Web 2.0 Services Venture Capital

Classic Examples of Web 2.0 and what Venture Capitalists think about the emerging Web 2.0

The Delicious is a good example

• Technology enabled service businesses are becoming very important

• Relationships between companies and corporations

• How you can do things with a very small staff

Encourage people that believe in

• Microformats

• Blogs and social collaboration

• Google is a very abundant service

• Abundance of information

• Google aggregates all the information on the net; where the attention is

• How to create a dialogue with the market

• We value conversation

• Research and Product development

How we want to operate with our clients

• We try to be as open as possible

• Through sharing the knowledge base we are learning all the time

• Blogging and personal blogging

• Our corporate web space is blogging based

• We operate in a very complex world

• We talk about services on top of the infrastructure

• What’s going to work in a particular context

The Dialogue helps us to see the market

• The emerging opportunities

• We share our own insights

• What we are paying attention to

• We don’t have time to process all the information

How easy is it to start a company today?

• Businesses that are application level are less capital intensive

• Infrastructure based businesses do require huge amounts of money

• Seed money is needed at the first start-up level

• Before companies needed 1 to 2 million dollars or euros to get a product out

• Now with Web 2.0 level businesses you can start with very little or hundred thousands

• The need of venture money rises when the organization starts to grow

Web services based company

• Google built its services with 38 million US dollars

• We have to feel comfortable about where to invest

• The Web 2.0 conference last year in November was a wake-up call for me personally

Being good partners to the entrepreneurs

• We have a very narrow focus

• Union Square Ventures is a venture capital company

• The opportunities are much more capital efficient

• There will be much more small and medium size companies growing in the near future

• We are interested in the edge

• In the blogosphere everybody can become the house theorist for a day or a week

We’re very well grounded in this sector

• How do you invest in web based services and applications

• What makes sense and what’s not

• Feed-burner? creating the use-base

• What is the promise of a company like that

• We try to be very interchangeable

Why did we miss the opportunity?

• We started to talk with people

• Publishing said that they will do their own feeds

• Publishers were very naïve about RSS in the early stage

• Providing a service to the publishing industry is to be between the margins

• Feedburner – the feed in its self had an intelligence in itself

• It became a very interesting thing

We were able to talk ourselves into it later

• We have the perspective on that market

• Delicious had some angels around and Amazon was there as well

• The raw material for venture capitalists are the entrepreneurs

• Delicious was all about how to bookmark on the web instead of your browser

• The categorization is very simple and easy to use

• Yahoo bought the business

• What all could have be done

Do you Delicious?

• It could had flourished much more as an independent company

• Innovating with business models

Are people being creative today with business models?

• We talk with entrepreneurs all the time

• Give a product for 30 days

• If you shift that to web services model

• Why should you cut them off by 30 days

• Don’t do the cut-off time based

• You have to rethink prices in the context of web services

• We are constantly looking for business model innovations

When you want your data back

• What is the best thing out there now

• One of the great things out there is now

• We take our pitch book and we are very lucky to find out

• How things come to our space

• We have been able to build up a disproportionally good reputation in a short time

There were two deals we didn’t do

• Side adviser – it tells if a web page is good to go too or not – McAfee bought it for a substantial amount of money

• Feedburner

• People come up with great ideas every single day