New York’s Internet Week featured a panel discussion with Union Square’s Fred Wilson, Hunch’s Chris Dixon and SV Angel’s David Lee. We took a camera to the event and have been posting excerpts all week. In this outtake – the three dive into a discussion about disruption.
Dixon teed up the conversation by talking about areas he considered ripe for disruption: Education, finance and government—saying government incumbents and lobbyists hinder development and have no real reason to push for change. Lee took the mic and tossed healthcare into the mix before wrapping by saying “there is a lot of inefficiencies in those systems … and we think that … anytime there is that type of inefficiency there is an opportunity.”
Batting third, Wilson claimed that “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.”
Wilson highlighted Sal Khan who created more than 2,000 free online classes through his Khan Academy and noted that “the vast majority of people who are on Khan Academy are not in the United States.” Saying “if you really want to see how the world is changing go to Sub-Saharan Africa or go to Southeast Asia or go to Eastern Europe and parts of the world that have not had things that we take for granted and look at how they are using the internet to get access to those things and I think that is where you see the big game changing things are going to happen.”
The three go on to discuss disruption in the TV, hotel (Airbnb) and music industries with Wilson noting “you can’t stop what people ultimately want to have happen.”
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...
David Lee is a Founder and Managing Partner of SV Angel, an angel fund with investments in companies such as Twitter, Foursquare, Flipboard, Dropbox and Airbnb. Prior to SV Angel, David was at Baseline Ventures, a leading seed-stage venture firm. He was a founding member of Google’s New Business Development team and led business development at StumbleUpon prior to its sale to eBay. He also was a corporate attorney at leading technology law firms. David has an M.S. in...
Chris Dixon is a Partner at and co-founder of Founder Collective. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. In addition to his work with Founder’s Collective, Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
