Fred wilson vc biography

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American venture capitalist and blogger

Fred Wilson (born August 20, 1961) is an American businessman, venture capitalist and blogger. Wilson is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, Etsy and MongoDB.

Career

Fred Wilson began his career as an associate and then became a General Partner at Euclid Partners. He worked at Euclid Partners from 1987 to 1996.

In 1996 Wilson and Jerry Colonna began Flatiron Partners, which was named after the Flatiron District. Based in New York City, it grew into an investment fund that focused primarily on follow-on investing, with investments in notable dot-com bubble successes and failures, including Alacra, comScore Networks, Yoyodyne, Geocities, Kozmo.com, The New York Times Digital, PlanetOut, Return Path, Scout electromedia, Standard Media International, Starmedia, Favemail, and VitaminShoppe.com. The firm's 1996 fund capitalized at $150 million with two investors: SOFTBANK Technology Ventures and Chase Capital Partners, the private-equity arm of Chase Manhattan Corp. The firm later raised another fund capitalized at $500 million with Chase Capital Partners as the sole active LP. In 2001 Wilson and Colonna shut down Flatiron.

In 2004 Wilson and Brad Burnham founded Union Square Ventures. TheFunded.com, a social networking site for technology entrepreneurs, rated him their favorite venture capitalist in 2007.

Wilson was a judge for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC BigApps competition in NYC.

Blogging

Wilson publishes a blog called AVC: musings of a VC in NYC. Wilson publishes one post per day, usually on a topic related to venture capital entrepreneurship or the Internet.

Personal life

Wilson

In twenty years of covering the startup industry, this may be a first: A top VC advises people don’t follow in his footsteps. Specifically, Union Square Ventures Fred Wilson talks about his route to venture capital and how he succeeded by timing, luck, and taking longer to learn parts of the business than he may have if he’d had operating experiences.

He also talks about the ascendancy of the New York ecosystem, as a man with one of the most valuable front row seats. We talked about the ups and downs of several of his largest investments, including Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Zynga, and he addresses the dangers of a lot of corporate venture capital groups… and putting too much time in building hype.

Fred Wilson: I was a slow starter. It took me at least 10 years to become halfway decent at venture capital. I made the mistake of getting into the venture capital business at a young age, which I think is a terrible idea. I think the venture capital business is an old man’s or an old woman’s business.

I think that when you’re young you should be building companies, and building products, and actually making something. I made the mistake of getting into an old person’s business at a young age, and it took me a long time to even have any idea about what I was doing.

I also made the mistake of not working in industry, so I didn’t come into the business with any relationships, any contacts. I didn’t know any industry sectors all that well, and I got lucky because after being in the business for about 10 years, really getting nowhere, the Internet came along.

I was just at the point where I knew enough about the venture capital business, had been hanging around the business, that I knew how to find a deal, convince an entrepreneur to take some money from me, and nobody knew anything about the Internet business in 1994. There wasn’t an Internet business in 1994.

My strategy was, let’s invest in anything that says the word Internet on it.

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We caught up with Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures (see bio, scroll down) who writes A VC, one of the more engaging venture capital blogs out there. Fred provides an entertaining discussion of the technology landscape, venture capital issues and music recommendations. It is the most-read VC blog, excepting perhaps Guy Kawasaki’s, which covers more general venture capital issues.

SiliconBeat: What time of day do you blog?

Fred: I generally blog between 5:30am and 7am. I will from time to time add something during the day, but for the most part blogging is an early morning activity for me.

SiliconBeat: Does it make you feel tired later in the day at your day job, and if so, how do you handle that fatigue?

Fred: I’ve been getting up early ever since I had kids. I’ve just replaced email time with blogging time. I do get a bit tired mid/late afternoon so Charlie and I usually make a Jamba Juice run at that time.

SiliconBeat: How do you explain to investors in your firm that the blog is a net positive for them?

Fred: I’ve been blogging for longer than Union Square Ventures has been in business and I was actively blogging throughout the entire fundraising process (but not blogging about the fundraising process – the lawyers made sure of that). So the LPs have known about my blogging before they made a commitment to our fund. That said, we have talked about blogging with our LPs as we also have an active Union Square Ventures blog at www.unionsquareventures.com where Brad and I both post. We believe it serves a number of important functions, including getting the word out about what we are interested in which brings deals in and also acts as a filter on deals we wouldn’t be interested in. It also raises the profile of our firm which is generally a good thing. And we can help our portfolio companies get the word out about their activities. And I also think it makes us more approacha