Fred Wilson who invested in Feedburner and sold it for $100M, and who is an investor in darling Twitter, seems to have his fingerprints all over the news today that Feedburner’s former CEO Dick Costolo has become Twitter’s COO.

It’s a shame, when you think about it, that Google basically paid $100M for Feedburner but hasn’t exactly taken RSS to the next level. continue reading...

Found via Tech Crunch, here are VC’s Fred Wilson’s six words to live by on the Internet: Global, social, open, mobile, playful, intelligent — and a bonus seventh one: instantaneous.

Not quite “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but true words indeed. continue reading...

Yesterday Henry Blodget reported that Twitter is looking to raise a Series C financing round of up to $15M on a $60M pre-money. If investors bite, that would give the short-form publishing platform a $75M post money valuation and effectively dilute the company by 20%.

Previous, Twitter had raised $5M on a $20M valuation, whereby they had sold off 20% of the company. continue reading...

Poor Fred Wilson… after hits like Feedburner ($100M), Tacoda ($275M) and not to mention Geocities ($2.3B), looks like Fred Wilson has fallen on hard times.

In one day, he’s trying to raise funds, first by unloading a red hot iPhone, then by scalping two tickets to a Neil Young concert. I’ll try to set up a Donate button soon on this post, let’s help Fred out… the man’s got a couple of kids, after all. continue reading...

Wow.

All right, I lied, though a short post would be fitting for my first ever Twitter post.  Brad Burnham and that “other guy” Fred Wilson’s USV invested an undisclosed sum in Twitter today.  continue reading...

VCs and tech entrepreneurs have a convenient way of justifying products that media companies allege infringe on their rights: it’s innovation.  Fred Wilson, one of the classier VCs out there, argued in my earlier post “When Does Being Cavalier Become Criminal?” that:

The “disdain” [between media companies and tech outfits] comes from the fact that the traditional media companies don’t want to see innovation, new business models, and platforms that opens up their content to massively new markets. If they were more open minded, so would I be. continue reading...

I think the world of Fred Wilson, so this isn’t a criticism of what he said, but it does reveal a lot about the chasm between media, technology companies and the VCs that fund these.  In the excerpt below, Fred is talking on his blog about a NYT article on Veoh:

Veoh came in as an also ran in the web video sweepstakes. We all know that YouTube won that one going away. But instead of giving up, they’ve copied Joost and build a client side app that acts as a set-top box style interface to video. But, and this is a big but, instead of going and asking permission from the content ownes like Joost is doing, Veoh is just pulling all the stuff that’s already on the web. That’s the way to do it. Nobody wants a closed system anymore other than the content owners. Open wins, closed fails.  My only beef is with Todd Dagres’s quote (Todd is a friend who sits on Veoh’s board). Todd says: continue reading...