Fred Wilson (born August 20, 1961) is an American businessman,

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

and blogger. Wilson is the co-founder of

Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, Flur ...

, a New York City-based venture capital firm with investments in

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

companies such as

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

, Foursquare,

Zynga Zynga Inc. () is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its missio ...

, Kickstarter,

Etsy Etsy, Inc. is an American e-commerce company focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home décor and furniture, toys, art, as well as craft ...

and

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Ser ...

Career

Fred Wilson began his career as an associate and then became a General Partner at Euclid Partners. He worked at Euclid Partners from 1987 to 1996. In 1996 Wilson and Jerry Colonna began Flatiron Partners, which was named after the

Flatiron District The Flatiron District is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, named after the Flatiron Building at 23rd Street, Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Generally, the Flatiron District is bounded by 14th Street, Union Square and Gre ...

. Based in New York City, it grew into an investment fund that focused primarily on follow-on investing, with investments in notable

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

successes and failures, including

Alacra Alacra, Inc. is a privately owned American company that provides information and workflow tools to financial institutions, corporations, and professional services firms. The company was founded as Data Downlink Corporation in 1996 by Steven G ...

, comScore Networks,

Yoyodyne Yoyodyne is the name of a number of companies, both fictional and real. Literary Yoyodyne was introduced as a fictional defense contractor in Thomas Pynchon's '' V.'' (1963) and featured prominently in his novel '' The Crying of Lot 49'' (1966). ...

Geocities Yahoo! GeoCities was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and ...

, Kozmo.com, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' Digital,

PlanetOut PlanetOut, Inc. is an online media company or entertainment company exclusively targeting the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) demographic. Originally founded as an early internet-based media company by Tom Reilly in 1995, it opera ...

, Return Path, Scout electromedia, Standard Media International, Starmedia, Favemail, and VitaminShoppe.com. The firm's 1996 fund capitalized at $150 million with two investors: SOFTBANK Technology Ventures and Chase Capital Partners, the private-equity arm of Chase Manhattan Corp. The firm later raised another fund capitalized at $500 million with Chase Capital Partners as the sole active LP. In 2001 Wilson and Colonna shut down Flatiron. In 2004 Wilson and Brad Burnham founded

. TheFunded.com, a social networking site for technology entrepreneurs, rated him their favorite venture capitalist in 2007. Wilson has served as a judge for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's

NYC BigApps NYC BigApps is an annual competition sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corporation. It provides programmers, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs with access to municipal data sets to build technological products that address c ...

competition in NYC.

Blogging

Wilson publishes a blog called AVC: musings of a VC in NYC. Wilson publishes one post per day, usually on a topic related to venture capital entrepreneurship or the Internet.

Personal life

Wilson attended high school at James I. O'Neill High School. Wilson is married to

Joanne Wilson Joanne Wilson (born 1961) is an American businesswoman and angel investor. She is known for backing female-founded companies. Biography Early life and education Joanne Wilson was born in 1961. Wilson studied at Simmons College in Boston, wher ...

, a prominent angel investor and author of the Gotham Gal blog. They have three children and live in New York City and

Venice Beach Venice is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles within the Westside region of Los Angeles County, California. Venice was founded by Abbot Kinney in 1905 as a seaside resort town. It was an independent city until 1926, when it was annexed by ...

. All of his children attended

Wesleyan University Wesleyan University ( ) is a private liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the col ...

. Wilson has a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

and an

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

from the

Wharton School The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in P ...

of the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. He is an active philanthropist and community advocate having worked on initiatives including the redevelopment of Union Square and Madison Square in New York City. He is also a board member of

DonorsChoose.org DonorsChoose is a United States-based nonprofit organization that allows individuals to donate directly to public school classroom projects. The organization has been given Charity Navigator's highest rating every year since 2005. In January 2018 ...

, an online charity that connects individuals to classrooms in need. Currently, Wilson is involved in the Pier 40 Partnership.

References

External links

Union Square VenturesA VC Blog
– Fred Wilson's blog. {{DEFAULTSORT:Wilson, Fred 1961 births Living people American bloggers American financiers American investors American venture capitalists MIT School of Engineering alumni Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania alumni