Fred Wilson Quotations

I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.

Most adults I know start their Internet session at Google, and most kids I know start their Internet session at either Facebook or MySpace.

Being an entrepreneur is hard. Having supportive and caring investors helps.

I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world.

So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illiquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster.

New York's niche is content, and content is becoming more valuable. Just think about what is more valuable: MTV or the cable system that you use to get MTV? Howard Stern or the radio station you use to listen to him? Ultimately, technology becomes a commodity, and content - real, true branded content - becomes more valuable.

It takes great salesmanship to convince a customer to buy something from you that isn't built or isn't finished.

It's not easy for an entrepreneur to find the time to blog. But for those who do it, it is a great tool to communicate with the various stakeholders in their business and build a reputation for thought leadership.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

I don't like to talk about myself. I like to talk about stuff that's happening, stuff that's going to happen, and the people who are going to make it happen.

The venture business is a bit of an apprenticeship business, so the firm I worked for didn't let me make an investment until I was 30. That was probably a very smart thing.

Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute.

Investing in management means building communication systems, business processes, feedback, and routines that let you scale the business and team as efficiently as possible.

Venture capital is about capturing the value between the startup phase and the public company phase.

The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It's Web services.

Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it.

I think 'crazy' is a compliment. I think you make money with people who are crazy.

Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook.

Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.

I'm a free speech bigot. I don't like censorship; I just don't think it's a good thing.

Marketing is for companies who have sucky products.

To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.

When my dad was in Vietnam, we lost a parent for a year. Thank God we didn't lose a parent for good.

One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.

I'm really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity, and knowledge.

Given New York City's cultural diversity, it has always attracted creative people.

It's upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend's start-up.

All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.

Skyping with your spouse works well enough, but apparently it is hard to get the kids to hang out on Skype for long.

The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.

The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.

When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

Facebook is not an unstoppable juggernaut. There are a lot of other things people can do on the web.

Many artists stick to making and hire a manager to focus on their business. Artists that build websites and mobile apps can do that, too.

There is a difference between hiring a CEO and turning over control of the business.

My venture investing career has three phases, all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to Internet. The second, at Flatiron, was Internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.

If you are successful, you will be cloned. That's life. In fact, it's a sign that you've made it when clones of your website, mobile app, and business start cropping up.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.

The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

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.

Blog-based businesses have lower cost structures and are more 'authentic,' and as a result are drawing larger shares of ad budgets.

When people laugh at a company or say, 'This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,' you are listening.

Games are the most social of all things on the web.

People already love to play casual games. But when you take a casual game and stick it inside a social network, it becomes way more exciting.

Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.

I would like to reiterate that I don't want any profiles of me. I am not newsworthy.

Not only do you have to put yourself in harms way in service of your country, you have to leave your families at home. It is a great sacrifice.

Start-ups should be hunch-driven early on and data-driven as they scale.

The best talent in the venture industry doesn't work in large companies and won't work in large companies.

The companies that do the best job on managing a user's privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful.

Certainly anything that is news or opinion needs to be free on the Web, because the Web is this very fluid medium that is very much driven by links and the flow of visitors through a discussion via links.

Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all 'User First, Brands Second' services. The brands are all over these services now. But for the most part, these services didn't do much to bring them. The engaged users did.

If you have a native monetization system where the atomic unit of content is the ad unit, that scales down all the way to a small screen experience. That's why Twitter is performing so well on mobile.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

The Web is going to capture an increasing share of people's attention, and billions of dollars are going to flow in. What Web 2.0 is about is harnessing those dollars in highly leverageable ways.

There are so many startups out there raising money. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's a good thing. Entrepreneurship is in vogue. Innovators are innovating. Makers are making.

When there were not very many Internet companies, the supply of Internet companies to the market was small and the appetite for them was large. Therefore, if you were in the business of creating Internet companies in 1996-98, you had a market that provided massive demand for that.

Businesses are a legacy we can pass on to our sons and daughters. We need our own businesses to have more of a say-so in our communities.

He's a wonderful person if for no other reason than the education piece.

We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.

We can't get out, so we might as well have fun.

We haven't invested in the Mining Company, but I want to be friends with Scott because he knows a lot of people.

Those of us who care are reaching out to get these young fathers involved. My parents' involvement in my upbringing drove me to be involved in my children's lives. It trickles down to the next generation.

The only dangerous hurricanes so far are the ones we've been drinking.

The only dangerous hurricanes so far are the ones we've been drinking. We can't get out, so we might as well have fun.

We've got to be very, very careful, ... We don't want to put the problem into the community either.

We have energized Saks Fifth Avenue's tradition of celebrating the holidays with excitement, innovation and great style. We are thrilled to have partnered with Philips to create this incredible break-through program, as a gift to our customers and the city of New York.

All of us in the venture capital area are going through a triage, where we have to decide which portfolio companies are so wounded we will never save them, ... As horrible as it is to go through that process, it's a cleansing process. To have some branches grow and bear fruit, you have to trim others.

David Rockefeller is 82 years old. There's no way he could find that.

It's not a correction ? it's a crash.

Everyone here at Saks Fifth Avenue is thrilled to be contributing to this incredible cause in this, our seventh year of continued support in finding a cure for all women's cancers. With the help of our partners Mercedes-Benz USA, the Entertainment Industry Foundation's Women's Cancer Research Fund, designer Diane von Furstenberg, and actress Hilary Swank, this year's shopping event will fund innovative cancer research that will revolutionize diagnostic and testing procedures, and change the future of all women's cancers.

I'm not saying M.B.A.s can't be great entrepreneurs. They can. But you don't need a degree to figure out it's costing you $5,000 per month to run your business, so you need $30,000 to keep it going for six more months.

I generally blog between 5:30 A.M. and 7 A.M. I will from time to time add something during the day, but for the most part blogging is an early morning activity for me.

I cannot promote an empty parking lot as if it is something of value. I've watched over the past weeks as content rich blogs have disappeared from Technorati results and spam blogs seem invulnerably present. I've also documented certain TAGS that previously had valid results and now show ZERO results.

The main focus is to give young fathers the tools to be more effective dads. Many young fathers leave the parenting to young mothers or to their grandparents.

I generally blog between 5:30 A.M. and 7 A.M. I will from time to time add something during the day, but for the most part blogging is an early morning activity for me.

We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.

Don't try to solve the entire problem on day one.

If you want to unleash more creativity in your company, you need to allow for a little contamination. It is the sand in the oyster that creates the pearl.

Profiles aren't journalism.

Not acknowledging that beauty is complex-that's the problem. I enjoy making it complex for people, because that's my world.

The strategy of Tumblr is very elegant.. The atomic unit of user experience is the same as the ads.

I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one's own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill.

I get everything that satisfies my soul from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.

Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven.

If you want to create something great and do it faster than the competition, you need to be action oriented.

I also like to use a sensational headline. Many people read blogs in aggregators, which generally show only the headline. So you have to give people a reason to click through. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading it should be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what is happening in the technology, Internet, and VC markets.

Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don't do the obvious thing.

You simply can't be tentative in a startup. You have to go for it at every chance you get. And if the leader of the organization is anxious, his or her fear pervades the organization. Everything comes from the top in a company. So if you are starting a company or building one, face your fears and move past them. It's critically important to your company.

If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.

Money is information, like bits.

The fact is that the amount of money startups raise in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success

Markets come and go. Good business don't.