Meetup - The Original Web Meets World Company
Something is changing on the web. We have lost some of the giddy enthusiasm that has surrounded the web since 2004. It was then that Tim O’Reilly defined Web 2.0 as a platform that leveraged collective intelligence. There is still a ton of interest this idea, but many of the recent conversations we have had about the web are colored by concern.
Though it is not often stated, I think insiders feel the web is coming of age, and they are wondering what’s next. It is not that they expect something new on the scale of the web, but they are worried that the insight that Tim defined – the leverage behind services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, and Twitter – is now broadly understood. They are not surprised there has been a flood of new services trying to mine this vein. The problem is the technically savvy core community of users whose early embrace fueled the growth of these services is running up an attention deficit. Any new service that expects this group to invest time and energy will need to displace the attention those users invest in existing services that have already achieved substantial network effects. That is not going to be easy.
Two things will need to happen if the recent pace of innovation on the web is going to be sustained over the next few years. The next generation of services will need to have an impact on the real world and the real economy, not just an attention economy driven by self expression and discovery online. These new services will also need to reach real people, many of who use few if any web services today.
Tim makes the argument for using the web to attack real world problems in this post: What good is collective intelligence if it doesn’t make us smarter. Tim’s point is that the hive mind of the blogosphere is useless if the rubber never hits the road. We can post and comment and tweet and tag and follow all we want in cyberspace; but if it ultimately doesn’t change anything in real space, we haven’t really accomplished anything.
"I've argued all along that the real heart of Web 2.0 is the ability of networked applications to harness collective intelligence. Yes, you can harness collective intelligence to build amazing internet businesses, as the past five years have shown us.
But what good is collective intelligence if it doesn't make us smarter?
In an era of looming scarcities, economic disruption, and the possibility of catastrophic ecological change, it's time for us all to wake up, to take our new ‘superpowers’ seriously, and to use them to solve problems that really matter."
So in Tim’s view, what’s next is the intersection of cyberspace and real space. John Battelle calls it Web Meets World. We agree with Tim, John, Umair, and everyone else who argues that the real impact of the web will ultimately be in its ability to organize people online to make a difference offline.
But none of these folks make the related point that for the web to have a greater impact going forward it will not only have to touch the real world, it will have to reach real people.
At USV we have been thinking about this challenge for the past several months. Our most recent portfolio company, Meetup, has been thinking about this challenge since it was founded in 2002. Organizing people online to make a difference offline has been the central mission of Meetup since the beginning. The team there has always understood that there was a difference between collective intelligence and collective action.
But the folks at Meetup were prescient in another way as well. They knew all along that the web would only reach its potential if it reached real people. Many readers of this blog will have been to tech Meetups. Most know of the political Meetups that powered Howard Deans 2004 campaign, and have informed every politician’s 2008 campaign. What may come as a surprise is that only 1% of Meetups are tech related, and only 5% are politically related. Most address the everyday needs of real people. Meetup, for example, organizes over 2300 moms Meetup groups in 1100 cities in 11 countries.
So we are thrilled to be an investor in a company that has been organized since its inception around the key insight that we believe will drive the next several years of innovation on the web – the need to solve real problems in the real world for real people. But we are pleased to be an investor for many other reasons as well. We have known the founder, Scott Heiferman since 1995. At the ripe old age of 36, he is a veteran of the New York start up scene, with four notches on his belt that I can count. The company he leads today so perfectly embodies our investment thesis that we have often used it as an example. It feels, in a way, like Meetup was always meant to be a Union Square Ventures portfolio company. Many of our other portfolio companies are aligned in spirit if not in practice. Check out these Etsy Meetups.
Obviously we think Meetup is perfectly positioned to lead the web to the world. It is, in many ways, the original Web Meets World company. It is also a great place to work and is, at the moment, looking for great people to work there.
July 23, 2008, By Brad Burnham
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| Tags: etsy heiferman meetup web20
Zynga Announces New Investment from Kleiner Perkins and IVP
Our portfolo company Zynga closed a $29mm round of financing last week which was led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP. We participated in the round, as did other investors Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures. Bing Gordon, co-founder of Electronic Arts and a games industry veteran, is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins and he will join Zynga's Board.
The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch both wrote about the financing.
