Quotes from Fred Wilson

Politics and government have been a terrible place to invest; education has been a terrible place to invest, but that is because the entrenched interests make it a terrible place to invest. The way you invest in those sectors is you go against the entrenched interests; you try and disrupt the entrenched interests, not to service them.

One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.

The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.

I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so, if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.

To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.

When there were not very many Internet companies, the supply of Internet companies to the market was small and the appetite for them was large. Therefore, if you were in the business of creating Internet companies in 1996-98, you had a market that provided massive demand for that.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

I generally blog between 5:30 A.M. and 7 A.M. I will from time to time add something during the day, but for the most part blogging is an early morning activity for me.

Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute.

Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook.

I'm really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity, and knowledge.

Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.

The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.

A person who is quietly confident makes the best leader.

The only way you win is by knowing what you're good at and what you're not good at, and sticking to what you're good at.

People already love to play casual games. But when you take a casual game and stick it inside a social network, it becomes way more exciting.

Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.

There is a difference between hiring a CEO and turning over control of the business.

Twitter wasn't planned. It just happened.

I'm a free speech bigot. I don't like censorship; I just don't think it's a good thing.

Most adults I know start their Internet session at Google, and most kids I know start their Internet session at either Facebook or MySpace.

If you have a native monetization system where the atomic unit of content is the ad unit, that scales down all the way to a small screen experience. That's why Twitter is performing so well on mobile.

It's upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend's start-up.

We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.