EarlyStageVC

The Quiet Disruption in Process

Hi. I’m back. Well, at least for a moment.   I’m been radio silent for a while because I didn’t feel I had much to say. Blogger’s block, perhaps. I prefer to think of it as editing in extremis.

Over the past few months we have seen the rise of “cloud computing” or “platform as a service” as evolution in the world of IT.   From one perspective it is an incremental evolution.  We have moved from proprietary data centers to hosting environments to platform environments.   The technology isn’t what is revolutionary; it is the economic model.

Go back to 1998.  We bought big iron, big o/s, big RDBMS, and big pipes all in service of building web applications.   Open source drastically cut the entry price for a good idea.   We saw an explosion of creativity unleashed in Web 2.0 beginning circa 2003-4.  The cost of entry went from millions to thousands of dollars.

Now the cost of provisioning the systems in entirely has gone to zero.  Google Apps is a free developer sandbox for web apps, at least for web apps that meet their design constraints.   I think it is reasonable to assume that the Python-only, non-transactional computing model that Google offers today will drive others to offer other computing stacks that support other flavors of development models, all equally free.  There is a phase transition between cheap and free.  I assume the growth of free application provisioning environments will cause another renaissance on the scale of Web 2.0.  (I will resist the temptation to label it. You're welcome.)

Let’s fast-forward another ten years.  If the market price of provisioning an application goes to zero more broadly, who is impacted?  What does this mean for

• SaaS application providers? 
• Enterprise IT?
• and vendors like BMC, IBM, and HP that dominate data center automation today?

Perhaps the value will shift from applications to infrastructure. Security, disaster recovery, archiving, etc., will still be needed - as services, not products. Freemium comes to enterprise computing.

We all know that the history of computing has been about platform shifts.  Free is the next disruption.  Like all platform shifts, it begins as a small but structural change in the economics of adoption. It ends with the re-alignment of the market, with a couple of survivors, and many more new entrants. 

Industry Standard is Back

After a six and half year hiatus,  the Industry Standard is resuming publication today.  There are two great lines in the original self-report of its death.

"The Standard was a victim of many of the same forces that have so damaged the companies it covers."

"The Standard's journalism was highly regarded, as well."

Well, let's see if they can avoid those forces the second time around.  Also, we'll see if the journalism really is highly regarded.  They are off to an inauspicious start.

Perhaps they can attract better writers than this hack.

As [i]Current As I Want To Be

In the past 15 years the Web has become the primary information source for over 1B people.  It is where we go to learn about anything and everything, from our business life to entertainment life to social life. 

Search has become the dominant method to plug the gaps in our knowledge. But we still rely on a hodgepodge of methods to stay current on topics and people we care about.  Some of us read online news sites.  Some read blogs.  Some watch videos.  Some get email. Some read their friends’ postings.    Many do several of these, sometimes several times a day.

It is intuitively obvious to all of us that ‘searching’ and ‘knowing’ are different modes of human thought.  What I know is persistent (modulo memory loss) and cumulative. I search to fill immediate gaps in what I know.  (Perhaps the most important thing I need to know is where to search!)

Staying current. This is the driving need behind the friendfeed, the newsfeed, and the blogfeed.  It is implicit in the water cooler experience and explicit in professional life.  Yet there is no fast, precise, and comprehensive way to stay current across our range of interests.  How do I stay as current as I want to be on the 10-20 concepts that are core to my personal and professional life, i.e., venture capital,  photography, semantic web, our investors at Crosslink Capital, my family, Facebook friends, portfolio companies, deals I am looking at, etc.

The key phrase here is as current as I want to be.  I want depth where I want it.  I want brevity and key ideas elsewhere.  I like Lewis Black, but all I want to know is his next TV appearance.  I invest in Software, a broad and nuanced category with dozens of meaningful facets.  I lose interest in some and gain interest in others (does anyone remember Enterprise Software?) 

About 6 months ago we seeded a company to tackle this problem of as current as I want to be.  Ramana Rao is world-class technologist in the field of text analytics.  He has attracted a remarkable team of technologists to attack this question of how do I stay as current as I want to be?  Not surprisingly, they call the company Icurrent.   

Icurrent is not yet another frontal assault on Google. This is not Search.  Search is for the gaps in what we already know.  This is really about knowing.  If we do our job right, everyone will know it; everyone will use it.

We’re approaching the next phase in our development.  It is time to inject the team with the right business DNA.  We need to find a Chief User Acquisition Officer – for lack of a better descriptor.  This is not about SEM, SEO, advertising, subscriptions, freemium, yadda yadda.   All these choices are part of the job, But what Ramana really wants is a business partner – one who can see the business from all facets (product, distribution, monetization) and can help forge the plan for user acquisition and retention.  (It would be nice to have this person on-board in the Spring when we raise our first significant venture round.)

The ‘revenue model’ is self-evident. It is going to look like every intermediary business on the Web.  That is not the hard problem.  The opportunity is in the interaction between the user experience and the business.  The right executive will know what this means and be energized by the idea.

So, let me know if you know anyone who is interested in hanging around with a bunch of ex-PARC and Stanford CS folks working on a big, hairy, audacious idea and has the business experience and context that makes him or her up to the challenge.  Better yet, let Ramana know.