 Image: Flickr/TechCrunch Ron Conway |
First he says the social web has hardly reached maturity. We've only seen the beginning of what's possible via Facebook. "Some 90% of the world's data have been generated in the past two years," he writes.
Conway thinks social interactions will be at the heart of most new products moving forward. They'll influence everything from search results to how mom and pop shops conduct their businesses.
Conway also notes how quickly startups are seeing success at the local level. Groupon built a multi-billion-dollar business in three years. Conway wonders if we'll see a startup become a true $1 billion business in 12 months in 2012.
The biggest trend Conway sees is something he calls "collaborative consumption." By that he means people area willing to share or rent things instead of buy them. Airbnb and ZipCar are good examples of this.
Conway concludes by saying why he loves startups. "The answer is quite simple: these entrepreneurs share their vision of the future with me. And every so often, their vision becomes the future. What could be more interesting than that?"
To read the full article, head over to The Economist >>
As do all of his colleagues in the VC industry right now. Having shown us all what fantastic value propositions and business Groupon, Zynga, Linkedin, Pandora etc are when they IPO...they need everyone to hold on just a little bit longer so they can cash in their chips on the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all - Facebook.
Zynga has a market cap near $8bn and provides 30% of Facebook profits (that's a dependency risk and a half) . So one could very reasonably say a good proxy for Facebook, right?
Google has 10x the revenue of Facebook and yet they want to IPO it at 0.5x the market cap of Google. So Facebook is going to be 10x more efficient at making money out of their plateauing eco-system?
2011 and the current tech boom bears many of the signs of previous distortion bubbles, meanwhile the Sand Hill brigade peddle snake oil and cash in big.
Shame of them to tarnish true entrepreneurialism with their Mafia racket.