Yesterday all five partners from Union Square Ventures ( Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson, Albert Wenger, John Buttrick, and Andy Weissman ) held a Sessions @ The Leonardo fireside chat.
The #usvsession hash tag hits several of the highlights. One of my favorites was:
There is no geography that has a monopoly on innovation.
Dwolla repeatedly came up as an example of this.
A few other things that came up ( unfortunately I don’t recall who said what ):
Do you even need VC money? Most companies don’t.
Do something that everyone thinks is crazy.
Some companies that have a product/market fit fail, nearly all companies that don’t have a product/market fit fail.
Things change, sometimes a no will one day turn into a yes.
Although the session officially ended at 6pm, Bryce and everyone from USV was great to hang around for a little while and chat with people.
It was interesting to hear Fred Wilson and others describe how they came to their particular investment strategy ( the application layer of the web ) and what sort of things have changed in the general VC landscape in addition to the specific changes around tech startups in New York. These guys talk to lots of different people about lots of different technology. This puts them in a good place to have a feel for the types of things that are going on and what sort of trends may be coming up.
Utah has some particular challenges in the area of tech startups. I spent some time talking with Jeremy Hanks for awhile after the session. Jeremy has put significant amounts of energy into trying to help the Utah startup scene with Launchup. He’s come to some interesting conclusions, he’ll be writing more about that later.
A big thank you to Bryce Roberts ( from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures ) for putting this event together.