Fred Wilson

The headline news is we have filled the gas tank again at USV and this tank is bigger. But scroll down to see the four areas we want to invest these funds into.

We listened to this conversation between @uninsightful and me this morning on a long drive. It was recorded at the USV CEO Summit right after Labor Day. It's a cross between Nikhil interviewing me and the two of us taking about the state of the VC business in 2026. Lots of gems

Agentic investing just got an exciting new entrant called @supertake created by @mignano and incubated by @usv. The wait-list is at https://t.co/T8FHL4keE9.

I took a walk around the Union Square neighborhood a couple of Fridays ago with our new partner @mignano and we recorded it so everyone can listen to our conversation. We talked about the past, present, and future of startups, VC, and NYC.

@getcode Pls connect my Twitter account CodeAccount:6Cf4VzvXs2G25RqjXe4XGmpPKiet8Ru2kZ19fWS1YWPg:F7i7uZqVrNXu6LjkjriE1w:5gcq7Jp1psQguvpBXgh82oi6XKf7JrTnZDqmig2Z4qtiPUWpjnrLFZ5tKAQA77QoEk1JpxYrJi5326HvVq9AAxBN

It’s A Wrap

The Gotham Gal ends 2013 looking into the future and thinking about how her porfolio companies will grow next year. I am similarly minded as we wrap 2013. I am excited about 2014, and in particular the big opportunities that await many of our portfolio companies.  I/we have a view about what is coming and I tried to lay that out at LeWeb earlier this month. We continue to look for investments in companies that fit into that view of the world. But for me, it is the development of the companies we have already invested in that is always the most interesting work. And there are a bunch of them that are poised to have very big years in 2014 so …

Traffic

Benedict Evans wrote a post about his traffic recently and I am proud that AVC is one of his top ten referrers. That inspired me to post some traffic data here today. I've had google analytics on this blog since Oct 2005 and here's what the monthly traffic has looked like since then: I feel like the AVC audince has been stable (or flat) since 2010. The peak in the middle of 2011 was from stumbleupon which was for some reason sending a boatload of traffic here for a while. That has since gone away and we are generally at about 250,000 visits per month. The UV chart looks almost identical to visits except it's about 175,000 UVs per month vs 2…

Girls Who Code

I feel badly for Paul Graham because he's being made out to be something I am sure he is not. But the brouhaha that he unleashed about women founders, women coders, and women hackers is a good thing because we ought to be having a broader conversation about these issues. Paul asks "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?" and that is a damn good question and one that I have been thinking about a lot over the past four years. We see very few women entrepreneurs walk into USV and that is disappointing to me. And I agree with Paul that one of the issues (but by no means the only issue) causing this gap, is …

Video of the Week: Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen

By any measure, 2013 will go down as the year we all saw the dark side of the Internet revolution, courtesy of Edward Snowden. So I think it’s fitting to showcase Eben Moglen’s conversation with Bruce Schneier as the final video of the week of 2013. This is long (90mins) but worth watching. Eben and Bruce are two of the leading intellectuals on the important subjects of trust, identity, privacy, and the Internet.

The Purity Of Angel Investing

Though I have made a few angel investments here and there over the years, it has never been my primary approach to investing in startups. I joined a venture capital firm when I was 25 years old and have been working at a venture capital firm ever since. I grew up in the business of investing other people's money and that is how I have gone about investing in startups ever since. Over the past five years, I have watched The Gotham Gal build a portfolio of angel investments. She has invested in almost fifty companies in the past five years and if you include things like restaurants and retail establishments, that number grows to closer to sixt…

On The Beach

A belated Merry Christmas to everyone. We spent yesterday in transit and I did not have time to write a post wishing everyone season's greetings. We did our Christmas a day early on Christmas Eve (borrowing a bit from a Wilson family tradition of opening one gift on Christmas Eve) and then caught an early flight to Mexico where we are on the beach until New Year's.  I will be taking it easy, reading a lot, and likely writing a bit too. It is the time of year to kick back and relax and I am doing just that.

