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Fred Wilson

Partner & Co-founder, Union Square Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderauthor@fredwilson ↗avc.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Fred Wilson is a prominent early-stage venture capitalist who backed companies including Twitter, Coinbase, Etsy, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and MongoDB. He is also widely known for authoring AVC, a long-running daily blog about venture capital, technology, and crypto published since 2003.

19statements → 7claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 3.58/5average certainty → 2.58/5average debate potential → 4said about them ↓

1 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 predictions · 2 assertions · 3 opinions · 6 insights · 2 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Fred argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Wilson: Cloud market will split to Amazon 60%, Google 30%, Microsoft 10%
“But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market, Google has 30% of the market, and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's gonna be a three player game in that business, and that's good.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:34 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
50% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

252 words/min while actually speaking · 11.4 um and uh per 1k words · 20.8 false starts per 1k · 31.8% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Fred Wilson: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,694 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Fred Wilson said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wilson: Big tech won't be significantly disrupted by AI
“I don't think that they were disrupted very much by the shift from web to mobile, and I don't think they're going to be disrupted very much by the adoption of AI power software.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:46 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wilson: Software revolution will unlock 10x to 1000x more value than manufacturing
“Total economic value that will be unlocked with the software revolution should be at least one, maybe two, maybe three orders of magnitude bigger than what we saw with manufacturing, automotive, you know, for the reasons you describe.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:27 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Opinion
Fred Wilson: Crypto is uniquely disruptive due to token business models
“I think crypto is, is the one innovation out there that feels highly disruptive because it's a real change in business model. It's not just a technological change. It's a fundamental change in business model. You're not monetizing with ads. You're not monetizi…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:08 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Assertion Partly supported
Wilson: YouTube sold to Google due to copyright fight costs
“Right, but that ultimately caused them to have to sell to Google. Because they concluded that they couldn't continue to play the game that way, which was the right way to play the game. As an independent company. They needed somebody who could fight the conten…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:19 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Prediction Held up
Wilson: Cloud market will split to Amazon 60%, Google 30%, Microsoft 10%
“But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market, Google has 30% of the market, and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's gonna be a three player game in that business, and that's good.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:34 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Insight
Fred Wilson: Crypto unifies being a product user and investor
“I reject that idea, and I think what's powerful about crypto is that they're the same thing, that using and investing are the same thing that they, and you don't have to be a user to be an investor, and you don't have to be an investor to be a user, but if you…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:38 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Opinion
Wilson: Web2 users deserve financial equity for building platform value
“It's just not right, particularly for a lot of these businesses where the user is the product. Right? Facebook users made Facebook. Twitter users made Twitter. You know, YouTube users made YouTube, right? It's just not right that the people who make the produc…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 32:14 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
What-if
Wilson: Twitter could have stayed open using a token business model
“If Bitcoin and tokens had existed in 2005 instead of 2009, I think it's very possible that Twitter could have adopted a token-based business model Left the protocol open.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 35:39 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wilson: Personal capital moved into crypto will never return to fiat
“Once my money gets into the crypto ecosystem, it's gonna stay in the crypto ecosystem. It might, you know, move like, I'm definitely gonna be playing around in all these networks and, you know, using them and staking and doing all this incredibly cool shit tha…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 37:20 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Opinion
Wilson: Native crypto applications are 10x–100x better than tokenizing real-world assets
“That's why I don't love when entrepreneurs, founders come to us, And they're like, we're going to take mortgage-backed securities and put them on the blockchain, or we're going to take like, they're really interested, a lot of people are interested in taking t…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 46:56 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Disclosure
Wilson: USV avoids dApps, focuses on NFTs and crypto games
“That's why largely we're not investing in a lot of dApps. I mean, we are playing around with NFTs and games for all the reasons you raised.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 52:20 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Insight
Wilson: Porting offline models online was an early internet investing mistake
“When we first started investing in the internet in 94, 95, 96, what we were doing was dumb. We were just basically investing in things that had existed in the offline world that were getting moved onto the internet. Like, ok, so let's, let's invest in a, Let's…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 45:36 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wilson: Crypto tokens will drive massive innovation in staking and governance
“I think that we're gonna see a lot of really innovative things being done with staking, because I think crypto tokens make staking super easy to do, and there are, like, I think Richard's idea is that if I can get data scientists to stake their models, to put …”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 48:51 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Insight
Fred Wilson: Internet tech is the primary 100-year technological revolution of this century
“Many of them last for kind of a century, right? Like automotive, or more broadly speaking, industrial or manufacturing based businesses were kind of the technological revolution of the 20th century, and even though internet and tech kind of emerged very powerf…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:44 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Assertion Partly supported
Wilson: Top 100 mobile apps mirror top 100 pre-iPhone websites
“If you look at the top hundred mobile apps, And you look at what the top hundred websites were before the iPhone came out, it's not a very different list, right?”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:09 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Insight
Fred Wilson: Business model shifts disrupt incumbents by making strengths weaknesses
“Everything changes when you change the business model. It's like all of a sudden, you know, your strengths become your weaknesses and that's what allows A lot of new entrants to come in.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:08 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Insight
Fred Wilson: YouTube succeeded due to broadband tipping and social sharing
“I think the two big moves that That made YouTube successful, whereas all the people who tried YouTube before YouTube were broadband, that's like, 80 to 90% of it, and also social sharing.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:35 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Disclosure
Wilson: 90% to 95% of USV portfolio companies run on AWS
“90% of the companies Maybe 95% of the companies we back are built on AWS.”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:12 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'
Insight
Wilson: Enterprise software markets are not winner-take-all like consumer
“They're also not winner take all markets, right? So the, it probably still a power law distribution in the outcomes, but maybe it's not as severe. Maybe it's not, maybe the winner's not 10 times bigger than number two, who's then 10 times bigger than number th…”
Fred Wilson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:43 a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption'

The other half of the tape: Fred Wilson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Chris Dixon 2Benedict Evans 2

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0022442019episodesmentions
0242019episodes it came up in
000.52142019episodesmentions per episode
2019 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' Jan 2, 2019 27m
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