One of Silicon Alley Insider's unspoken assumptions is that many of our readers know who Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, and the rest of the Union Square Ventures team are, and care a lot about what they think and do. That's why we write about them all the time, and why we're happy to run Fred's posts as often as possible. But if you need a refresher course, here's the NYT:
Mr. Wilson’s blog posts receive 20 to 200 comments from readers, which the partners mine for investment ideas and research. One-third of their investments grew out of these comments, including Twitter, FeedBurner and Zemanta, Mr. Wilson said.
Union Square’s investment strategy will continue to be tested. It is much harder to find promising Web start-ups now than three years ago. There are so many services and so much more capital financing them, and users have less time and attention for new offerings.
The partners said they planned to look at how Web services might transform sectors not yet touched in a big way, like education and the environment.
“We have only begun to investigate the impact of information technology on behaviors, habits, needs. We believe it can be profound,” Mr. Burnham said.
