Fred Wilson (financier)

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For other persons named Fred Wilson, see Fred Wilson (disambiguation).

Fred Wilson (born August 20, 1961) is a New York-based venture capitalist, active since 1987, and a prominent blogger. Through his well-known blog and his investment in some of New York's notable start-up companies over the past decade, he is recognized as a leading voice of the venture capital finance community in the nation's largest city.

Fred is a co-founder at Union Square Ventures, a smaller ($125 million in capital under management) newly formed New York City based venture capital firm, with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as del.icio.us, etsy, FeedBurner, Indeed.com, Tacoda, and Oddcast.

In 1996, Fred co-founded Flatiron Partners with his partner Jerry Colonna. Flatiron, named after the Flatiron District, became a successful, primarily follow-on investment fund in the New York City area, with investments in notable Dot-com bubble successes and failures including Alacra, comScore Networks, Geocities, Kozmo.com, New York Times Digital, PlanetOut, Return Path, Scout Electromedia, Standard Media International, Starmedia, and VitaminShoppe.com. The firm's 1996 fund capitalized at $150 million with two investors: SOFTBANK Technology Ventures and Chase Capital Partners, the private-equity arm of Chase Manhattan Corp. The firm later raised another fund capitalized at $500 million with Chase Capital Partners as the sole active LP.^[1] In 2001, Wilson and Colonna essentially shut down Flatiron (although they still manage what remains of its portfolio). Wilson offered a blunt assessment in July of 2005 in Business 2.0 Magazine, "Yeah, boy, we really screwed up a bunch of things."^[2]

Prior to Flatiron, he was at Euclid Partners. Fred has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Fred is married with three children and lives in New York City.