An Evening With Fred Wilson, a New York VC visiting Leeds England
Posted on 12. Aug, 2008 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Events, Inspired
I was privileged to meet Fred Wilson, prolific blogger and pioneering Internet investor on Friday evening at the Evening with Fred Wilson event at Leeds Metropolitan university’s Old Broadcasting House.
Organised by uber-connected Leeds entrepreneur Imran Ali, the evening took the form of an informal presentation and interactive Q&A session with the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, the New York based venture capital firm behind web services like delicious, Feedburner, Etsy, Disqus and Twitter.
Delicious was sold to Yahoo in 2005 whilst Google bought Feedburner last year.
Fred has been in the UK on a fact finding mission as his firm sizes up making investments in web applications and services in Europe. Their rationale on extending their reach across the Atlantic is that the journey from New York to London is pretty much identical to the one from New York to Silicon Valley.
They intend to have a full strategy in place by autumn and will potentially invest in one or two European companies a year.
At the talk, Fred had a lot to share about the internet landscape in the US. Topics covered included how his firm evaluates a deal, the impact of the global economy on ad-supported businesses and the commercial potential of web platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other SAAS (software as a service) ecosystems.
He employed an intriguing approach to selecting the topics discussed, inviting everyone in the audience to suggest a topic and then expounding on those that got the most votes around the room. The suggestions flowed thick and fast and although mine didn’t make it to the shortlist, everyone got a lot out of the ones that did.
Thankfully he allowed some time at the end for a traditional Q&A session and his response to my question about whether Union Square Ventures intended to invest in next generation media companies was particularly insightful.
He said that whilst they are not really interested in ‘the Agency model’, he is really interested in
“the potential for the Internet to disrupt that old model of employing thousands of people to create ‘advertising content’”.
He went on to say he would like to see more crowd-sourced models for creating and distributing ad content online.
I certainly agree. I’ve got a few ideas and as it happens, Real Fresh TV is working on a couple of branded content projects that will demonstrate the concept. All will be revealed very soon…
Coincidentally, the Doritos brand is moving in that direction in the UK with the main marketing activity for the new Doritos Collisons launch happening predominantly on Bebo, the social networking site.
I met quite a few interesting folk at the event, another great show for the North’s creativity and entrepreneurial talent. From Nick Halstead, founder of blog comment aggregator, fav.or.it, to representatives of SitePen, a Dojo-based toolkit, there was a great buzz about the event and much to discuss with other aspiring internet entrepreneurs.
Fred says his firm, already closely linked with Seedcamp, the exciting early stage UK & European startup network that is partnered with TechCrunch UK, will try to be present at UK wide events for tech startups.
I’m sure Manchester would love to host such an event and I’d be happy to lend a helping hand.
On other Real Fresh TV related news, we’ve got a couple of exciting projects under wraps. We’ve been working with a big media agency on a significant music related social media project and are collaborating on a couple of cross platform projects for a couple of household brands.
Stay tuned!
Photo Credit: Pirates Of Silicon Valley DVD image on Tychay’s Flickr feed
UPDATE: Here’s a detailed outline of Fred’s talk on Friday by Guy Dickinson of ThinkFold.
Related posts:
- Real Fresh TV wins Manchester Evening News Blog of the Week award
- Presenting A Beginner’s Guide to Social Media at #smc_mcr
- Mapping Creativity with Manchester’s Beacon
- Real Fresh TV: The Story So Far
travesti
thanks.. you
thanks şekerim
nice event, and nice cope up with this event..