Business + Innovation
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson at TE NYC17
An interview between David Kirkpatrick and Fred Wilson, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures. Below is an excerpt from their conversation. You can download the full transcript here. Kirkpatrick: Let me quickly introduce Fred. Fred is the most eminent venture capitalist in New York and I was thinking about Fred’s work and his role in the industry. In a way, you’re the most successful VC of the second generation of the Internet. You funded Twitter and Tumbler, and a bunch of others, Etsy, MeetUp, and Kickstarter—so many great companies. It’s really interesting because you’re often sort of grouped in with, from a slightly earlier generation, John Doerr and—what’s his name, from Benchmark. Well, Gurley of course is a little closer to your generation. Wilson: He’s younger than me, actually. Kirkpatrick: You’ve served on boards with him, I think, haven’t you? But anyway, the fact is that you’re one of the only ones – maybe Gurley would fall in this category too, and that’s why we had him talking about it in November actually, who has never really participated in the founding of one of the giant colossi that is now sort of looming over society with such sort of overbearingness. So maybe we should start with—since I already mentioned it. That did come an awful lot yesterday. We even had somebody from Facebook here and from my perspective as a tech journalist, the role of Facebook, Google, Amazon in particular; but also Apple and Microsoft is increasingly the environmental question that doesn’t affect just the...
