Fred Wilson

Yesterday, my partners and I invited Paul Romer over to USV for lunch. For those that don't know, Paul is a leading thinker in the world of economics and currently a Professor at NYU. It was a fascinating conversation. My favorite part of it was Paul's "lecture" on...

One of the most noticeable changes to the venture capital business over the past decade is the movement of investment allocation from capital and time intensive sectors like biotech and clean tech to capital efficient and fast moving sectors like internet and mobile.

This makes total sense if you think...

Possibly the most interesting running conversation I've been having with entrepreneurs lately is how they can keep their companies independent without having to go public and turn their cap table into a casino. There are a bunch of entrepreneurs thinking seriously about this issue and I've been thinking seriously about...

Jeff Leventhal, the CEO of our portfolio company WorkMarket, emailed me yesterday. He said:

i would love to see an avc post about copycats like samwer bros. what do u think of this form of entrepreneurs, etc?

I looked back over my archives and I guess I've...

So you've built and launched your product. It is well received. You've acheived "product market fit" and it is time to get more users or customers. You've graduated from the "building product" stage and have entered the "building usage" phase. What does this mean for your team?

Well first and...

The first stage of a startup, what I call the Building Product stage is management light. The team should be small. We have portfolio companies like del.icio.us and duck duck go where the Building Product stage was accomplished by one person, the founder of course. That...

We have a portfolio company that will remain nameless that does something I want to call out as super awesome. Every board meeting, as homework after the meeting, they ask each board member to fill out a simple Google Form with two questions; three things we are doing well and...

Yesterday I met with an entrepreneur from Israel who has built a Facebook app called Chat Rounds that allows you and a buddy to hang out, video chat, and play games and watch videos together. He told me that the service is particularly popular with military people stationed...

The term "lead investor" is often misunderstood. I have seen VCs negotiate to be called a co-lead or a lead in the term sheet. But you don't get given that designation. You earn it.

Glenn Kelman (a long time AVC regular) has a great blog post...

Back when we were doing our MBA Monday series on Financing Options For Startups, I got an email from my friend Andy Sack. Andy was one of the first entrepreneurs we funded by in the mid 90s with our Flatiron Fund. He's done something like a...

The Wall Street Journal has a story out today that says "Web Startups Hit Cash Crunch." There has been a fair bit of reaction in the tech blogs and I thought I'd toss into the discussion some things we are seeing:

1) There are so many startups out...

Cap Tables (short for capitalization tables) are spreadsheets that show how much everyone owns of the company. You can get a stockholder ledger from your lawyer that will list all the stockholders and show how many shares or options they have, but I don't consider that a cap table.

For...

I've been reading Eric's book which I am very much enjoying. And on wednesday night I spoke to the NYC Lean Startup Meetup with the help of Giff who interviewed me.

Eric and his fellow lean advocate Steve Blank have...

I like simple ways to think about things. Like mobile first, web second. These kinds of constructs work for me. One that I've been using a lot lately to describe what we like and don't like as much is User First, Brands Second.

When you are building your...

Today on MBA Mondays we are going to cover yet another topic in the Financing Options series, financing capital equipment like servers, routers, switches, computers, etc.

Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute. It makes sense to look for places where...

The New York Times asked me to give them an opinion piece on the Mayor's effort to bring a new science and technology University to NYC. They also asked a few others, like Caterina Fake, Eric Reis, Dave Tisch, and several more students of NYC and technology. The...

It's Monday, time for MBA Mondays and the next post in the Startup Financing Options series. Today we will talk about Venture Debt.

If there were two words less likely to be found together, it would be venture and debt. Startups are not credit worthy enterprises....

Three years ago (almost to the day), I wrote a blog post titled Transitions that talked about transitions going on at our portfolio company Etsy. At the time, Etsy's founder Rob Kalin was handing over the CEO job to Maria Thomas, Chad Dickerson was coming in to run engineering, and...

Today on MBA Mondays Startup Financing Options series, we are going to talk about the financing option that I specialize in -- preferred stock.

Almost all venture capital firms and many angel and seed investors will require the company they are investing in to issue them...

MBA Mondays are back after a one week hiatus. Today we are going to talk about convertible debt. Convertible debt can also be called convertible loans or convertible notes. For the purposes of this post, these three terms will be interchangeable.

Convertible debt is when a company borrows...