Today is one of my favorite days of the year. We are having the Union Square Ventures portfolio summit where for one day founders and/or CEOs of our portfolio companies come together. It is an amazing opportunity for everyone involved to learn from each other and hopefully establish relationships that will continue to bear fruit during the year. It is also a great reminder that by now we have 37 active portfolio companies which brings me to the subject of this post: disclosure.
I had recently gotten to the end of a gripping but unfinished story on Wattpad, one of our portfolio companies. So I decided to comment and ask the author to add to the story. Wattpad sent that comment out as a tweet and it got picked up by a new Twitter account called MrDisclosure, pointing out that I had not disclosed in that tweet that we were investors in Wattpad. This got me thinking about whether or not it is a reasonable expectation for me to indicate on each individual tweet whether or not we are investors in a company mentioned in the tweet.
Leaving aside that we are investors in Twitter (should every tweet include that?) we are also investors in foursquare and I frequently post my checkins to Twitter. We are also investors in Tumblr where I am writing this very post and will cross-post automatically to Twitter. You get the idea. There are a great many services that we are investors in that I both actively use and that are connected in some way or another to Twitter. Trying to edit every tweet to include an extra #investor tag for disclosure seems impractical.
I also don’t think it is necessary. My Twitter profile links straight to the Union Square Ventures web site, from which it is one more click to see our portfolio. I also happen to have fewer than 10,000 followers on Twitter and am pretty sure that most of them know I work in VC and am therefore likely to have investments that I will tweet about. Finally, if you really do care, all you need to do is follow MrDisclosure and you will be notified.