Guest Post: Nick Grossman – Winning on Trust

This is a post Nick did around his User First keynote. It’s great and I wanted to feature it to the AVC community today. The comments thread at the end is also running on Nick’s blog and at usv.com so you will see commingled comments from all three places. —————————————————– “It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.” — Joseph Stiglitz, In No One We Trust The week before last, I visited Yahoo! to give the keynote talk at their User First conference, which brought together big companies (Google, Facebook, etc), startups (big ones like USV portfolio company CloudFlare and lots of way smaller ones), academics, and digital …

A New Look For 2014

I have been unhappy with the way this blog looks for a while. I've fallen into my typical habit of putting too many widgets on it and messing things up. I have also discovered that the layout of the blog is making disqus work more poorly on mobile than it should. Many of you have run into problems commenting on mobile and it's likely that is my fault, not disqus' fault. I also want to do an even better job of optimizing the blog for reading on phones and tablets. That was the goal of the last redesign, which we did in the spring of 2010, but a lot has changed with responsive design since then and we are going to leverage all of that to make A…

Founders and CEOs

I watched the Steve Jobs movie with Ashton Kutcher last night on the flight to Salt Lake City. It wasn't great to be honest but the board room scences with Jobs, Markkula, and Arthur Rock (and later on John Sculley) were pretty compelling.  Having been through some of that myself over the years, I winced when Arthur Rock came down hard on Jobs and was depicted as a patronizing father figure. Mike Markkula got much better treatment and came across as the good guy who tried to to the right thing by Jobs.  The pivotal scene in which Sculley decides he can't do the CEO job effectively with Steve Jobs in the company and asks for a board vote to …

Video Of The Week: The Nexus Wireless Charger

A few weeks ago, I got a Nexus Wireless Charger and put it on the shelf next to our front door where I leave my phone to charge when I get home. It worked so well and I like it so much that I got another one for our family room to charge the Nexus 7 that we use to control our audio and video in our home. I set it up this morning and I think I have now solved the problem of having the tablet run out of power because my kids don't plug it in. Now all they have to do is place the tablet on the little pad on the family room side table each night after they turn off the TV.  So I thought I would share a video with all of you that shows how this …

Fun Friday: My Favorite Songs Of 2013

As promised in last friday's post, I am going to share with all of you my favorite songs of 2013. This list is a mix of indie, pop, and hiphop. That's what I listen to. There are 17 songs on it – one cover, and sixten originals. The record of the year for me was the Arctic Monkey's AM and there are two songs on here from it and we kick it off with a Drake cover from Alex. And in another homage to the boys from Sheffield, it is called Mad Sounds of 2013. Enjoy.

Markets and Clearing Prices

Last saturday night in NYC was a bit of a moment for Uber and their surge pricing mechanic. Most people were seeing 3x-5x in manhattan for most of the night and there were reports of 10x for some people. There was a snowstorm, people were out at holiday parties, and there was more demand for rides than there were cabs. So in some sense the market worked and rides went to those who were willing to pay the most for them. The next day Mo Koyman tweeted about it and one of the larger twitter conversations I have seen developed. .@uber is loved by customers, but charging 4x – 8x in inclement weather is unacceptable. is that one day's margin > c…

Crowdfunding Brooklyn Castle: An Update

I woke up to this email: Hi Fred,This weekend our team traveled to Florida to compete in the National Grade Chess Championships.We won!Our sixth graders and our seventh graders each won the team championships after three grueling days of seven games each of which could last up to three hours.Thank you for your support!here is a link to a little video the kids made today…sorry to say i am better at chess that video production..if the kids look exhausted it is because we arrived back in NY at 1 am last night.https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10202014393592894&l=6816040591261209313Thanks!JG To everyone in the AVC community who contributed t…

Targetspot and Radionomy

Yesterday we announced a deal that I have been working on for the past three months. Our portfolio company Targetspot has merged with Radionomy, the leading streaming radio company in Europe. The combination creates the largest global audio ad network and brings Radionomy to the US. It also gives the Targestpot network an anchor tenant that will make it easier to do sophisticated targeting campaigns that require both scale and reach. Advertisers can now leverage the capabilities of a digital audio network with reach to over 75M listeners and more than 80 publishers in both the U.S. and Europe. The streaming audio business has gone mainstrea…

Taking To Dos and Moving Up The Y Axis

I chromecasted the kitchen laptop to our family room TV yesterday morning and watched the entire Sarah Lacy interview with Dick Costolo. Yes, I had posted it as the video of the week without watching it in its entirety. But I knew it would be good. And it was. All two plus hours of it. Dick has this management framework that I've heard him talk about before. He and Sarah talked about it in the Pando talk. It goes something like this: If you think about what you are trying to accomplish in a meeting with someone you are managing and you plot the following: one the x axis – whether you clearly communicated the issue to the person on the y a…

The Smartphone As A Wallet

Last night the Gotham Gal and I went out with a bunch of friends. We met at a restaurant on the upper east side that had recently opened. It was snowing pretty heavily all day yesterday and we were worried about getting a cab on the street. So as we were getting ready to leave, I hailed a cab on my smartphone so that it would pull up in front of our apartment building. The car came more quickly than I thought it would and we scrambled out of the apartment and got in the car and headed uptown. When we arrived at the restaurant, I realized that I had left my wallet in the apartment. Because the cab was paid for on my phone, the driver had been…

Video Of The Week: Sarah Lacy’s Interview With Dick Costolo

Sarah Lacy is a good interviewer. I've been on the other side of her questions. She is direct and doesn't avoid the hard questions. This week she had Twitter CEO Dick Costolo on Pando Monthly. Here is the full interview If you don't have 90 minutes to watch this whole thing, some there are some short blurbs up on Pando's channel on YouTube.

