F
Fred Wilson
avc.blogs.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2006
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, writes about startups, investing, and the venture industry.
What HN saysHN commenters call his posts brilliant, quote his advice to look for great judgment and ethics, and link his piece on the 'calling in rich' VC cliché.
67HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
143stories submitted
1.3Kstory points
13 years agolast shared
2006people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Where To Go For Inspiration?2 people · 12 points · first shared 2008 · 1 comments on HN
- 2A VC: If You Are Looking For Something More Entrepreneurial2 people · 10 points · first shared 2008 · 4 comments on HN
- 3Battening Down The Hatches2 people · 4 points · first shared 2008 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Fred Wilson: Social Blogging (more "lightweight, social, and interactive" than just blogging)2 people · 2 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 5Our run in with2 people · first shared 2008
- 6Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?1 people · 47 points · first shared 2008 · 23 comments on HN
- 7We Need A New Path To Liquidity1 people · 46 points · first shared 2008 · 16 comments on HN
- 8I Got Lucky1 people · 45 points · first shared 2008 · 13 comments on HN
- 9Venture Fund Economics: Gross and Net Returns1 people · 41 points · first shared 2008 · 3 comments on HN
- 10Venture Fund Economics1 people · 36 points · first shared 2008 · 3 comments on HN
- 11Three Reasons To Use Disqus1 people · 35 points · first shared 2008 · 24 comments on HN
- 12Fred Wilson: Saying No1 people · 34 points · first shared 2007 · 14 comments on HN
- 13Incenting The User To Put Up A Profile Picture1 people · 34 points · first shared 2008 · 22 comments on HN
- 14A VC: The Fiction of 20%1 people · 33 points · first shared 2007 · 3 comments on HN
- 15Ten questions about entrepreneurs1 people · 33 points · first shared 2008 · 10 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
colortone · 2007-09-17
I thought this was absolutely brilliant.
There's a great discussion of it brewing at http://avc.blogs.com
gordonbowman · 2011-12-06
Great post on an important topic. I also like Fred Wilson's advice:
"Above all else, look for great judgment and ethics."
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/02/thoughts-on-cho.html
david927 · 2008-04-14
I agree that if you're starting a new venture and you don't have optimism, you won't get anywhere. But if you also hide from reality, you're toast as well. This stuff isn't from 'sky is falling' kooks -- it's from Warren Buffet and Jim Rogers and Paul Krugman... a long list of the great financial and economic minds. Here it's Soros. But they'll all be ignored until it's too late. People don't want bad news, just good news.
In my mind, that's why this is, actually, hacker news. A start up is a little boat. We need to know when the storm is coming earlier than others and take action:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/battening-down.html
merrick · 2013-08-08
I found the series of articles as a whole to be an enlightening account from the perspective of a restaurateur who tried new things in San Diego.
This was Part of 5 of a series that begins here:
http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant…
Prior to this aside from being a patron of restaurants my only knowledge of the restaurant biz was based on Setting the Table which Fred Wilson blogged about here:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/setting_the_tab.html
theorique · 2012-05-19
People call it "calling in rich".
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/07/vc_clich_of_the_3.html
dpapathanasiou · 2008-05-19
Have you seen this: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/05/if-you-are-look.html ?
far33d · 2008-01-31
That would be very cool... I've read that scanning regular barcodes with a cameraphone is difficult, but I believe there are some people making headway with it.
If it were music, I'd rather just make a call to a number, have it listen to whatever song is in the background, and then download it for me.
Fred Wilson has talked about txt based commerce a bit as well - http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/01/texting-in-purc.html
augy · 2007-09-25
Fred says the 10billion is not real
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/09/facebook-really.html
Alex3917 · 2007-03-25
Also, I'm not sure how thrilled the seduction community and NLP community will be that all of their books are now online. I don't normally advocate piracy, but I think this is a really unique opportunity for grokking Net Natives circa 2007.
(Net Natives as used by Fred Wilson: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/06/net_natives.html)
update: When I say it's a unique opportunity for grokking net natives, I mean this in the same sense as when Paul Kedrosky blogged that the Amazon top 100 products list is more telling than the Ph.D. dissertation of the average would-be historian.
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/12/27/top_sellers_at.html
vonmoltke · 2012-09-25
From Fred Wilson's blog announcing the partnership[1]:
To Paul and Rony’s credit, during that seven month courtship, they have built Indeed into the leader in the job search market. Their competitors will probably take exception to that comment, but our analysis of traffic, jobs indexed, and name recognition indicates that Indeed is the leader in pure job search.
They did not need the money to start and maintain the business. What their growth rate was before and after the investment is irrelevant; they were a sustainable business without the VC money. Sure, the infusion of money and intangibles gained from having Union Square Ventures as an investor helped propel their rise, and may well have been necessary to push it to a $1B valuation by today. However, it was not necessary for the business[2].
[1] http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/08/indeed.html
[2] Based on publicly-available information
mercurio · 2008-03-11
A couple of days ago, Fred Wilson made a relevant post about his near escape from the auction rate bond market. Its an interesting read, with more detail on how these bonds usually function and how the recent malfunction developed. From what I understood, these bonds don't lose all their liquidity overnight. After they lose their "primary" liquidity (by failing an auction), there is a secondary market that kicks in because of the high interest rates that the bonds are contractually required to offer once they fail an auction.
Fred says he got a call from his broker saying "your bonds have not yet failed an auction but you should know that the risk of it happening has gone up". I imagine that a lot of startups must have got a similar call, but perhaps the founders were too focused elsewhere to pay attention. Or maybe the smart ones did listen and were able to avoid this sorry mess.
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/our-run-in-with.html