KP halted? Really? What good investments have they actually made in the last 3-4 years? KPCB completely missed out on the Web2.0 while their competitors made billions. Look at their portfolio... it's devoid of anything that made it big in the last few years.<p>As for Randy Komisar, he's a new VC who hasn't had a SINGLE exit! He's been trashing Web 2.0 for a while now and has contributed to KPCB's decline. KP used to be a tier-1 VC firm that "got it" and in the past two years, they've become a tier-2 firm. I routinely tell entrepreneurs to go and practice their pitch at KP since they will ask tough questions and not make an investment because they won't get it in the end.<p>Look here how he's trashing Web 2.0 earlier this year:<p><a href="http://www.venturebeat.com/2007/01/03/with-web-20-its-easy-to-get-muddled/" rel="nofollow">http://www.venturebeat.com/2007/01/03/with-web-20-its-easy-t...</a><p>And look at his portfolio: <a href="http://www.kpcb.com/team/index.php?Randy%20Komisar" rel="nofollow">http://www.kpcb.com/team/index.php?Randy%20Komisar</a> <p>ALL duds.<p>Sour grapes, Randy?!<p>PS: No wonder Vinod Khosla left KPCB.. he probably got sick of slowness and influx of people who suck at envisioning the future and investing based on a vision.
This article is all based on an off the cuff remark by a single (often deliberately controversial) partner at Kleiner. And it's nothing new that people in SV despise the term "Web 2.0." <p>If Sequoia or Benchmark announced, as firms, that they were no longer investing in web startups, that would be meaningful.<p>Randy Komisar saying that "Web 2.0" companies are a lose is different thing.
I wonder how much of this supposed non-investment in "Web 2.0" companies is because traditional VC's like KP can't get the terms they need (or are used to)?<p>In the 90's to start even a web-based company, you would spend $1MM+ just on things like office furniture and snacks.<p>These days a $500,000 investment can get you a working "beta" prototype with users (or even paying subscribers) and much more infrastructure than it ever could in the past. <p>You can get your "Web 2.0" company rolling with less than a dozen people, in temporary (or no) office space. That doesn't need "Kleiner Perkins" level investments, so I can see why they maybe can't find any Web 2.0 deals worth investing in.<p>When $500,000 gives you something that you can start to make logical extrapolations from, you're in a better position to negotiate a lower percentage for the investors. This is good for founders, but not for VCs.
This comment/article aside - how many web startups have KP invested in recently? They've not had a major hit since Google and have spent their time investing in a bunch of other sectors. <p>There's nothing new here.
Ok, If I'm correct, this has been hashed a hundred thousand ways. People in the industry get excited about some new technologies, and a couple of new ideas, (portals, social networks, semantic web...there will be more) and a few somebodies make it big. Lots of other people say "x and y market could also use that idea" and soon it's a paradigm with buzzwords.<p>Now there is a group of developers and entrepreneurs equipped with some good ideas, some buzz words, and some drive, they all take these things to the VCs of the world. VCs are smart people, and I'm sure that they get tired of seeing 20 different angles of the same box.<p>Business principles haven't changed since the 1890s. You have to either do something new, or do it much much better than everyone else to make it big.<p>I think that the message that he's trying to give is "Give me something new, and show me that you don't need to bank on the success of somebody else to do it"
"At the end of the day, there is a deep, long term trend towards the network as platform, and to applications that leverage the true strength of that platform. That's what <i>I</i> call Web 2.0, and I know that KP is still investing in that trend."<p>The network is the computer bromide #38,323.