fredwilson

checking it out now

this is not about you reading us

this is about us reading you

we are not trying to compete with HN. We use it every day and find it invaluable.

what we are trying to do is open up our link sharing to the public so everyone can see what we are thinking about, reading, and discussing

and while doing that, we thought it would be great to let others do the same

i did give PG a preview of this about a month ago in case he was upset about it. he replied to me and did not seem to be

it won't get deleted if its not spam

and everyone gets a vote up or down so the best links will rise to the top

maybe, but he didn't put in on the front page of foundry's web site.

we've been using this internally for a while to share and discuss links and we find it very valuable

so if a community doesn't develop around this, it will likely just be a public page where USV posts and discusses links, which in and of itself should be useful to entrepreneurs to see what we are interested in and talking about with each other

yeah, we've talked a lot about having two identity systems on usv.com. it is not ideal. but twitter doesn't have comments and disqus doesn't have the user base that twitter has, yet.

we are thinking about ways we can connect the two together in a tighter way to reduce some of this

as you point out, twitter and disqus are USV portfolio companies and we love using and supporting the products our portfolio companies make

i could care less about pissing off google, yahoo, etc

but it is less clear what else i should be doing to try to change things

i am all ears

how so?

as the VC you are ascribing that to, let me correct you. i care a lot about making money. i just think there is a time and place for everything. you can get the "make money" stage too quickly and it hurts more than helps.

as the person who wrote the "empty bag of words", i'd like to say that i agree that a business needs to have strategy at its core. but product strategy and business strategy are two different things. get the product right first, then figure out the business strategy, then business model. and twitter isn't the only business i've invested in. i've been doing this for 27 years and have invested in hundreds of startups. i used twitter as an example but my message was based on the totality of the experience, not just one company

everyone contributed but it was David, Marco, and the entire Tumblr team who should get all the credit for this

i don't want to disclose confidential information publicly but we did the first three rounds with Spark alone so we did way more than pro-rata in those and then we did pro-rata in every round since.

there are many of us in VC who approach things this way. they are the ones we like to work with the most. if you look at who we work with often, you can reverse engineer the list.

it is easier to behave properly when you have a big pile of chips in front of you. when you don't have any chips, it is tougher. that's why the best get better and the worst get worse.

I take it personally when people write irresponsible garbage about our portfolio companies. I care about them and their teams a lot. Making money is nice but being a supportive and good investor is a lot better

Total garbage. There is not one fact in this privco thing that is close to right. The numbers are good but nowhere close to that good. This is the same firm that predicted Foursquare would be out of business this year which will also prove to be nonsense.

yes, but more like 21 months http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/05/off-the-schneid.html

Hi Paul

i would prefer to eliminate legal fees entirely by using standard docs and not negotiating them on either side. we have done that many many times and it works great. all you need to do is use a standard template. most law firms have them.

this is what i propose on every seed and series A we do. most entrepreneurs take us up on it. and then we don't even use a lawyer on our side.

however, there are cases, like one you and i have exchanged emails on recently, where a legal issue comes up that is created by the entrepreneur's counsel, that requires a lot of work and sometimes we end up getting stuck with the bill on it.

in situations like that, i like to have the discussion of who should pay the bill up front and on a case by case basis

i love it when the lead character in the post stops by and participates in the discussion

Exactly

yes, i am using them as synonyms. most fire sales are talent driven deals.

look at the last six months of the chart

i think that is exactly what i wrote.

"I have come to believe that most people can be talented at managing people if they want to be."

you can hate on me and hate on VCs all you want. that's fine. but please don't misrepresent what i wrote

i think they will start to go back down once we make developing for mobile easier

the vast majority of the opportunities we pass on are a community that isn't large enough or engaged enough. i don't want to name names because that would be uncool to those entrepreneurs and companies. there are examples of businesses we see that are trying to serve the existing status quo and those are also not that interesting to us

we think it is very useful as a strategic guide.

if you think of etsy, twitter, lending club, workmarket, pollenware, and kickstarter, you might struggle to understand why they all fit our investment thesis

it is because they are all networks that are large and growing and disrupt big markets (twitter - news, etsy - sale of artisinal goods, kickstarter - the studio model in entertainment, lending club - consumer lending, pollenware - working capital finance, workmarket - contingent labor)

i think you are right that the social web will not monetize as well as search.

btw - foursquare's VP Revenue hire was its first, not a new one.

if i wanted to signal that, i would do that with a more direct and specific blog post. in fact i did that four months ago http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/08/networks-and-the-enterprise....

yes, and the cost of developing for iOS, Android, and web at the same time

that would be a wonderful thing if it were to happen