Tumblr's always been the blogging platform for America's obsessive coastal elites, with its smart-looking templates and its super-easy conversation system. It's appropriate, then, that the precious New York startup plans to make its money selling internet fashion.
Fred Wilson's venture-capital firm, the paper of record tells us, "has built its portfolio making small bets on young companies." That is an excellent definition of early-stage venture capital. But is Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, to be congratulated with a glowing New York Times profile merely for doing his job?…
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures carrying his own lunch order from Shake Shack in Manhattan's Madison Square to a group of tables where he was entertaining wantrepreneurs in New York for the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo. Not pictured: Lane Becker, president of online customer-service startup Get Satisfaction, who kept…
Buy low, sell high, as they say on Wall Street. And right now, there's a flow tide of technical talent from shuttered financial firms flooding the New York Area available at rock-bottom prices. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures says why not take a pay cut and work longer hours at a Web startup? The "quant jocks"…
Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson has given European startup Zemanta another $750,000, raising the young company's total to $2.25 million in early funding. What does Zemanta do? They've created a set of browser and blogging software plugins that automagically suggest and quickly adds "relevant" links to your…
New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson is sick of answering questions about how his firm's most notable investment, Twitter, will ever make money. "The No. 1 question I get about Twitter is, how do you monetize it?" Wilson told the Deal's Alain Sherter. He continued:
Doing nothing to turn the tide back in favor of all those kooky startup incubator kids, Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson offers this on why funding young wantrepreneurs is just good sense to him:
Union Square Ventures partner Brad Burnham — the one who isn't blogorrheic Fred Wilson — says it's time to move past startups "driven by self-expression and discovery online." In an interview with The Deal, excerpted above, he says that those kinds of companies had their day three or four years ago. Now it's too hard…
Why do so many people in tech deliver singing telegrams? Because they're so painful. My colleague Jackson West ventured this explanation: "Tech people are uncomfortable enough in the real world — raising the discomfort level and then blogging it for laffs provides a tail-eating narcissistic kick." Plus, it's a…
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger says he's invested $1.5 million in New York-based cloud-computing startup 10gen, a company founded by some ex-DoubleClickers and a Joost engineer, because there are "some serious issues" with Google's App Engine, a service which allows startups to run applications on…
Now that Caterina Fake has left Yahoo and Stewart Butterfield has tendered his abstract resignation letter, what will the widely beloved Flickr cofounders do? And where will they go? Brendon Wilson, who worked in the Valley himself before returning to his native Canada, pointed us to an effort by a group of geeks to…
Outside the Gizmodo and ArsTechnica party last night, a rep was handing out postcards advertising her company's "analytics and advertising for iPhone apps." My first thought was, "Isn't Apple going to have first crack at that data, since they control the distribution of third-party applications?" My second: All the…
A venture capitalist involved in the deal confirms the news that Twitter is closing a $15 million funding round led by Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, setting the company's value at nearly $100 million — $80 million before the new investment, $95 million after. Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams…
Union Square Ventures backs growing startups like Twitter, Tumblr and Etsy and can claim successful exits from Del.icio.us, FeedBurner and Tacoda. All that success could make partner Fred Wilson's career a model for any aspiring VC. It shouldn't. At least, not according to Wilson. "I did it all wrong and got lucky,"…
Last we heard about microblogging service Twitter's latest funding round, Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger told us — and, via Twitter, the world — that he was taking a lunch meeting at Twitter HQ. That was April 25. Despite rumors of an imminent deal, there's been no announcement. So why can't Wenger and…
Union Square Ventures funded Mark Pincus's casual games maker Zynga with $10 million not long after Max Levchin-founded widgetmaker Slide raised $50 million. Competitor RockYou wants a round of funding that would value it at $400 million. We like to scoff at these purveyors of online sheep-throwing tools, but that's…
A tipster tells us Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin has a "$10 million Viacom offer floating around." Hype Machine, a website which aggregates music uploaded to blogs, has grown 125 percent in the last year, with 127,000 monthly visitors, according to Compete.com. Another source familiar with Volodkin's plans…
Someone carefully let it be known today that Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are looking for $15 million in venture-capital funding. We emailed existing Fred Wilson, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, to ask if Twitter's been in touch, looking for a re-up. Wilson's unresponsive…
If scenesters from Brooklyn to San Francisco's Mission District want to have Tumblr cool-kid bragging rights, they'll have to pay, founder David Karp has decided. Why has Karp finally set his unflinching blue eyes on Tumblr's bottom line? His hosting bills must be starting to pinch. He'll begin peddling paid Tumblr…
