A historical collection of our writing.
Fred WilsonFor years, we have been fascinated by the fact that many of the very best startup companies come out of “side projects”. They are accidents really. eBay, Google, and Yahoo! are all examples of this mode of starting companies. Delicious was born this way. One of my favorite web services, Sitemeter, […] Read more
Brad BurnhamOur sessions event happened almost a month ago and it is starting to fade into my memory. But there is at least one phrase that came out of Sessions that we are still using with regularlity at Union Square Ventures. And it came out of this really interesting exchange between Brad and Tim O’Reilly on […] Read more
Brad BurnhamThere was a lot of discussion about the relationship between web service providers and consumers. This relationship is obviously especially important in services where the consumers are also the producers of the service. One thread of this discussion was about control. I hate to lead with Jeff […] Read more
Fred WilsonMany of the people we know in the venture capital business think their customers are the LPs (the investors in venture capital funds). We’ve always thought that was wrong. The entrepreneur is the customer and the LP is the shareholder. That’s the only way to think about the venture capital business […] Read more
Brad BurnhamThere was a lot of talk at Sessions about trust. The word appears 33 times in the transcript. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it 11 times himself. Here, Jeff makes the point that value is shifting from content to trust. “And so the content isn’t what’s valuable. It’s the trust and relationship that’s […] Read more
Brad BurnhamOne of the insights from our Sessions event was from Yochai Benkler who said the following about peer production: we do have very good research on how adding money undermines social motivations depending on contents I am not sure how to intepret that last part – “depending on contents” – but […] Read more
