With Web 2.0 Summit now over, looking back, in my mind, easily the best panel was the one entitled Point of Control: Finance. It featured venture capitalists John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) talking with New York Magazine’s John Heilemann about the state of both investing and the state of the web ecosystem at large. What made it so interesting is that Wilson and Doerr clearly don’t agree on many of the big issues.
This was best exemplified during the portion of the talk when the two give their views on where we are now. While Wilson worries that we may be in the midst of the next “bubble”, Doerr thinks of it as a “boom”. They’re both talking about the same thing, they just view it completely different ways.
Then they go into starting companies on the east coast versus the west coast, the state of angel investing, iPhone versus Android, Facebook versus the web, Google’s ability to innovate, ideas versus innovation, investing in Twitter, etc.
Watch it all above, things start to get more heated about 20 minutes in.
And here are the links to posts they reference:
John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Together with KPCB’s partners, John has backed many of America’s best entrepreneurial leaders, including: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt: Google [GOOG] Jeff Bezos: Amazon [AMZN] Scott Cook, Bill Campbell: Intuit [INTU] Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla: Sun [SUNW] And the founders of Compaq, Cypress, Macromedia and Symantec These ventures have created more than 150,000 new jobs. In 1974 John joined a small chipmaker, Intel,...
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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