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Joel Liu's personal annotations on this page

joel
Joel bookmarked on 2008-10-15 startup opportunity education environment
  • We do the same
    for USV and a couple of weeks ago took a day off to discuss how we think the web itself is
    changing, how the web is changing industries and society, and as a result how
    opportunities for startups are changing. One of the best ways we have found to think about change is to identify
    those principles that appear to drive the change and that themselves can
    provide a bit of a constant. In other
    words to understand what’s changing, you need to understand what is staying the
    same.
  • To us, this appears to be one of the great constants of the
    web. It is taking power away from
    existing large institutions and pushing it out to smaller entities and often
    all the way to individuals. In the
    process it is building up new institutions (such as Google), but the net result
    appears to be a distinct shift of “power to the people.” We see this at work in
    many of our existing investments: Etsy’s
    marketplace for handmade goods lets artists connect directly with buyers; Covestor enables investors to share their
    track records and discover each other; Wesabe puts folks in
    control of their finances; Tumblr facilitates sharing oneself; BugLabs lets anyone create a custom network-connected device. In each case, individuals are empowered in ways that simply were not possible prior to the web.

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 Oct 2008, by Joel Liu.

  • 15 Oct 08
    joel
    Joel Liu

    startup opportunity education environment

    • We do the same
      for USV and a couple of weeks ago took a day off to discuss how we think the web itself is
      changing, how the web is changing industries and society, and as a result how
      opportunities for startups are changing. One of the best ways we have found to think about change is to identify
      those principles that appear to drive the change and that themselves can
      provide a bit of a constant. In other
      words to understand what’s changing, you need to understand what is staying the
      same.
    • To us, this appears to be one of the great constants of the
      web. It is taking power away from
      existing large institutions and pushing it out to smaller entities and often
      all the way to individuals. In the
      process it is building up new institutions (such as Google), but the net result
      appears to be a distinct shift of “power to the people.” We see this at work in
      many of our existing investments: Etsy’s
      marketplace for handmade goods lets artists connect directly with buyers; Covestor enables investors to share their
      track records and discover each other; Wesabe puts folks in
      control of their finances; Tumblr facilitates sharing oneself; BugLabs lets anyone create a custom network-connected device. In each case, individuals are empowered in ways that simply were not possible prior to the web.

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