Fun Friday: Year End Lists

It's been a month since we've done a fun friday around here. Getting much too serious it seems. So let's do one today. It's year end and time for year end lists. Here are some that I saw and liked: The New Yorker's Best Books of 2013, Part 1 The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2013 The New Yorker Best Movies of 2013 Cliff Chenfeld's Music Picks for 2013 Kirk Love's Top 10 Albums and Songs for 2013 works in progress: my songs of the year (i will publish this at some point in the next week) Brian's best of 2013 Ok, that's enough from me. Please share your favorite year end lists in the comments.

The Limits of Capitalism

I am a capitalist. Contrary to the occasional community members who call me a socialist or a techno communist, I believe wholeheartedly in the power of markets to efficently determine what's best in most cases. But I am not an absolute capitalist. I believe that markets do break down from time to time and we need to recognize when those things happen and do something about it. The labor movement, when it was not corrupt for the most part, is an example of a societal response to a market breakdown. When we stare into the future, we see that our cars will not have drivers. We see that the stuff we buy from Amazon will be delivered by drones. …

My Talk At LeWeb Yesterday

I'm back in the states this morning and up early (jet lag). The main purpose of my trip was to give a talk at LeWeb, which I did yesterday morning. Loic asked me to talk about the next ten years and what is going to happen. That's a big ask and so I dodged it a bit and instead talked about the framework we use to try to predict the future. I talked about three big trends (networks, unbundling, and smartphones) and four areas to watch (bitcoin, wellness, data leakage, and trust/identity). The talk is 25 minutes with a brief Q&A with Loic at the end.

Hour Of Code

This is CS Ed Week and this year we are celebrating it with an Hour Of Code. The idea is to get every student to spend an hour this week writing code.  If you want to do this with your kids (at home or in school), here are some resources to try: The Codecademy Hour of Code iPhone app - download this on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and learn the basics of coding in an hour. As many of you know, Codecademy is a USV portfolio company and millions of people have used Codecademy to start learning to code. Code.org – Code.org has built tutorials for teachers who want to do an hour of code in their classrooms. Code.org is a non-profit dedicated…

The Government Surveillance Letter

Note: The website this post is about is now down. I am not sure if that means this thing was a hoax or something along those lines. Regardless, I believe the sentiments expressed on the website are correct and that Internet companies, large and small, should ban together to express them. Sometime last night, a letter to the President of the United States and Congress was published on the Internet. It was signed by eight of the largest Internet companies; Apple, AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo! The website where the letter is hosted outlines five principles for government surveiilance: 1) sensible limitations…

Mobile Shopping

I've been doing some holiday shopping. I like to do all my shopping online. I don't really enjoy being in stores and I like the convenience of having the items delivered to me. This holiday season, I've been trying to shop more on mobile, both phone and tablet. I am doing this partly because I want to see what the experience is like and partly because as I spend more time shopping on mobile, I realize it's easier in some ways. It feels to me that as a reaction to the shrinking real estate that is available in mobile, particularly phones, designers have made the user experiences simpler and more intelligent. Features that were smart on the w…

Some New Features on USV.com

I am taking a break from video of the week this weekend to talk about the work of Kevin Marshall and Nick Grossman on USV.com. After the USV team built and launched USV.com, Nick and Kevin did a rewrite of the core web app and then open sourced it. Since then, they and others have been iterating on the open source code base and they have implemented a bunch of new features which launched yesterday. Many of these features are ones that I have been begging for and ones that members of the AVC community have been asking for. Kevin lays out a list of the big ones in a blog post he wrote this morning. First of all, we believe we have gotten integ…

Feature Friday: Personal Hangouts

I have had a personal conference calling bridge number since the mid 90s. I know the number by heart. I give it out all the time via email, text, and kik. It does not require a participant code. When I type my host code, we are all connected. I have not found a better model for voice conference calls in the almost twenty years I have been using this number. But more and more I am doing hangouts instead of calls. And I want the same experience for hangouts. It used to be possible to get a "static URL" for a Google Hangout but this feature was dropped at some point. You can get a permalink for an event but it ends on the date of the event. Wh…