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I saw this tweet when I got up this morning:

hey @fredwilson - whats the story behind ur avatar?

While longtime readers know it, I figure many of you don't. So here it goes.

Starting about four years ago, Howard Lindzon started commenting actively on this blog. He was funny, he was smart, and I enjoyed our banter in the comments.

One march vacation, our family made a short stop in Phoenix, wh...

I generally take a quick run through audience stats every morning. I saw this chart and thought "hmm, big day yesterday, why is that?"

So I went to google analytics, which confirmed the big day.

And then I went to the makeup of the traffic:

Like most big days on AVC, it was referring traffic that caused the bump. Search and direct traffic are very consistent at about 2,500 visits per day. But ref...

I was explaining how I go about finding deals yesterday to a friend of mine and I thought I ought to explain it to everyone.

I write this blog. It's like a broadcast channel of "what is interesting to me." I market it every way I know how and I get somewhere between 70k to 100k unique readers of it every month between web, rss, and mobile.

As a result, I figure entrepreneurs and others have a pretty...

After our weekly team meeting yesterday afternoon, I hopped into a cab to the far west side of manhattan to attend the Business of APIs conference. In the cab, I opened socialscope on my blackberry to check into twitter and saw this tweet from my partner Albert:

Love APIs -- so excited about @foursquare's announcement http://bit.ly/1Zswju

As I sat down with Quentin Hardy to talk about APIs, I wasn't sure where the conversation would go. Fortunately Quentin is a good interviewer and we had a great chat.

We talked a bit about the foursquare api, and I mentioned that I am most excited about cool games that can get built on top of foursquare, like mob zombie.

We talked about what is a real api, and I seconded our friend Joshua Schachter's assertion that a read-only api is not an api. I believe apis should allow full read/write access and the ideal api in my mind totally replicates the web app's functionality.

That led us to Twitter naturally and I stated that the thing I want most from the Twitter api is sign up via the api. I realize that there are reasons why that hasn't happened yet, but I feel that Twitter has led the web world in providing full access to its application and sign up is a key feature that third party developers could do great things with.

Quentin seized the opportunity to pounce on the monetization question and I stated my belief that the best way to monetize apis is to "send money with the api". I talked everyone through my Business Model Jujutsu post and ended with this line from Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed:

We tried charging for our API without much success. Then we paid developers to use it and it took off.

We also talked about "api failures". I said that there are two kinds of api failures that I've noticed. The first is when the web app itself is not very popular and therefore developers aren't compelled to build to its api. That is not an issue with the api itself. The second is when the web app itself is very popular but the api is not so much. Usually the issue in this situation is the api is too restrictive and doesn't allow developers to do enough with it. I mentioned the Etsy api, which is read only, as an example of this situation. Fortunately, Chad Dickerson of Etsy, had preceded me at the event by a few hours and talked about how Etsy is taking their api to the next level by offering both read and write.

That's about all I can remember about the talk with Quentin. It was a good one. APIs are such an important topic. I'm surprised there aren't more events about them. I'd like to thank Mashery for putting this one on. And I'll leave you with a blackberry photo I took of the view from the event yesterday evening. That alone was worth the trip to the far west side.

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Back in the early days of web video, it wasn't clear who would win the competition for video upload to the web. There was YouTube, Vimeo, and the big dog was Google Video. I tried all of them. YouTube was by far and away the best experience.

Google Video required you to wait for days to see the video you uploaded. It was so annoying that I wrote this post exactly four years ago today (how's that fo...

On Friday I posted some of the key themes I'll be addressing tomorrow in my keynote.

I spent this morning assembling them into a deck that I'll use in my talk tomorrow. Here's a final draft. Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions/critiques/copy edits, please leave them in the comments.

Social Recruiting Summit KeynoteView more presentations from fredwilson.

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When my son Josh got Tweetie on his iPhone, he simply went to Twitter.com and found every NBA player he could think of, found out if they had a verified account, and if they did, he followed them. That was his follow list (along with me and the gothamal).

But now with Twitter lists, it could be so much easier. TNT has put together this list of NBA players on Twitter. The Twitter iPhone app companie...

I'm giving the keynote talk at the Social Recruiting Summit in NYC on Monday. I've been working on my presentation over the past few days and some themes are worth talking about.

