Fred Wilson's Gift To Me

Getting To Know Fred Wilson

I first came across the AVC.com blog. Frankly I thought the name was cheesy. VCs are not supposed to have blogs, I thought. VCs are supposed to be inaccessible, working in smoke filled rooms. A blog is the opposite of a smoke filled room.

Then I started visiting the blog once in a while, after having bookmarked it and not visited for months. I started liking it. It was a decent blog. It was interesting. The blog posts touched on many current topics of interest to me.

Then I started liking it a lot.

I got excited about Zemanta and Disqus before I realized they were Fred Wilson's portfolio companies. That made me respect the guy. It was only a matter of time before I realized he was an investor in Twitter, and sat on the Twitter Board. That was a big nugget to have come across in 2009. 2009 was Twitter's year. During the first half everyone was talking about Twitter. The icing on the cake was to realize no, Twitter did not pitch Fred Wilson. Fred Wilson pitched Twitter.

I like vision people. Clearly Fred Wilson was a visionary.

I wish there were a few top tech entrepreneurs who were as avid bloggers as Fred Wilson is. That would be a triumph. I wish all of the very top tech entrepreneurs were avid bloggers. Not even Kevin Rose is, and he is not exactly the topmost entrepreneur. Fred Wilson kind of stands out in the tech industry that way.

And then I realized Geocities also had been part of Fred's portfolio. I was a Geocities guy back in the days, an avid user. I was sad when Yahoo shut down Geocities recently. Geocities was the original online community.

Fred Wilson did not need to prove to me no more. This cat's got something going on, I thought.

Fred Wilson's Insight
Happy Holi
Fred Wilson: VC
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Fred Wilson

AVC, Not For Me

If you are an early stage entrepreneur, you are, of course, looking to find the VC types. For a while I thought of pitching Fred. We even exchanged a few emails. If he was not going to come in himself, he was going to lead me to some people. But I was too early stage. Like too. And I did not articulate myself well.

Then I was resigned to the fact I just don't fall in his domain expertise zone. He does "web services." I am absolutely not in the dot com space.

But that did not change the fact that he was a visionary in the tech industry, and he had become my favorite solo blogger. I very rarely emailed him, but when I did, he replied. That was and is a big deal.

Maybe A VC For Me

But I was not going to give up. You can't bemoan not having a 200 billion dollar tech company in New York City, and stay stuck in the dot com space. I took a friendly swing at Fred Wilson in a blog post. When I started work on that blog post, I had no intention to do so. But a few paragraphs later I was doing it. What the heck, I thought. Tell it like it is. (Fred Wilson's Insight)

Fred Wilson's Gift To Me

Finally it happened. Fred Wilson gave his gift to me. It happened in his comments section to this blog post: Yochai Benkler On TheBroadband Plan. Yes, he is open to going beyond the dot com space, he will invest in broadband if the spectrum is opened up. Opening up the spectrum is a political battle. I am well suited for a political fight like that one. Taking a singular focus to a revolutionary proposition. I could do that. I am itching for the fight.

My Comment:

"There isn't enough competition on the access side of the Internet, both wireline and broadband. The rest of the Internet stack is hypercompetitive and is innovating at a mile a minute. But in access, we have monopolies who go at whatever speed suits them. There's nothing pushing them to go faster."

Finally, for the first time, Fred Wilson and I are "talking."

(1) Hardware (2) Software (3) Connectivity.

Paul Allen wanted MSFT to do both hardware and software. Bill Gates vetoed that. He said no, only software. He was right. But by now the biggest virgin territories are in sector three: Connectivity. That is where the big fortunes stand to be made. Hardware and software will hum along, but the biggest disruptions stand to be made in sector three. The dot com space is kinda saturated by comparison, although that space will always stay fertile because the human mind never satiates. But sector three is where big things will be done in the next push.

Fred Wilson's Comment:

i think you may be right, but i am scared of the capital costs involved. if wireless spectrum was dregulated, i might get interested

My Comment:

"....if wireless spectrum was dregulated...."

That has to be the primary push.

That is all the opening I need. This fight is not entirely as complicated as what happened in Nepal in April 2006. (The First Major Revolution Of The 21st Century Happened In Nepal) This tech entrepreneurship challenge speaks to my political strengths.

My company wants to bring hundreds of millions of new people online. Internet access is the voting right for this 21st century. Take me to the fight.

Andrew Parker

And then Andrew Parker happened out of the blue. I'd love to do a May 2010-May 2011 stint with Union Square Ventures. I think my startup will have covered more ground in three years with this stint than without it. I hope I get to do it: fingers crossed.

Who Is Andrew Parker?

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