Less is More

I did a panel yesterday at the NY Venture Summit with five other VCs:

Habib Kairouz, Rho Venture Capital
Charlie Federman, BRM Capital
Charles Crockett, Ascend Ventures
Greg Case, APAX
Deven Parekh, Insight Ventures

These are smart guys.  And they told it like it is.

We talked about the changes in the IT sector, the NY market, and the venture business.

At the end, our moderator, Stephen Davis, asked where all of this is going.

Everyone provided answers and they were all good.  I got to go last, so I tried to summarize.

I said, "in three words, less is more".

Less is more in the technology and venture business these days.  It takes less to start companies, it takes less to operate them at scale, and most smart entrepreneurs are raising less and diluting less.

There is this ideavirus (I hate the word meme and will never use it on this blog) going around right now about small is the new big.  I think Seth Godin started it.  Jeff Jarvis picked it up. And others are blogging it too.  I may have that wrong.  It’s often hard to tell where these ideaviruses start on the internet.

As I was riding my bike this morning (where I do my best thinking), I realized that less is more is a corollary to small is the new big.

Our dream at Union Square Ventures is to one day fund a company that gets to a billion dollars of revenues with less than 10 employees and does it legally.  We may never do it, but someone will.  Because less is more.