Although many investors are spinning for the chance to invest in Turntable.fm, the hot music startup has not yet picked a dance partner, despite reports to the contrary. Business Insider claims that Turntable has raised $7.5 million at a $37.5 million valuation and “that term sheets were indeed signed yesterday.” But reached a few hours ago as he was boarding a plane, co-founder and chairman Seth Goldstein told me, “We have not closed any new financing.”
There is certainly a lot of interest in Turntable from VCs who want to fund its next round. The buzz among venture investors is that there is intense competition for the deal, particularly between Union Square’s Fred Wilson, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins. Wilson is the clear favorite (Turntable is based in New York City), but he is being outbid by Accel and Kleiner. → Read More
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. → Read More
“Building on someone else’s platform is a good idea, if you have your eyes wide open,” investor Fred Wilson told a packed room of entrepreneurs on Monday night at an Internet Week event in New York City. He was answering a question about whether or not it’s a good idea for startups to build on another company’s platform, and we caught his response in the video above.
Wilson knows a lot about this subject. He sits on Twitter’s board and a year ago wrote a blog post warning startups in the Twitter ecosystem ti stop “filling holes.” Twitter then proceeded to fill those holes itself by buying or building various clients and other services, and is still filling them to this day (its new pictures feature is a case in point).
While this issue has created a lot of angst in the developer community, Wilson is very straightforward about it. “You should expect eventually the platforms you are building on to do something against your interest. One day you may wake up and discover that platform is competing with you, and that sucks.” → Read More
Last night during an Internet Week event at General Assembly, investors Fred Wilson, David Lee, and Chris Dixon took the stage to talk about a range of topics related to startups, including one that’s been a source of angst for many a startup: patents.
It’s a topic that Wilson has discussed before on his blog (most recently in this post titled Enough is Enough, and he didn’t mince his words:
“The basic problem with patents is that you’re trying to assign property rights to something that doesn’t deserve property rights. The fact that these property rights end up in the hands of financial owners as opposed to the original inventors just exacerbates the problem. The basic problem is that Chris [Dixon] and a bunch of engineers can be sitting at Hunch designing some amazing new feature and somebody unbeknownst to them has a patent on this feature and never actually implemented it and can now screw them over… It’s just not right, it shouldn’t exist.” → Read More
Where there are startups, there are great investors backing them up. The resurgence of New York City as a startup capital the past few years has witnessed the rise in prominence of several East Coast investors across the spectrum from super angels to super VCs. Today, we are incredibly pleased to announce that Fred Wilson, John Borthwick and Josh Kopelman will all join us for this year’s Disrupt in NYC.
All three invest early and often, and represent a new breed of founder-friendly investors who contribute more than just capital. Speaking of money, if you still haven’t purchased a ticket and would like to do so, tickets are available here.
On the super VC end of the spectrum, it’s hard to compete with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. He was an early investor in Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Etsy, Wilson is also a proficient blogger and an avid user of Web products, which is why founders like Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley seek him out. → Read More
An organization that aims to diversify and strengthen the pool of successful startup founders in tech, Women 2.0, today announced that it will spin out its mobile focused Founder Labs pre-incubator program as a standalone entity, and expand it from San Francisco to New York City this May.
Women 2.0 and Founder Labs founder, Shaherose Charania, told TechCrunch:
“We want to change the ‘founder force.’ There’s a pretty diverse work force here. But the founder force looks kind of homogenous. Founder Labs will create teams working in mobile that are diverse, in terms of experience levels, gender and ethnicity.
We want people not to just create apps, but mobile health, payment, and smart grid [technologies]. I don’t think Silicon Valley or New York City startups and investors have gone into those spaces enough, yet…”
I was in the air an average of 30 hours a month for the last two years, so I watched a lot of movies — typically semi-delirious on Ambien– that I wouldn’t ordinarily. One of those was the star-studded rom-com “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Note: You won’t see this movie at the Oscars tonight, or any night, and that’s not because it was cruelly overlooked. But as a plane movie, it sufficed.
I’m assuming most TechCrunch readers are far to Y-chromosomey to have seen it or even admit they’ve seen it, so I’ll fill you in on the thrust of the film. Like most things in life, the simplest explanation is usually the right one: If a guy doesn’t call, he didn’t lose your number, he isn’t away on business in Yemin, he wasn’t kidnapped and held at gunpoint– he just didn’t want to call you. All these fairy-tale stories that lonely girls thrive on about how the jerky guy one day woke up and realized how great you are may have happened to somebody, sometime, but that person was the exception, not the rule.
The somewhat cold message of the film is that you shouldn’t live your life assuming you are the exception. (Of course as rom-coms go, the main character does end up being the exception, undercutting the wisdom of the point. But for the purposes of real life, let’s pretend she didn’t and moved on to someone else.)
Believe it or not, this movie came up in conversation at a dinner party in Silicon Valley the other night. → Read More
Yes, China is taking over the world. Or at least the Internet. No, this is not like the WE’LL-ALL-BE-WORKING-FOR-JAPAN-oh-nevermind scare of the 1980s. Why? Because China has more than 1 billion people. It already represents the largest online audience in the world and is less than 30% penetrated and has Internet spending per capita that’s less than one-third of the United States.
