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We (Nathan and me) added a new widget to this blog yesterday. It's on the right sidebar above the Flickr photo widget. The purpose of this widget is to answer a few questions about the people who read this blog.

If you wish, you can take the survey right here on this post.

Powered by Hunch.com

This census/survey is powered by Hunch which is an interesting decision/recommendations service based in NYC. I mentioned the service last week in my post about selecting a hotel to stay in.

We've already got some data coming in about what this readership looks like. Here is a screenshot of the first few data points. Click on that link to see them all.

The sample size is still too small to make any conclusions. I'll post again in a week or two when we have some real data.

Should be interesting and relevant to Kid Mercury's thoughts on blog stars and blog communities.

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One of the more contentious things in the negotiation between an entrepreneur and a VC over a financing, particularly an early stage financing, is the inclusion of an option pool in the pre-money valuation. As my friend Mark Pincus likes to say, "it's just another way to lower the price".

I'll accept that critique. And take it one step further. The option pool is absolutely a piece of the price neg...

About a hundred readers of this blog gathered last night in the cafeteria of Washington Irving High School just off of Union Square in Manhattan to meet each other and celebrate the generosity of this community in the recent Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge.

It was a great moment for me. I got to meet many readers who I know by name but not in person. Putting a face to a name is a wonderful thing...

I drove out to the middle of New Jersey yesterday morning to attend a board meeting. Everywhere I went, I saw "dump corzine" messages. It was clear the governor was in trouble.

And this morning, we wake up to the news that Corzine has indeed been dumped and Mayor Bloomberg barely got 50% of the voters in NYC to pull the lever for him

Both of these men are wealthy. Both of these men grew up on w...

I'm sure everyone out there gets email intros. Someone who knows you sends you and someone you don't know an email suggesting you meet.

I send emails like that a lot. I might send a half a dozen or more every day.

I get even more emails like that. Sometimes dozens a day.

And I'd like to propose some email intro etiquette which I follow almost religiously myself:

When introducing two people who don't k...

As the venture business has grown and matured, many firms have developed specific areas of focus. Our firm, Union Square Ventures, for example only invests in web services. I believe this is a good thing for both the investors in venture funds, called LPs, and the entrepreneurs.

But there are a number of ways that firms can execute their focus on a particular area. Two of the most popular are "the...

We did it, for the third year in a row, this blog has won the tech blog category of the donors choose blogger challenge. Most importantly, we raised a total of $37,504 for teachers' projects in public schools. That number...

My partner Albert said this a week or two ago on his blog:

When people ask me whether investing in web services is a long-term opportunity, I often say that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

I was reminded of that when I went to the web to find a hotel to stay in Miami when I am down there for Future Of Web Apps in February.

In the past, I'd have tried TripAdvisor or maybe even Google. But just in the pa...

Last friday my partner Brad attended a company offsite for our portfolio company Meetup.com. On monday of this week during our regular weekly meeting, he gave our firm (all five of us) a report on the day which he said was excellent. One thing that stuck in my mind all week was his description of the lunch talk by one of the leaders of the "slow movement" (whose name escapes me now).

I'm familiar w...

I read the Google blog post announcing their enhancements to music searches this morning. I think it's terrific that Google has made these enhancements but there's one thing I don't like.

Google says:

Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners

There has been a lot of talk about young entrepreneurs creating all the great companies; Gates, Jobs, Yang/Filo, Bezos, Dell, Brin/Page, Zuckerberg, etc, etc.

I agree that visionary young people are worth backing and we do a lot of that at Union Square Ventures.

But there is another kind of entrepreneur I love backing even more. It's the serial entrepreneur who has had a number of successes under their belt and now wants to swing for the fences. We have a bunch of them in our portfolio and there is nothing more fun than watching someone who has a ton of experience get behind the wheel and really step on the gas.

When someone has two or three startups under their belt, they understand a bunch of things that a first time entrepreneur doesn't. They understand the value of setting a very clear vision and getting everyone on that page. They understand that they need to hire the very best people. They understand how to raise capital and pick their investors carefully. They understand how to make quick decisions and not let issues fester. They have a rolodex of talented people and potential business partners they can get on the phone or email quickly when they need them. Most of all, they ooze confidence and make everyone better around them.

These entrepreneurs usually have enough money in the bank that they are not looking for a payday. They don't build their companies to flip. They build their companies to go all the way. They are doing it for money, but they are also doing it for the thrill of the game, for ego, and to build a legacy. Those are very powerful motivators, much more powerful than money if you ask me.

