Fred Wilson
Partner & Co-founder, Union Square Ventures. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
2appearances
39statements
6resolved
2supported
1contradicted
33%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Fred Wilson said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
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: 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…”
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…”
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: 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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Wilson: Data is only defensible if it is proprietary first-party data
“The only defensibility that you can get with data is defensibility around your own data. If you're getting data from somebody else, it's not defensible, because they can give it to somebody else as well.”
Wilson: Google search holds an almost insurmountable data advantage
“I would even argue that Google benefits from network effects and the data that they have that, in their search business, I think, almost an insurmountable advantage because of the data asset that they have. And the network effects around that.”
Wilson: Software alone lacks defensibility without proprietary data and networks
“Shows the problem of thinking that software is any kind of defensible advantage. I don't think it is. But if there was something about The data, ah, and the network around that software that made it so that it wouldn't be easy to leave the first company and go…”
Wilson: Startups should build platform services on data rather than sell raw data
“I don't think selling the data is the right thing to do. I think the right thing to do is to build services on your platform that take advantage of the data that let the people who might buy the data from you instead come and build businesses And transact on y…”
Wilson: Consumer internet startups should build simple products before data science
“In consumer internet, even if big data and machine learning is going to be the thing that ultimately locks in your value proposition for the long haul, I don't think you get into the market and get the scale position that allows you to access that data with da…”
Wilson: USV will not invest in porn, spying, or gambling
“I won't invest in porn. I won't invest in spying. I won't invest in gambling. Those would be three things I wouldn't do.”
Wilson: Bootstrapping marketplaces with institutional users instead of grassroots is a mistake
“When entrepreneurs come in and say, We're gonna bootstrap you know, one side of our market, the demand side or the supply side, by going to institutions or going, you know, kind of bypassing the little guy and going to large chunks of supply or demand. That al…”
Wilson in 2013: All mobile and micropayments should run on Bitcoin
“So that's what's interesting to me right now in payments and it's not like mobile payments or micropayments. Like, to my mind, all that should be running on, on bitcoin.”
Wilson: User value and team quality matter more than early business models
“I don't care about the business model because we can tweak the business model. We can get the business model right. What I care about are do you have users and are they getting value out of your product and how much value they're getting out of your product an…”
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…”
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 …”
Wilson: Machine learning hit a major inflection point around 2013
“I think that machine learning is, has hit an inflection point in the past few years artificial intelligence, machine learning, whatever we want to call it To the point where, ah, we're starting to see, ah, these, ah, dreams that we've had for 30 plus years in …”
Fred Wilson: Successful healthcare startups will bypass hospitals and insurance companies
“And I think what will work for us in healthcare is to service the doctors and the patients and ignore the hospitals and the, Insurance companies and all the big honkin' bureaucratic institutions in healthcare.”
The other half of the tape: Fred Wilson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 7 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Zach Weinberg 2Chris Dixon 2Benedict Evans 2Matt Turck 1Anand Sanwal 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the MAD Podcast 4
the a16z Podcast 4
2019 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Building Crypto, from Vision to Reality
- a16z Podcast | High Growth in Companies (and Tech)
- a16z Podcast | So Where Are We on the 'S-curve' for PC Devices?
- a16z Podcast | The Topic That's Lasted the Entire History of Computing -- Bundling and Unbundling
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2015 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Fred's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MADLEDGER | Partner & Co-founder, Union Square Ventures | 1 | 20 | 33% 1/3 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| a16zLEDGER | Partner & Co-founder, Union Square Ventures | 1 | 19 | 33% 1/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |