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- Web 3.0...The ‘S’hock and ‘A’we Phase...Speed and Acceleration
Web 3.0...The ‘S’hock and ‘A’we Phase...Speed and Acceleration
Howard Lindzon
April 08, 2011
Web 2.0 was for sissies.
If you built a web 2.0 company, you made some shekels, but who cares. Nobody was watching. If they were watching ( remember DIGG), people got bored.
Today, there is some ‘Hall of Fame’ execution going on. You should not worry about ‘traction’ and ‘lean’, you need speed, acceleration and a global footprint.
It is hard for a web entrepreneur not to have ‘web envy’ as one of your investors is a shareholder in Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn or Twitter and your silly growth chart in the board meetings is a fraction of the other guys.
It’s not just American web Companies either. Take a look at $SINA whose stock is a rocketship and a pretty pure play on Twitter. Some numbers:
It took Sina Weibo 66 days to reach it’s first million users and 177 days to the first 10 million, which achieved April 28, 2010. Since then the site has reached 100 million registered users it continues to grow at a breakneck pace.
The Web 1.0 phase was pretty amazing, but revenue was not on anyone’s mind. By the time you had revenue on your mind, you were cutting death spiral ‘Convertible Notes’ ( $AMZN ). You could only go so fast with Nokia bricks, land lines, cable to be laid and PC’s. It took a few weeks to get your business cards. There was no Facebook or Twitter.
Today, people are talking about a bubble because you raised $2 on a $5, you need 500,000 users to be taken seriously after the first year, you should have international demand, a chinese clone to legitmize you and a clear path to revenue.
The acceleration is happening at every aspect of the web 3.0 curve from launch to funding to A round to team and to partial liquidity.
What will bring down this phase is pure exhaustion as teams forget what it’s like to play ping pong, go on a bender or just enjoy the process. I talk about it all the time, but the pressure is intense. Not the pressure to start a company or get it funded, but the pressure from that moment on.
Our ‘win’ mentality is so wicked and cool, but we have taken it to new levels at the start-up web level that we won’t be able to sustain it and nurture it.
I am not bearish, just interested in the fallout and web 4.0 landscape that will quickly develop and what it will be called.
The Web 4.0 ‘Nesting and ‘Cuddling’ and ‘Giggles’ ?
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