Lauren Wagner

Entrepreneur, 2022-2023 Berggruen Fellow

Lauren Wagner is a Principal at Link Ventures where she invests in early-stage technology startups. She previously worked at Meta and Google in their New York and Bay Area offices bringing new products to market. At Meta, Lauren led product strategy and market adoption for the company’s transparency efforts. She developed the first APIs and data-sets for academics, which includes the largest study examining the impact of Facebook on the U.S. 2020 elections. Lauren also developed tools designed to counter misinformation, including fact-checking and crowdsourced content moderation. She spent 10 years prior to this at Google working on artificial intelligence, and with venture-backed startups and multinationals. Lauren holds a Master’s in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford, as well as a Master’s and Bachelor of Science from Cornell University. As a Berggruen Fellow, she will be researching the ‘Trust and Safety’ industry – people who ensure that users trust platforms and feel safe using them – to expand the dialogue around how to mitigate online harms and train the next generation of technologists to consider both the private and societal impact of their work.