Looking Ahead
I said something on Heather Green’s podcast that I’d like to repeat on this blog. Heather asked me if our investment strategy was changing. I told her that when we raised Union Square Ventures’ first fund in late 2003 and early 2004, we were very excited about the coming explosion in web native technology driven services and were determined to find and invest in a number of important ones. And if you look at the first five investments we’ve made, they all fit into that category.
But I also told Heather that a VC firm’s investment strategy must always be dynamic and that it’s important to be looking ahead to what’s next.
I estimated that we are now spending about 40% of our time looking forward to what might be next. We don’t really have a good inkling of what that will be yet, but its important to us to be ahead of the curve.
That doesn’t mean that we are ignoring the current explosion in web native technology driven services. We are still spending about 60% of our time in this area and certainly plan to make a good number of additional investments in this sector.
But hopefully you will start to see some new ideas, terms, and themes develop on this blog and our personal blogs over the coming year.
We are really just starting this process, but here are some early themes we are digging into; spimes, the internet of things, virtual words, avatars, second life, cyworld, natural interfaces, wearable computing, structured messaging, and several others.
We intend to be open about this look ahead. Most of these ideas and hopefully many more will start emerging in my tags, they may become tags ad even categories on this blog and tags and categories on the other services we use.
And as we look ahead and share what we find with you, we’d love it if you’d share back with comments on this blog and our personal blogs, tagging things for us in delicious, and of course, email, IM, and Skype.
March 23, 2006 09:17 AM, By Fred Wilson
Tags: future research themes thesis
funny, i was at lift '06 when mr. sterling described spimes.
frankly, spimes are a funny moniker to describe what could be next. i think that a good use of this blog would lay out logical reasons why and why not to invest in projects. be critical, be cynical, be truthful, tell us what works, be honest from the heart, be transparent, don't hold back... then we will love you...
- the yardbird's song, "shape of things" -
Soon I hope that I will find,
Thoughts deep within my mind.
That won't displace my kind.
Posted by nonecknoel , March 23, 2006 12:33 PM