Fred Wilson has a good post up about the Venture Capital and startup ecosystem.  My favorite piece:

It’s a small world. Joe Fernandez is a friend whose company ‘Klout’ I made a small angel investment in. It turned out very well for me. I love Joe but he’s not a hero. He’s definitely smart and cute. I was no hero for investing because I said ‘no’ many times before writing the check and got to see more proof before making my angel investment. 

So I agree with Joe and Fred for the most part but at the same time want to add that ‘entrepreneurs are not heroes’ in this boom. I believe the closest thing to the heroes in our ecosystem are the ‘first check’ angel  investors and the code. Yep the inanimate code.  The code we build our products with and upon. 

Fred wrote the first check into Wallstrip. He’s my hero. YouTube is also my hero. No so much the founders of YouTube because they were not the first to launch a video site. They iterated. They wrote some cool code that pushed the video ecosystem along that inspired Wallstrip. 

I have paid it forward many times writing first checks.  There are so many reasons for this amazing startup boom and it’s been wonderful to be a part of this wave and moment in time  but the code should get most of the credit.

The software is the thing. 

I’m sure it software could talk for itself Silicon Valley would be a much better HBO show as well 😎