1) Since we started Union Square Ventures in 2003/2004, we have only been involved with one retained search. Our portfolio companies have certainly used search firms, but our use of them has been extremely rare. We prefer to source candidates ourselves using our networks, and increasingly our social networks.

2) We sourced both of our junior investment professionals, Andrew Parker and Eric Friedman, with blog posts at USV.com.

3) We have sourced countless senior hires for our portfolio companies off of this blog and USV.com. I would bet that we've done a couple dozen successful hires that way in the past couple years.

4) Many of our companies have internal recruiters and we work hand in hand with them, sourcing talent, vetting talent, and closing the sale.

5) LinkedIn is a terrific place to find talent and to find references. When I want to check someone out, I invite them to connect to me on LinkedIn, I find who we know in common, and that is my reference list. Charlie O'Donnell taught me these LinkedIn tricks about five years ago and I use them all the time.

6) Tracked.com is also a terrific place to find talent and figure out who they know. Let's say you wanted to find the top execs at LinkedIn. You can find them all in one place here.

7) Hunting for talent is necessary but not always sufficient. You need to get the word out. Like all things on the internet, there are free ways and paid ways to do that.

8) The best free way is get your jobs indexed by Indeed so they can be found by the over 10 million people a month who go there looking for jobs. We feature all the jobs in our portfolio on the front page of USV.com by running an Indeed stored query of all the jobs in our portfolio companies.

9) Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are also great free ways to get the word out. Post the job on your website and tweet it out, get it retweeted, searched, and discovered and the resumes will start coming in.

10) You can also pay to get your jobs "sponsored" in Indeed. You can post job ads via Facebook's self serve ad system and target them at very specific locations and job types. And we'll see more social media/networks offer paid systems like this in the next year.

11) There are all sorts of niche communities on the web you should be hanging out in if you want to find talent. For tech/engineering talent, we like to look at Meetup groups on certain tech topics (there are eight Ruby On Rails meetups within 25 miles of NYC), open source projects, and niche communities like Hacker News and Stack Overflow. You can play the same game with communities for other kinds of job types. The key is you have to hang out there a bit, get to know the community and the people in it, and build trust and add value.

That last point is the big point. Social media is about showing up, hanging out, and earning trust. If you want to use social media to source talent, you can't fake it. You have to really participate in these systems. But if and when you do, they are incredibly powerful and are changing the face of recruiting.

I look forward to talking to the recruiting community about this topic more on Monday. And if you have ideas for other things I should be talking about, please leave them in the comments.

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I posted about our portfolio company Tracked.com a few weeks ago. In that post, I said:

Tracked.com is social. Users have a profile in the service and can send messages to each other in the service (and via twitter and facebook very shortly). Objects in the service (news, quotes, charts, public filings, companies, people) can be sent around like links in twitter and facebook.

That "very shortly" is ...

I don't like to go to conferences. I explained why in this post.

But every once in a while I do attend one. Ideally it's a smallish gathering on a specific topic that I am interested in.

I'm doing that over the next couple days in Denver at Defrag.

Defrag is a conference about mining data for insight, with a focus on social data and semantic analysis. You need to look no further than our portfolio t...

Saul Klein, co-founder of Seedcamp and one of the top VCs in europe, has a long and thoughtful post up on the evolution of Seedcamp. In it he says:

In my mind, helping to bring some cohesion to our region's distributed network of talent, capital and is a 15-20 year project. ......

Getting to the right point takes time, and the cycles that kicked off what we now know as Silicon Valley began near...

Taking a cue from the advice we give to companies all the time, we've just launched the new USV.com in beta form last night. It still has a few kinks to get out, but it is mostly there. When Brad...

Almost 750 people took the AVC Reader Census/Survey in the past 24 hours. That's a decent sample size. So if you want to know what the readership of this blog looks like, go here.

I'm sorry to say that it is overwhelmingly male, 92% of the respondents are men. I'm also disappointed that 75% of the respondents live in North America. Other than those statistics which I am hell bent to change, I am pretty pleased with the composition of this audience. We are bloggers, twitterers, early adopters, travelers, and people who want to make their mark.

If you haven't gotten around to taking the survey, you can do so right in this post.

Powered by Hunch.com

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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...