VC (and Twitter Investor) Fred Wilson to Speak at the Googleplex on Disruption: Help Him Write His Speech
by Kara Swisher
Posted on May 11, 2009 at 7:02 AM PT
Well-known venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson will be at Google Wednesday to give a talk about “disruptive industries.”
The Googlers should be mighty interested given that the object of their current annoyance and desire, Twitter, is one of the hottest start-up investments of late for Wilson’s Union Square Ventures.
Before Google (GOOG) execs–you know who you are, David Lawee and Marissa Mayer–try to hand over a big bag of money to Wilson to stop the microblogging madness, Wilson asked readers in a post to help him improve the talk.
Here is his speech deck and the description of the talk (a common occurrence at Google’s Silicon Valley campus, by the way):
Fred will be talking about “disruptive industries.” Media/entertainment has taken the brunt of the disruptive force of the Internet and Internet technology but that’s just the start. What industries are next? Energy, education, consumer finance, and health care all seem ripe. What are those industries going to look like in 20 years, 40 years, 60 years?
Comments
thanks for the post Kara.
to all of kara’s readers, if you have thoughts on my presentation, particularly how I can improve it, please do not leave them here because i might not see them.
do me a favor and leave them here instead
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/0.....ption.html
kara – what would be really great is if you would embed the disqus comment thread to the end of the post so we could have one set of comments on both of these posts
alley insider does that when they reblog my posts
Posted by fred wilson at May 11th, 2009 at 7:16 amF:
We are working on the comment stuff after D! Then you and Bijan can stop bugging me and get back to not-selling Twitter.
Posted by Kara Swisher at May 11th, 2009 at 7:24 amDisruption for disruptions sake is stooopid. I’m still waiting for some use of twitter that couldn’t be just as easily (or in fact more easily) done with existing technologies. If limiting a post to 140 characters is a good thing, then why doesn’t someone come out with a Twitter2 that limits you to 20 characters? Yes, 140 characters are aimed at cell phone text messages, but future cell phones (at least the ones used by Twitterers) will almost certainly include web browsers that don’t impose this limit.
I read today that some NY Post writer is posting the equivalent of a book on Twitter! WHY?
It’s nonsense.
Posted by Mac Beach at May 11th, 2009 at 1:04 pmfred’s slides are good but generic. something you would find in any vc doing a talk… nothing *disruptive* in his presentation, all common sense…things already known…cell phones for payments, etc. it’s already live in japan, etc.
i was hoping for something eye opening…come on fred!
Posted by Sam Harrison at May 12th, 2009 at 12:50 pm