The East Coast vs. West Coast VC fight got a platform today in one of the most hilarious talks at Web 2.0 Summit, an intense debate between Fred Wilson and John Doerr on points of control in finance.
One highlight, the announcement of the “merger” of Union Square Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Web 2.0 Summit, possibly mocking the announcement of our own acquisition at TechCrunch Disrupt.
The talk was full of spicy quotes, and moderator John Heilemann brought up the fact that Wilson once described social network Facebook as “as a photo sharing site with some chat attached.”
Fred Wilson elaborated, “Facebook is not an unstoppable juggernaut. There are a lot of other things people can do on the web.”
Wilson later got into how only one great company (Zynga) has been built on the Facebook platform. His downplaying the power of the social network had very interesting timing, as coming up directly after the Doerr and Wilson panel is a conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Fred Wilson is a founder and Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures. Fred began his career in venture capital in 1987 and he has focused exclusively on information technology investments for the past 16 years. From 1987 to 1996, Fred was first an Associate and then a General Partner at Euclid Partners, an early stage venture capital firm located in New York City. In 1996, Fred co-founded Flatiron Partners. Fred was the Managing Partner of Flatiron Partners and was responsible...
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