July 23, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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| Tags: facebook financing games myspace networks social zynga
10gen
My love for computers and software started as a teenager growing up in Germany. I fondly remember my Apple II which followed my TI 59. I early on discovered that I could earn money with my programming skills and wound up doing some after school work for Siemens. While I mostly wrote code on a local machine, I got to do some mainframe stuff in Cobol. I was struck at the time by how incredibly cool and easy it was to have code running on a machine that was in a different city (Munich) over 100 miles away that reliably and rapidly provided access for thousands of Siemens endusers across the world. That was almost 25 years ago.
The last 10+ years many of us have struggled with how to create a similar experience for not thousands, but tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of people over the Internet. By comparison to my mainframe experience, most of how we have done that has a Rube Goldberg-esque feel to it: Lots of machines running lots of different pieces of software strung together by tons of custom code and all of that is before you get to the application layer. Last year I wrote a post titled "I Want a New Platform” which describes in some detail what I believe is wrong with our present stack and what might replace it. A lot of exciting things have happened since the post in what is rapidly becoming known as “cloud computing.”
Cloud computing will fundamentally transform how software and services on the web are created. When the cloud is fully realized, developers will no longer have to worry about provisioning and monitoring machines (whether virtual or real) or whether they will be able to handle a 1000-fold increase in load on their service. A single individual will be able to create a site or service that can affect the lives of many millions or even billions of people.
The undoubted leader in the use of cloud computing is of course Google. In fact, it appears to be a crucial aspect of Google’s competitive advantage. Imagine coming up with a better webmail client a la gmail, but not being part of Google – leaving monetization aside for a moment, where would you have run the sucker and made it support millions of users? One might point to Amazon EC2. But while EC2 is a great platform for creating and managing machine instances, it does not by itself provide the kind of abstraction that is needed. Most people who use EC2 today still create instances that essentially contain the same stack that they might otherwise have on more expensive machines at a dedicated hosting provider.
Google has taken some steps of making their cloud computing platform accessible to developers through Google App Engine. But there are some serious issues with App Engine. Some of these Google will likely fix, such as having Python as the only available language. Others are harder to overcome. What if you are worried about Google competing with your business? What if you would like to run your code elsewhere? Given that cloud computing is part of Google’s competitive advantage it’s not clear that Google will want to ever make App Engine as fully fledged and portable as it might otherwise be.
Today we are excited to announce that we are backing a team working on an alternative, the amazingly talented folks at 10gen. They bring together experience in building Internet scale systems, such as DART and the Panther Express CDN, with extensive Open Source involvement, including the Apache Software Foundation. They are building an open source stack for cloud computing that includes an appserver and a database both written from scratch based on the capabilities of modern hardware and the many lessons learned in what it takes to build a web site or service. The appserver initially supports server side Javascript and (experimentally) Ruby. The database stores objects using an interesting design that balances fast random access with efficient scanning of collections.
10gen could be seen as a departure from the kind of investments that we have made. But in fact 10gen fits in well with many of our basic premises. First, 10gen is attempting to change the structure of a large market, the $20B+ a year hosting industry. Hosting providers running 10gen will be able to completely abstract away machines and instead provide developers with a platform a la Google App Engine. Second, it is doing so in a capital efficient manner. 10gen is not investing in physical hardware. Instead, 10gen is developing the software and services to run on existing hardware that has been built up and continues to accumulate. Third, 10gen is not looking to traditional sources of defensibility in the form of proprietary closed software or hardware. 10gen is opensourcing the key components of its stack and is actively recruiting contributors (if you are interested, check out the SDK and the contact page).
We look forward to working with Dwight, Eliot, Geir and the team they are building. 10gen has released an alpha SDK in time for OSCON 2008 this week.
July 20, 2008, By Albert Wenger
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Twitter Acquires Summize
Our portfolio company Twitter announced today that it has acquired a company called Summize.
We have known the Summize team and have followed their progress for the past year. Summize has developed a real time search engine for conversational media (i.e. blogs, twitter) and more recently has focused exclusively on Twitter search.
We are excited about the combination and believe that is an excellent pairing of teams and technology that will benefit the shareholders of both companies.
We have been eager to work with the Summize team and their investors and will now have the opportunity to do so through our investment in Twitter.
July 15, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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| Tags: acquisition summize twitter
Twitter Raises A Second Round Of Funding
Our portfolio company Twitter announced today that they have closed a second round of financing, led by Spark Capital and including Jeff Bezos' investment entity Bezos Expeditions. Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage, another existing investor, also participated in the round.
We remain very excited by the power of marrying communications and social media in the form of small microblog messages shared between friends and followers. Twitter will use the financing to shore up its infrastructure which is the number one priority of the company right now.
June 24, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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| Tags: financing microblogging twitter