Words matter. These are the best Fred Wilson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It’s Web services.
When there were not very many Internet companies, the supply of Internet companies to the market was small and the appetite for them was large. Therefore, if you were in the business of creating Internet companies in 1996-98, you had a market that provided massive demand for that.
It’s not easy for an entrepreneur to find the time to blog. But for those who do it, it is a great tool to communicate with the various stakeholders in their business and build a reputation for thought leadership.
Blog-based businesses have lower cost structures and are more ‘authentic,’ and as a result are drawing larger shares of ad budgets.
Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.
The companies that do the best job on managing a user’s privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful.
It’s upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend’s start-up.
Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.
All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.
I’m really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity, and knowledge.
The venture business is a bit of an apprenticeship business, so the firm I worked for didn’t let me make an investment until I was 30. That was probably a very smart thing.
The best talent in the venture industry doesn’t work in large companies and won’t work in large companies.
Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.
When my dad was in Vietnam, we lost a parent for a year. Thank God we didn’t lose a parent for good.
Given New York City’s cultural diversity, it has always attracted creative people.
The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.
Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.
The Web is going to capture an increasing share of people’s attention, and billions of dollars are going to flow in. What Web 2.0 is about is harnessing those dollars in highly leverageable ways.
Twitter wasn’t planned. It just happened.
I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world.
Yahoo is free, it’s fast and it’s Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.
When people laugh at a company or say, ‘This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,’ you are listening.
Not only do you have to put yourself in harms way in service of your country, you have to leave your families at home. It is a great sacrifice.
To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.
People already love to play casual games. But when you take a casual game and stick it inside a social network, it becomes way more exciting.
Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren’t getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.
Money is information, like bits.
If you have a native monetization system where the atomic unit of content is the ad unit, that scales down all the way to a small screen experience. That’s why Twitter is performing so well on mobile.
If you are successful, you will be cloned. That’s life. In fact, it’s a sign that you’ve made it when clones of your website, mobile app, and business start cropping up.
Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it.
I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so, if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.
We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.
Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute.