If you look at our portfolio, you'll see quite a few startups created by young visionaries and quite a few startups created by serial entrepreneurs who are swinging for the fences. There isn't much else to be honest.

We are open to all kinds of entrepreneurs and we don't screen for age or track record. If you have built a web service that fits into our investment thesis, you'll get a hearing at our firm regardless of who you are and what you have done. But it is also true that we tend to back young visionary founders and successful serial entrepreneurs most of the time. That's because we've made a lot of money doing those two things and not so much doing anything else.

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I was having breakfast at Pastis with a friend today. The "mayor" of that restaurant, Mark Ghuneim, walks in and goes to the bar to order his morning coffee to go. I said to my friend, "watch this, he's going to pull out his phone and then look up and and try to locate me in this restaurant". My friend, who is not on foursquare, says to me "how do you know?" I said "trust me". Sure enough, Mark st...

I've thought a lot about whether you can build a business via a browser plugin. I wrote a post a while back on that exact topic. I have seen web services successfully use browser plugins to increase the engagement with users. Delicious did this very successfully. The combo of a web service and a browser plugin is better than just a web service and is vastly superior to trying to do it all via a pl...

I was reading Technorati's State Of The Blogosphere report yesterday. It has a lot of data on bloggers but not so much on readers. And I'm more curious about readers than bloggers.

I believe that blog reading has gone completely mainstream based largely on discussions I've had with friends who are not in the tech business (one advantage of living and working in NYC) and based on talking to my kids ...

David Gillespie sent me a note today about this presentation he posted about a week ago. It's really great and I think everyone should take ten minutes out of their day and spin through it.

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)View more documents from David Gillespie.

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Technorati released its annual State Of The Blogosphere report this past week. In it was a short interview they did with me about VCs and entrepreneurs who blog.

I like the way it came out so I figured I'd reblog it here.

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Fred Wilson, managing partner of two venture capital firms and well known "VC blogger" at AVC.com, discusses the relationship between entrepreneurship and bloggin...

Image via CrunchBase

I am excited to announce that we've got a match to play around with in the Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge. It is from HP and it works like this:

HP has committed to contribute a total of $200,000 pro-rata to all of the campaigns in the challenge.

This community has contributed about 7% of the total raised to date, so we are on track to get a match of $14,000.

Everyone who contri...

The FCC votes today on adopting Net Neutrality rules. This is an important debate and you can be sure that the telcos and their lobbyist's have been throwing all the money and influence they can at this issue.

One of the arguments from the telcos is that Net Neutrality will hamper investment in the infrastructure. I agree that is a risk. But if the FCC does not set the ground rules and insure open ...

One of my all-time great moments as a web user was the launch of Yahoo! Finance. It was everything I had ever wanted as an investor, at least as a public market investor. I could not believe that all of it was free and in one place. I was a loyal Yahoo! Finance user for the better part of ten years. Recently I've found myself using Google Finance a bit more. But rarely does a day go by when I don'...

My daughter Jessica wrote this yesterday. I have spent much of my career investing in the "digital revolution" but I take great pride in the fact that my daughter has the ability to step back and evaluate that revolution on her own terms.

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the return of the polaroid through the eyes of a teenage film photo blogger

October 9, 2009 was the last day that unexpired Polaroid f...

A few months back, I posted about Etsy's Handmade Moment contest in the context of using your user base to crowdsource good marketing material.

We have a winner of that contest and in the spirit of closure, here it is. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming after this.

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When somebody tells me about a new musical act, I always just go listen to them. No point in reading about something when you can experience it.

Same with a new web service. This morning I read about DailyBooth getting funding from Sequoia, Betaworks, and an excellent group of angel investors. I'd heard about DailyBooth before. It was a Y Combinator company this past summer and some of my colleague...

As I promised at the start of the Donors Choose campaign, I am going to do a Meetup with everyone who gave to the campaign. Here are the details: Who: Anyone who gave to the current Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge...

When I use the word "mobile web", I am not referring to the web running in mobile browsers, although I understand that is what the words have come to mean. I believe that mobile devices are bringing web services into our pockets and purses, onto restaurant tables and bars, and into schools and stadiums.

I am not particularly concerned about whether these web services are deployed in a browser or ...

We had a discussion about "blog stars" in the comments to my post yesterday. Kid Mercury has been saying for as long I recall that niche communities are the future of the Internet. And he believes that niche communities are led by "blog stars".

So I asked him to name 10 "blog stars". And this is what he said:

1. fred wilson
2. heather armstrong (dooce.com)
3. kottke
4. jdawg (gotta admit it....you kn...