Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar in conversation with industry leader, Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson, about why women — as founders, entrepreneurs, team members and potential markets — are great investments that are only getting better as the industry evolves. The discussion will also include practical advice on bootstrapping, seeking funding from angels and VCs, risk-taking — and getting to the table in an industry that runs on relationships.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He currently is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Fred has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Fred is married with three kids and lives in New York City, and streams some killer tunes at FredWilson.fm.

Rachel Sklar is editor-at-large of Mediaite.com, a former senior editor at the Huffington Post, the founder of social microgiving site Charitini.com and the co-founder of Change The Ratio, which promotes visibility, access and opportunity for women in new media and tech. She is an advisor to SBNation.com and TeachAIDS.org, and was formerly a corporate lawyer in New York and Stockholm, where she never learned to like herring.  

ABOUT OUR SPONSORS

 Hunch.com will be hosting the event at its NYC offices. Hunch personalizes the internet by getting know you and then making smart recommendations about what you might like. The company's mission is to build a 'taste graph' of the entire web, connecting every person on the web with their affinity for anything, from books to electronic gadgets to fashion or vacation spots. Hunch is at the forefront of combining algorithmic machine learning with user-curated content, with the goal of providing better recommendations for everyone.

The company provides personalized recommendations on tens of thousands of topics on Hunch.com, and is now partnering with other companies to power custom recommendations on other sites and applications.Test its intuition out here. 

Magnify.net is a platform that provides video curation, video upload and video encoding to 83,000 publishers, ecommerce sites, and communities. Customers deploy a Media 2.0 strategy — powering your video community with a online video platform that drives engagement and monetization.