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Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on *...*

BoxeeNovember 18

One of the big "aha moments" for me in the past couple years came when I hooked up a Mac Mini to a large display in our family room in the spring of 2007. Slowly but surely, our family started using the Mac Mini instead of the cable set-top box and the DVD player. My son watches YouTube videos on the Mac Mini, my daughter downloads tv shows and movies from iTunes and watches them on the Mac Mini. The Gotham Gal and I watch SNL on sunday morning on Hulu (that's Tina Fey on SNL being delivered into our family room via Hulu in the picture on the right). We also listen to music on iTunes and via streaming services like last.fm, Hype Machine, and, of course, fredwilson.fm on the Mac Mini. And when we are not actively engaged with it, the Mac Mini goes into screen saver mode and runs family photos that are sitting on a file server in our basement.

Not only are we watching less cable, we are watching less DVDs. We can get full length movies via Netflix, Hulu, and bittorrent on the Mac Mini. Many think that streaming video is not ready for "prime time" on a big screen in a family room but I can tell you definitively that is not true. We usually opt for streaming over file-based video due to the

Return PathOctober 30

Reputation is critical to most businesses, but on the Internet reputation takes on an even more important role. When you do business with a person or a company that you cannot see and you don't know, you really need some data about their reputation. Some of the most successful businesses on the Internet are built on reputation.

eBay, for example, maintains a rating for each and every user in their marketplace that is updated to reflect their reputation in real time. User reputation ratings in eBay are crucial for creating an accountable, safe, and reliable community of buyers and sellers. Google's page rank algorithm, that is the heart of their search engine, effectively measures the reputation of each and every page on the Internet and returns search results sorted by those pages that have the best reputations for a given keyword.

We are constantly looking for investment opportunities in other Internet businesses that are built on reputation and several months ago, we closed an investment in a Company that we know well and have been working with for quite a while already.

That company is called Return Path and they are the leading provider of email sender reputation data, deliverability, and whitelisting through a service called Sender Score. The Sender Score database tracks email senders (using the sending domain and IP address of the mail server that each and every commercial mailer uses to send their emai

Why The Flow Of Innovation Has ReversedSeptember 29

I had a beer recently with Dave McClure of 500 Hats. As is always the case when I get together with Dave, we had a long, rambling and enjoyable conversation about how the Web is changing the way businesses get built.

At some point, I said that the vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

Dave immediately said he’d give me three months to blog that before he did. I thought that was generous even for me who doesn’t blog easily or often. But just to be sure I make the deadline, here is the post.

The basic insight that the flow of innovation has reversed has been out there as a meme for a while. Fred wrote about it and referenced Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 article. I took a shot at why it was happening; I focused on changes in the way services are built and their complexity. The conversation that Dave and I had was more about how

Power to the PeopleSeptember 22

We encourage our portfolio companies to make sure they take time out from the operational demands of their business to think about the bigger strategic picture. We do the same for USV and a couple of weeks ago took a day off to discuss how we think the web itself is changing, how the web is changing industries and society, and as a result how opportunities for startups are changing. One of the best ways we have found to think about change is to identify those principles that appear to drive the change and that themselves can provide a bit of a constant. In other words to understand what’s changing, you need to understand what is staying the same.

To that end we first looked at the characteristics of opportunities that we had set out as far back as 2004: technology leverage, disruption of markets, no gatekeepers, capital efficiency, data asset/network effect defensibility. We believe that all of these still apply and they are all still things that we look for in opportunities. But these also point to important changes. It used to be that mobile was a walled garden environme

ZemantaSeptember 15

We've invested in a number of blogging related applications and services; Adaptive Blue, Delicious, Disqus, FeedBurner, Outside.in, Twitter, and Tumblr. We've been attracted to this sector for a number of reason; because an increasing amount of content is produced with these kinds of tools and services, because traditional media is increasingly adopting these tools and services themselves, and because our personal usage has given us a deep understanding of these tools and services.

Today we are announcing yet another investment in this sector, a small company in Slovenia and London called Zemanta. Zemanta is a service that's focused on helping the blogger/content creator make the process of creating their content simpler and easier. As you write, Zemanta processes all of your text (like a spell checker in a word processing program does) and suggests things