person on directly to talk to you guys.

Meet Albert Wenger, and you are a partner at Union Square Ventures.

That's right.

That's right. skip that step and just bring a smart person on directly to talk to you guys. Meet Albert Wenger, and you are a partner at Union Square Ventures. One of the best known venture firms, I think, in the last few years. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. I got a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about, and one of the reasons I wanted to have you here is I had a really interesting discussion with you in Dublin. There's a lot of wine involved, and you have a take that's very different than a lot of venture capitalists that I talk to. But I do want to ask you some things that I think are the same questions. I would ask a normal VC, which is, what's it like investing venture money in late 2015 when we've had this, is there a bubble, is there not a bubble discussion for what seems now like years? Well, I've called it a bulge recently. I think if you think of a bubble, you think of something that can pop, sort of explosively disappear. I think that's what we had in the first bubble.

And it happens with pretty much every big technological change. You get a very quick, fast run-up in stock prices, and then you get

sort of a bursting of that bubble, and then you get a much longer period where that technology

actually has its long-term impact on society. And we're in that much longer period. And that sort of pattern,

...