NYC30 on NY interviewed NY venture capitalist Fred Wilson on what investors are looking for in 2010, what qualities make up a successful entrepreneur and what advice he can give to those new on the scene. If you are into startups and the tech scene, chances are you know who Fred Wilson is. Mr. Wilson is a very, very successful venture capitalist in New York and has stake in companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Disqus. He’s one of the more active VC’s in the blogosphere and writes daily on his “musings of a VC in NYC” blog at avc.com.

When asked “What mistakes do you see startups commonly make?” he replied:

One mistake I see people make is that they hire out the development of the technology. So they have the idea, but they’re not technical enough to write the code themselves and so they find a development shop, an outsourced development shop of some sort, and they turn over the building of the product to them. And I think that’s a huge mistake.

I think companies need to have the engineers as part of the core founding team and they need to be all working out of the same room and working together and committed for the long-haul. A company needs to own its engineering and product, in a way that you could never own it if you hired someone else to build it.

This answer surprised me. Not the fact that so many startups were outsourcing, but that it’s a mistake. Personally, I have decided to go the route of outsourcing development for my two projects. Milwaukee seems to lack the startup atmosphere and not many are willing to work long hours for no pay. In a perfect world (or, Silicon Valley) co-founders are easy to find… almost as easy as it is to find a place to buy a beer here in Wisconsin. One thing that I would like to see are programs that foster entrepreneurship in the area. There are a few organizations that bring together groups like MKE Live for professionals, Spreenkler Meetups for designers or Web 414 for developers but none for the startup minded.