NO Deals: Etsy, Twitter, Disqus Lose Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Sales
By DONNA BOGATIN • Apr 10th, 2008 • Category: BIG PICTUREYAY? Union Square Venture’s (USV) blogging managing partner Fred Wilson comes around, later rather than sooner: “Is USV changing exit strategies?” I headlined in February, underscoring the apparent about Yahoo-Google-AOL face of the venture capitalist’s incongruous “we don’t need or want consolidation of services on the Internet.”
Odd USV philosophy indeed, I pointed out, given that USV itself cheered for such a suddenly bad for “end users,” but “normal” consolidation play on the Internet. Wilson now seizes on Yahoo’s disarray to slam the entire, small universe of prospective big-pocketed portal buyers for his USV portfolio companies, crying “we need a new path to liquidty.”
Poor USV? Perhaps soon!
When Wilson pocketed Yahoo’s delicious money, he heaped praise on how Yahoo “handled the Flickr acquisition.” Today, though, Wilson erroneously laments, Flickr is but a mere “afterthought.” The USV partner may not have logged into his Flickr account recently: Video On Flickr! Yahoo announced yesterday.
Wilson also now puts the fate of delicious traction solely at Yahoo’s doorstop, apparently market unaware of the flood of social media services flooding the Web “market” competing against the not so proprietary delicious asset.
After years of doing his darndest to sell such non-proprietary Web services to deep-pocketed firms, Wilson has suddenly seen the error of his financial ways: “big companies buy little companies and the innovation stops,“ he announced in February.
Is USV now prepared to (not) put their money where their mouthes are? After all, Wilson is “sick” at how the hundreds of billions in market cap Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL, News Corp, maximize their shareholders’ value:
They are playing around with Internet assets like they are toys.
No more toying with USV portfolio companies Etsy, Twitter, Doisqus…sales then to the big, but now very bad, behemoths.
Wilson says he “honestly,” could care less about such Web leaders that he has nevertheless consistently courted for their liquidity values.
How much does he still care for Etsy, Twitter, Disquus…? “The company/web service creation process needs some kind of (new) end game,” Wilson declares on behalf of his USV financial interests, seemingly oblivious to hundreds of thousands of bootstrapped entrepreneurs for whom a successful “end game” has been, and always will be, the building out of long-term, stand alone, self-sustaining businesses, for their own full accounts.
Contrary to Wilson’s cry of “without a path to liquidity, all the innovation that is being created by the entrepreneur/vc equation will stop happening,” the legions of real-world entrepreneurs that put their own real sweat and financial equity at big risk for their own big gains will continue to do so, Union Square Ventures capital (very) optional.
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DONNA BOGATIN is the Founder & CEO of STARTUP ALPHA
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