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Who

Wilson is the founder of Union Square Ventures, one of New York's best known venture capital firms.

Backstory

After earning an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Wharton, Wilson learned the VC trade at Euclid Partners, joining the firm as an associate in 1987 before making partner. In 1996, he teamed up with Jerry Colonna—a Queens College grad who had spent a decade at the computer magazine publishing company CMP—to form Flatiron Partners. With $150 million in capital from Chase and Softbank, the duo started investing just as the Internet was starting to take off. They made a killing with an early investment in Geocities: When Yahoo! acquired the company in 1999 for $3.6 billion, Wilson's fund walked away with a reported $400 million. In all, Flatiron exited 18 investments between 1997 and 2000, taking full advantage of the bull market in all things Internet.

As the dotcom market crumbled in the early '00s, the Flatiron portfolio plunged, although few of the burnouts were as spectacular as the failure of Kozmo.com, the snacks-and-video delivery company that swallowed $250 million in financing (including $20 million from Flatiron) before eventually going under. Following the crash—and after investing $570 million in more than 50 companies including Multex, StarMedia, Jim Cramer's TheStreet.com, iXL, Kurt Andersen and Michael Hirschorn's Inside.com, and PlanetOut.com—Flatiron's 25-person firm was folded into Chase. Wilson and his two partners, Bob Greene and Jerry Colonna, continued to manage the remaining Flatiron portfolio (including several investments which later turned out to be successes, such as comScore and MercadoLibre) before Wilson joined forces with Brad Burnham, a former general partner at AT&T Ventures, to form Union Square Ventures in 2003 with $125 million in capital.

Of note

Flatiron Partners wasn't New York's first tech-focused venture fund or its biggest, but it became one of the most high-profile firms during the Internet boom—and turned Wilson into a Silicon Alley celebrity—serving as a symbol of those frothy days back in 1999 when any 25-year-old with a decent idea could raise $5 million and set up shop in a big loft in SoHo with a foosball table.

To some extent, things are different these days: Union Square Ventures has been more discriminating about its investments this time around. While it's too soon to tell how the fund will ultimately do, Wilson has already had a handful of successes. The bookmarks tracking service De.licio.us was sold to Yahoo! for $30 million in late 2005. (Wilson reportedly wanted to hold out for more, but company founder Josh Schachter wanted to cash out.) He also scored with Feedburner, which was sold to Google for $100 million, and the advertising network Tacoda, which was picked up by AOL in July 2007 for $275 million. Other Union Square portfolio companies include Indeed, Etsy, Clickable, Outside.in, Tumblr, Twitter, Oddcast, and Scott Heiferman's MeetUp.com. Wilson was also an angel investor in the video podcasting company WallStrip, which was purchased by CBS in May 2007 for a reported $5 million.

Off hours

When he's not sitting in board meetings, attending conferences, downloading music, riding on his bike, checking out concerts, eating dinner out, or watching a high school basketball game, Wilson is often parked in front of his computer posting to his popular blog (avc.com) or detailing the minutiae of his life on Twitter (twitter.com/fredwilson).

Personal

Wilson is married to Joanne Solomon Wilson, a former advertising director at Jason Calacanis' Silicon Alley Reporter and now a full-time mom, who blogs under the moniker Gotham Gal. (She also does a bit of investing herself: She invested in Lockhart Steele's Curbed.com.) They have three children—Josh, Emily and Jessica. The family dog, Lucky, passed away in December 2007.

Habitat

Until recently, the Wilsons lived in a 14,000-square-foot townhouse on West 10th Street that was purchased for $7.4 million in 2000 and renovated in 2002 using an architectural design by David Piscuskas. They sold the home in November 2006 for $33.15 million, setting a downtown property record for a single-family residence. The family is now building a new home on West 12th Street. They also have a home in Amagansett.

True story

In 1999, Flatiron Partners was sued by Barry Gosin's commercial real estate firm, Newmark, for using the name and likeness of the historic building without permission. (Incidentally, Flatiron's offices were never actually located in the fabled building; the fund operated a few blocks to the south.) Wilson and Colonna eventually settled the dispute by agreeing to license the image from Newmark.