Discussing Disqus...The Case for Style, Instinct and Less Due Diligence

Before we start…I am biased. On of my funds has a $50,000 investment in Disqus in the seed round.

I have my opinions and I use this blog to flesh out my ideas and thinking and frankly, as close as I am to Daniel the CEO, I can only offer my opinions and the same thinking I would offer here. Furthermore, the uber smart and NON conflicted (directly) Mark Suster chimed in with a deep post on why he loves Disqus. My friend Mathew Ingram at Giga OM, with their awful commenting system :) has a great post up, so the elephant is out of the room.

Facebook has entered commenting. They are going to win a LOT of accounts.

If Disqus had a crummy product, a screwed up cap table and no cash, there would be cause for some concern in my eyes. You can’t ignore Facebook, they are like my mom with a cellphone. They are figuring shit out. Luckily for Disqus, my mom is not a user, they have a wicked cool product, a great team, sick investors (save me), the cap table is in order and plenty of runway.

If Yahoo had any mojo, Disqus would have been theirs a while back. If Facebook had style and a care about the ‘open web’ they would have bought Disqus for a more sneaky evil data set potential. As Mark Suster says in his post linked above, Google could/should buy them. A wild card could be AOL or another big media property. In the meantime, Jason and Daniel at Disqus have their plans for sure.

If I am at Yahoo today as a VP of something, I have two decisions if I care about user experience or community…Facebook or Disqus. I would lean towards Facebook comments. If you can’t beat em, join em and try to wreck Facebook from the outside in. In the meantime, you could clean up the comments that no one cares about anyways on your own site.

At Stocktwits, ideas and community matter most, so Disqus will continue to work very well. Facebook is not where people talk stocks…at least for now. From a viral loop and broadcasting standpoint it would be interesting to push everything through Facebook since that’s what Facebook wants us to do.

The social web is fascinating and the land grab that Facebook has won with seeming ease, should not be that easy considering the stakes. This is not quite like ‘oil’, but I am shocked that there is not more blood. The tech/web insiders are so quick to call bubble and attack one another with a keyboard and an ‘anonymous’ handle, but the stakes are massive right now and I am amazed that the pace of acquisitions is not much higher.

In the words of Chris Dixon, we need more ‘swashbucklers’.