Fred Wilson

A couple of days ago, Fred Wilson made a relevant post about his near escape from the auction rate bond market. Its an interesting read, with more detail on how these bonds usually function and how the recent malfunction developed. From what I understood, these bonds don't lose all their liquidity overnight. After they lose their "primary" liquidity (by failing an auction), there is a secondary market that kicks in because of the high interest rates that the bonds are contractually required to offer once they fail an auction.

Fred says he got a call from his broker saying "your bonds have not yet failed an auction but you should know that the risk of it happening has gone up". I imagine that a lot of startups must have got a similar call, but perhaps the founders were too focused elsewhere to pay attention. Or maybe the smart ones did listen and were able to avoid this sorry mess.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/our-run-in-with.html

From Fred Wilson's blog announcing the partnership[1]:

To Paul and Rony’s credit, during that seven month courtship, they have built Indeed into the leader in the job search market. Their competitors will probably take exception to that comment, but our analysis of traffic, jobs indexed, and name recognition indicates that Indeed is the leader in pure job search.

They did not need the money to start and maintain the business. What their growth rate was before and after the investment is irrelevant; they were a sustainable business without the VC money. Sure, the infusion of money and intangibles gained from having Union Square Ventures as an investor helped propel their rise, and may well have been necessary to push it to a $1B valuation by today. However, it was not necessary for the business[2].

[1] http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/08/indeed.html

[2] Based on publicly-available information

I agree that if you're starting a new venture and you don't have optimism, you won't get anywhere. But if you also hide from reality, you're toast as well. This stuff isn't from 'sky is falling' kooks -- it's from Warren Buffet and Jim Rogers and Paul Krugman... a long list of the great financial and economic minds. Here it's Soros. But they'll all be ignored until it's too late. People don't want bad news, just good news.

In my mind, that's why this is, actually, hacker news. A start up is a little boat. We need to know when the storm is coming earlier than others and take action:
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/battening-down.html

Also, I'm not sure how thrilled the seduction community and NLP community will be that all of their books are now online. I don't normally advocate piracy, but I think this is a really unique opportunity for grokking Net Natives circa 2007.

(Net Natives as used by Fred Wilson: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/06/net_natives.html)

update: When I say it's a unique opportunity for grokking net natives, I mean this in the same sense as when Paul Kedrosky blogged that the Amazon top 100 products list is more telling than the Ph.D. dissertation of the average would-be historian.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/12/27/top_sellers_at.html

I found the series of articles as a whole to be an enlightening account from the perspective of a restaurateur who tried new things in San Diego.

This was Part of 5 of a series that begins here:

http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant-part-1-overview/

Prior to this aside from being a patron of restaurants my only knowledge of the restaurant biz was based on Setting the Table which Fred Wilson blogged about here:

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/setting_the_tab.html