Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, is a preëminent figure in venture capital. He's been at it for 25 years: his first big deal was an investment in the Web community GeoCities, which Yahoo bought for about $3 billion in 1999. He went on to back startups including Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare. But from his successful perch, Wilson worries that his industry is in trouble.
Lately VCs haven't come close to generating the returns on their investments that made them stars in the 1990s. It's even becoming questionable what value they generate for society. IT companies are finding it cheaper than ever to get going now that they can rent computing resources from providers in the "cloud." Meanwhile, alternative funding mechanisms are proliferating. And because VCs often shy away from technologies that take a very long time to bear fruit, such as many in energy or biomedicine, some critics contend that VCs flood the world with too much money for ideas that don't solve big problems.
To read the original article: Fred Wilson on Why the Collapse of Venture Capital is Good - Technology Review
