Fred Wilson has an awesome post up today titled Venture Fund Distributions – Cash versus Stock. It explains, in great detail, how a VC thinks about distributing stock (either from IPOs or from sales of companies to publicly traded ones) back to their investors (or LPs.) It’s extremely detailed, gets into the mechanics of it, and also – as usual for Fred’s posts – has Fred’s own personal viewpoints woven through it. This is by far the best discussion I’ve ever seen of VC stock distributions either in the blogosphere or in interviews. A must read.