Vinod started by explaining that, contrary to the rumor, he is not starting a fund, he is just investing his own capital - hiring a few people to help with this. He was a General Partner in all Kleiner funds he was involved in, but decided to forego his GP position in KPCB XI (which means that he is less involved in the fund, and the firm).
He sees opportunities in peer-to-peer infrastructure: communication, media distribution and mangling (as in being on the computer and im’ing whilst watching TV - something I do all the time), etc. He also states that personalization has not yet started to deliver on its promises on the web.
Vinod states that there is still too much capital in the coffins of the VCs, even if a lot of the overhang (‘leftovers’ from the capital raised by the bubble funds) has been largely used up. This makes raising money ‘too easy’, and cautions startups being funded nowadays that they should not take this as a sign of future success (neither on their capacity to execute nor raise further funds), and that management teams should spend frugally by trying things at small scale and get market response.
On the subject of search, he recalls Excite’s rebuttal of Vinod’s suggestion of buying Google’s technology for $1M (very very early on) because Excite guys thought they could do so much better. Lesson: be open to other’s capabilities to disrupt your turf - even when you are successful (actually, especially when you are successful because you might become complacent).
The discussion moves to the topic of trust in the blogosphere, put in the perspective of MSM and reporting on disasters, like Katrina and London bombings. Vinod argues that he will trust more aggregated reports from hundreds of bloggers rather than CNN, even if there is no blog trust/reputation infrastructure (I would argue that linking behavior is an OK proxy for now - Scoble would say that this is what we get with Memeorandum).
I don't think so re. Memeorandum (as I stated earlier, his is a genuine big picture thinker and thought leader, Memeorandum is a step in the right direction, but in no way the final destination envisaged).
On the mobile revolution, he sees an increased usage, way beyond ringtones and wallpapers, into communication and new types of interactions. An example he gives is using cell phones to help people improve their english (a real challenge for Chinese, Indian… and French people :-). Just in Shanghai, there are over 5M customers/users of such a product.
Moving to education, Vinod states that kids now need to learn about sifting through thousands and thousands of search engine results on any topic they might research, and critically assessing which source to trust or not. He would use new communcation mechanisms to offer remote tutoring, and would open source textbooks in a wikipedia model - which would save billions of dollars every year in California that could be reinvested into more critical projects.
Staying with open source, he gives the example of patented seeds that could benefit greatly to developing country and their ability to engineer seeds matching their particular requirements and environment. This is not feasilble today because of patent protection.
On improving on Google’s relevance (question from Michael Yang from Become.com), Vinod sees value in collaborative filtering, and diverse applications of information retrieval and extraction.
(Via Software Only.)