The title of this post is a line in a Damon Gough (aka Badly Drawn Boy) song that I heard on my bike ride this morning. You can click on the black banner at the bottom of the screen and hear it play while you read this. And it took [...]

Fred, for the Crunchbase link via SMS, text "cbsms tumblr" OR "cbsms fred wilson" to 41411. The SMS bot will send you a link to the most relevant page on Crunchbase for any search term that follows "cbsms" (Crunchbase SMS)... companies, people, financial institutions, whatever. Russell, very cool! I'm not [...]

Yesterday I posted about youth and inexperience. Today I am going to post about getting old. Because I am 47 today and getting close to the age where I have always thought venture capitalists start to fade. I got into this business young, too young. And so as a young [...]

There was a set of map charts on some popular blog this week that showed how 'geeky' your web service is. The more its users were centered around silicon valley, the more geeky your web service is. Of course this is the fear we who invest in leading edge web [...]

“ Emerging technologies that threaten to destroy the current paradigm can have precisely the opposite effect. Remember when VCRs and then DVDs were going to lay waste to the movie industry and ended up saving it instead? The Web leaks of entertainment that NBC bought and paid for served as [...]

Seedcamp London is europe's closest thing to YCombinator and similar programs here in the states (funny to say that because I am writing this in St Andrews University in Scotland). The deadline for applying to this fall's Seedcamp London program is this coming Sunday, August 10th. If you want to [...]

It always amuses me that our portfolio company Zynga got its start with Poker. Because as I always tell Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, he's playing this hand pretty well. And Mark seems to like the hand he's got right now because Zynga has just raised the stakes [...]

Ballou Pont Party Originally uploaded by fredwilson. I got my start in the venture business with a summer job in 1986. Back then the way you got in to see a VC was you sent (via mail) a business plan. It was read (often by me) and if it met [...]

Last week I attended Open Coffee in Paris where I met a bunch of interesting entrepreneurs. I also met the people who run a PR firm in Paris called Ballou PR. They asked me to do a full day “speed dating” session and a Pont Party during my time in [...]

If you asked me who my inspirations were when I started to blog, they would have been: Seth Godin - because his blog was my favorite read at the time (and still is in my top 10)Dave Winer - because Scripting News was the first blog I ever read (when [...]

I read a comment on my “Looking For Inspiration” post this morning that suggested I was just getting bored with Web 2.0 like many others. It’s something I’ve considered a lot lately. I am certainly not bored with the investments we have made at Union Square Ventures and many of [...]

I need to start this post with an important disclosure. I was on the Board of ComScore for nine years from the summer of 1999 until earlier this month. And I am still a shareholder in ComScore through the Flatiron partnerships. In no way is this post intended as a [...]

Image via Wikipedia One of my favorite VC quotes comes from Bill Kaiser of Greylock. He once said, "when I hear about a company once, I often ignore it, when I hear about it twice, I pay attention, when I hear about it for the third time, I take a [...]

A recent commenter suggested that I blog about the post-MBA experience I had when I got into the venture capital business. This is my version of the story and I'll make it as brief as I can. There are several lessons to take away from it. I'll get to them [...]

When I think about the venture capital business, I think about risk. It's one of the riskiest investment types there is. But as they teach you in business school, risk and return are highly correlated over the long haul. What we want to do in the venture capital business is [...]

I've been reading Creative Capital, the biography of General Georges Doriot, Harvard Business School professor and President of American Research and Development (ARD), the first institutional venture capital firm. I came across some words of wisdom that he imparted to his business school students and I think they are wonderful. [...]

One of the many great things about using a third party comment system is you can hang a single comment thread off of as many posts as you want. That's what's going on right now on this blog and Alley Insider. I have an understanding with a number of blogs [...]

In the fall of 2006, Business 2.0 asked me to write a short post about how blogging can build your business. It ran in the December 2006 issue in a story called "How To Succeed In 2007". Alex Hammer sent me a copy of that article this week and it [...]

So much of the news in the tech world this morning is about old news, Yahoo!, CNET, Plaxo. I suggest you ignore all of that and focus on what went on last night in San Jose at the annual Churchill Club Dinner. Some of the smartest minds in the venture [...]

First, let me say that I am not sure about the utility of video comments. I've seen them and even viewed them on Techcrunch and I think they slow down and break up the conversation more than they contribute to it. But I also firmly believe in trying everything at [...]

First, I'd like to be perfectly clear that our firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Disqus. So I am clearly biased about what I am about to say. Second, I'd like to point out that the reason we made the investment is largely based on my experience as [...]

I know that I have that urge all the time. I will not reveal the guilty parties. In fact, I may be guilty myself of over twittering. In any case, here's a cool twitter app built by Union Square Ventures' very own Andrew Parker. He calls it TwitterSnooze. Go ahead [...]

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham has penned another one of his essays, this time tackling not one but two issues in it. The first is why the best Internet companies are not sold (think eBay, Google, Facebook). Paul's argument is simple; they would have sold but nobody offered them a [...]

Most readers of this blog know what Y Combinator is. Hell, last month two of the top five referrers were affiliated with Y Combinator. But for those who don't know, Y Combinator was started by Paul Graham and now runs two programs a year in which about twenty teams (each [...]

I've written a bunch about Covestor and I have this widget on my right sidebar that shows how my public stock portfolio is doing (not well). As is sometimes the case with things I post about on this blog, our firm Union Square Ventures has become an investor in Covestor. [...]