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.)