That means two things are true that aren’t usually true at the same time: It’s a monster now and it’s barely gotten started. The Internet– more than any other industry– is about building huge, mass audiences. China wins at that. Accept it. You can’t spend 15 years arguing size and eyeballs matter and not be impressed by what is happening in China right now. → Read More
I think this show is going to be a winner. That’s not as arrogant of a statement as it sounds, because the content has little to do with me. Your questions elicited great answers from one of the most powerful consumer Web investors on the planet, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. What’s not to like?
It’s a long video, so here are some of the topics we cover: Whether venture capital still a home run business; why Wilson says “I won’t do (a convertible debt deal) I never have and I hope I never will;” his view on whether crowd sourcing funding will disrupt the industry; whether Twitter appreciates its developers enough; advice for entrepreneurs in other countries looking for US funding and how much salary a founder should ask for. Hands-down my favorite moment is around the five minute mark when I ask what his wish for the venture industry is by the end of the year.
Next week, we have Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint Ventures in the hot seat so send in your questions now to askaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com. → Read More
So far most of our shows on TechCrunchTV have been about bringing you news, analysis and interviews of some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful and interesting personalities. But starting this Friday, we’re going to get you, dear readers, into the mix– or at least your questions.
We’re launching a new weekly show called “Ask a VC” until we think of something more clever or punny. (Paging, Dr. Carr to the newsroom…) Here’s how it’ll work: You email any question you want to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com. We cull through those questions and pick the most unique or most frequently asked or most interesting ones and Friday morning, we get a well-known VC on Skype and we ask away. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is going first this Friday. Wilson has some of the hottest companies in his portfolio including Twitter, Zynga and Etsy. Email any questions you have for him now! We’ll try to get through as many as we can.
The idea is that millions of entrepreneurs who read TechCrunch around the world don’t always have access to pick these guys’ brains, and we want to give you that chance. Ask questions about advice, the market, his portfolio, his blog– anything you want. And watch Friday afternoon to see if we picked your question. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following excerpt is from Mastering The VC Game, a new book by Jeffrey Bussgang that goes on sale Thursday. It tells the backstory of Twitter from the perspective of founder Jack Dorsey, from his early obsession with couriers and his attempts to create a better dispatch system to his “Aha” moment with Twitter (“What if we simply set status, archive it on the Web, use SMS to do it, and it all happens in real time?”) to why the company picked Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures as its first venture investor (“I want a VC who is always thinking a few steps ahead of me”). Bussgang interviewed both men, and details how the VC and entrepreneur clicked in the second half of this excerpt. The first part recounts the tale of how Dorsey came to invent Twitter.
Jack Dorsey (a.k.a. @jack in the lingo of the Twitterverse) founded Twitter, the social networking and microblogging site where users—Twitterers—post very short (140 characters, tops) updates known as tweets. The concept for Twitter came out of Jack’s lifelong fascination with mapping the real-time movements of people and things within complex environments. “Since I was very small, I’ve been fascinated by how cities work,” Jack told me in his typically straightforward way. “I always got really excited when I thought about visualizing them, specifically around maps. What would you place on a map to show how a city worked?” → Read More
Most entrepreneurs take it for granted these days that the best way to run a startup is lean and mean. It is a badge of honor to be able to take a startup as far as you can with as little capital as possible. But is that always the best strategy? At our upcoming Disrupt conference in New York City (May-24-26, buy tickets here), VCs Ben Horowitz and Fred Wilson will debate both sides of the coin. Actually, they will be continuing onstage what they’ve already started on their blogs. → Read More
Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”
Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. → Read More
Every so often, venture capitalist Larry Cheng puts out a list of the top VC blogs. Previously, he ranked the blogs by how many subscribers they have on Google Reader. But now he’s changed his methodology and is ranking them by average monthly unique visitors, based on Compete data. He just came out with his new global ranking for the fourth quarter of 2009. Below are the top ten blogs from that list.
If you compare this list to the last one, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is now the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures (who previously was No. 1). Now, the always-provocative Paul Graham of Y Combinator is No. 3, whereas he wasn’t even in the top ten on the old list. Other new entrants to the top 10 include Mark Suster of GRP Partners, Dave McClure of Founder’s Fund and soon to launch his own seed fund, and Bijan Sabet of Spark. Some VCs who dropped out of the top ten include Marc Andreessen and David Hornik of August Capital. → Read More
When it comes to lists of top VCs, one of our favorites is the top VC bloggers. Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, started keeping just such a list last May, based on how many subscribers each VC blogger has on Google Reader. This morning he updated his VC blogger leaderboard. The top 20 are below, all 100 are on his own blog, Thinking About Thinking (No. 71).
These rankings obviously do not correlate with venture returns, but they are one measure of who are the most interesting VCs. Guy Kawasaki and Fred Wilson kept their No. 1 and No. 2 spots on the leaderboard, but Benchmark’s Bill Gurley made a big move from No. 9 to No. 3. That pushed most everybody else down a notch. Dave McClure made his debut on the list at No. 13. And Peter Rip moved up 37 spots to No. 15.
(Leaderboard after the jump): → Read More
