Social production systems seem to deliver a much higher portion of the economic value created to the consumers than traditional production systems do. As Tim O’Reilly says, "if you look at … Ebay or Google, even though they're very, very...
October 2005 Archives
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As we get a chance to go back through the transcript of Sessions, we are finding a number of themes that are worth highlighting. We will try to get these thoughts up on the site over the next week or...
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One of the companies that we are invested in is working on reshaping a large and important industry with a new technology platform. The team that is building this company is first rate and has already built several very valuable...
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Every week, I do a VC Cliche of the Week post on my personal blog. This week the cliche is A Bridge to Somewhere. If you want to read about bridge loans and why they need to lead to somewhere,...
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One of the first posts that came out of Sessions was Joel Spolsky’s comment on architecture astronauts. Joel said. I'm starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to...
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This is a really great story about the power and perils of peer production. This morning Brad told me that there was a reformatted version of the transcript of the Union Square Sessions event on our wiki. I assumed that...
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It took a couple days, but we've uploaded the entire transcript of the first Union Square Sessions, an event focused on the topic of peer production and open data architectures. The entire transcript (all 227 pages) is available as a...
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Today we hosted the first of what we hope will be many conversations about the impact of information technology on our society, our economy and on the business of venture capital. The subject of this "session" was peer production. We...
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Early stage venture capital investing is not really a numbers oriented business. Its much more important to have a feel for technology, markets, and people than numbers. But there are times when numbers are important. Two of the most important...
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We like to make our initial investment sometime between the formation of a business and the first dollar of revenue coming in the door. Sometimes that time period lasts a while. In the interim, how do you monitor how an...
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We are true believers in the potential of the web. Over the last year, we have seen a number of lightweight web services that could be the foundation for large and valuable businesses. Many of these services appear to be...
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Anyone who has been to our site before will notice a very different look and feel today. When we launched Union Square Ventures last year, we put up a web site that described who we were, how we saw the...
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I just finished John Battelle's The Search. It's a great book. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in business, technology, marketing, and the internet. One of the things I that I enjoyed most in the book was...
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Do you want to make money in your own home? Forget real estate scams, tupperware, or becoming a spammer. Create your own Web 2.0 company NOW!! Its easy. Just follow these 10 simple steps and you, too, can be seen...
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What is Audience Management? It's the ability to track your audience and customers, know who they are, what they like, how they behave, etc. Done right, it can allow a business to improve its relationship with its customers and potential...
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I didn't plan on posting anything about Union Square Ventures' most recent investment, del.icio.us. The founder, Joshua Schachter, posted twice to his list about the investment and I figure that is pretty much the whole story. If you want...
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Last year, when Brad and I were on the road raising our fund, we used to talk a lot about web services that should exist but don’t. One of Brad’s favorites was “paid job search.” Brad would say that job...
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I feel in my gut that we need a new dimension, a new vector, a new lode to mine. And I feel that we are close to finding it. Note the conscious use of the word we in the last...
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For the past 50 years, the media equation has most often been solved for the largest audience. That is changing and its happening pretty quickly, brought on largely by digital media. I think the media equation is going to get...
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The morning paper this morning is not a pretty picture. New Orleans is flooded. Large swaths of the southeast are down and out. Energy prices are spiking. The war in Iraq shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Interest rates...
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This is a picture of my office taken from my desk. Fred's Sitting Area Originally uploaded by fredwilson. I look at this artwork every day and it reminds me that I gotta get stuff done. It also sits...
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Some things take longer than others for me. I was quick to grok the blogging thing, reading them, writing them, etc. I was pretty quick to grok the podcasting and vlogging things too. RSS made sense to me immediately. But...
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I've talked about this before, but I want to say it again. The problem with podcasts is you can't link to a specific part of the podcast. You can link to the entire MP3, but if there is a funny...
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Steve Shu's post on VC in different geographies got me thinking. Steve wrote it on July 28th, but it only showed up in technorati's link search this week so that's when I read it. I also got a trackback from...