Technological Revolutions And Financial Capital
I talked about this book yesterday on stage at Disrupt and got a bunch of requests via email and Twitter for details so I thought I'd blog about it today.
Back in 2003, when Brad and I were starting USV, we were struggling to make sense of the bubble and its aftermath, what it meant for technology and what it meant for venture capital. If we were going to start a new venture capital firm, we wanted to start one that would be relevant, that would have a coherent investment thesis, and one that would make money for our investors.
Brad got this book from someone, not sure who, and when he finished it, he said "you have to read this." I did and it became the basis for much of our investment thesis. We concluded that the period of building and investing in the infrastructure of the Internet revolution had passed and it was time to invest in the application layer. But much more than that important and simple insight, this book gave us a framework to think about what the Internet was doing to markets, society, and business. We still refer to it frequently. And I think it is still very relevant to the environment we are operating in right now because the Internet is the mother of all technological revolutions and it is important to understand exactly what that means.
