Zitat des Tages von Fred Wilson:
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.
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.
Politics and government have been a terrible place to invest; education has been a terrible place to invest, but that is because the entrenched interests make it a terrible place to invest. The way you invest in those sectors is you go against the entrenched interests; you try and disrupt the entrenched interests, not to service them.
Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute.
The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.
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.
Most adults I know start their Internet session at Google, and most kids I know start their Internet session at either Facebook or MySpace.
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.
Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.
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.
Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.
Games are the most social of all things on the web.
When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.
I'm not saying M.B.A.s can't be great entrepreneurs. They can. But you don't need a degree to figure out it's costing you $5,000 per month to run your business, so you need $30,000 to keep it going for six more months.
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.
Twitter wasn't planned. It just happened.
There are so many startups out there raising money. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's a good thing. Entrepreneurship is in vogue. Innovators are innovating. Makers are making.
All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.
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.
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.
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.
Certainly anything that is news or opinion needs to be free on the Web, because the Web is this very fluid medium that is very much driven by links and the flow of visitors through a discussion via links.
It takes great salesmanship to convince a customer to buy something from you that isn't built or isn't finished.
When people laugh at a company or say, 'This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,' you are listening.
I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world.
So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illiquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster.
Investing in management means building communication systems, business processes, feedback, and routines that let you scale the business and team as efficiently as possible.
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.