Web 2.0 Reactions

What was a budding movement three years ago, at the dawn of the revival in technology, internet, and silicon valley, has become a full blown mania.

Everyone is on this game.  That goes for both entrepreneurs, who seem to be hatching new businesses at as rapid a rate as we saw at the height of the web 1.0 bubble, and VCs, who are quickly remaking themselves from enterprise software investors to consumer internet investors.

Last year at this time we were talking about interesting companies like Skype, Flickr, MySpace, etc.

Many of them are gone, gobbled up by the web 1.0 giants or the mainstream media companies.

In their places we are seeing second derivatives.  I heard one business described as Google Maps meets delicious, and another described as Skype meets MySpace.  When the first derivative hasn’t fully figured its long term business model (other than getting bought), the second derivatives are pretty scary.

I am a contrarian at heart.  This situation bothers me.

It doesn’t mean we are going to stop investing.  But it does mean we are going to be more careful.

We have to raise our hurdles when others are lowering them.