cruel to be kind

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Fred Wilson is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of Union Square Ventures, twitters under @fredwilson and blogs on avc.com about web technologies, finance and venture capital.

We talk about

• why he is interested in the ways the web changes the business world and how internet companies can – while America is facing the downturn – grow and actually take market shares from existing businesses
• why he has, despite of the down turn, an optimistic outlook for web-based companies and will invest aggressively
• his fields of investment and the restructuring of the media industries
• characteristics of the kind of businesses he is interested in
• why the area of finance is in great need of being reinvented
• I think the time has come to change the way that consumer finance business works and make it work better for the consumer and be more transparent for the consumer
• why consumers should start to manage their finances on their own and how the web could help here
• why he started to invest in European companies and why it is difficult to finance projects based in Asia
• in which areas of (web) technology Europe is ahead of the States and more innovative
• why European entrepreneurs should rather take a global approach when doing business and some advantages of European entrepreneurs over their American counterparts

Download MP3 (22:30 min, 13.2 MB)

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