Where can I get my web 2.0?

When I saw Michael Arrington's post today on the Top 5 Web 2.0 Venture Capitalists I started to get hurt feelings that we didn't even warrant a minor mention, after all we did fund Socialtext, Zend, and Ping... all pretty credible web 2.0 companies in my opinion. Oh well, my little boy still thinks I'm pretty cool.

What is web 2.0 and where can I buy it? Wikipedia says web 2.0 is a collection of websites that provide services to end users that will replace desktop applications, this is pretty vague. Is web 2.0 syndication of content? Is web 2.0 an ideology? Is web 2.0 a technology? Is it AJAX, Firefox, Flock, mashups, google fill-in-the-blank, ning zing wing and bing, del.icio.us, fec.etio.us, flickr, furl, spurl, wikis, greasemonkey, SOA, ESA, RSS, or NFW? I suppose it's all of the above, but the fact that it isn't well defined certainly makes it appealing.

In my head I have come to the position that web 2.0 is simply the synchronization of development and runtime environments with a scripting language that enables your customers to customize and extend your applications in ways you never anticipated. If I'm right that this theme will grow in the market then a number of infrastructure evolutions will be required and new categories created. It's what venture capitalists dream about.

Link: web2.wsj2.com.

Now of course, there is also a lot of attention these days around the fact that Web 2.0 startups should be small and simple (ala the small pieces, loosely joined and more quality by doing less Web 2.0 memes). But while it's true that monolithic software and sites the way we used to build them is a really bad way to do things heading into the future, I think it's discouraging folks from attempting grand visions as well. Changing the world is hard work, and harder to do on the cheap. Fortunately, and I think Tim O'Reilly would agree, the best Web 2.0 places will require no advertising whatsoever. They will spread like wildfire on the strength of their own virtues. And besides, the cost of an Internet startup is a fraction of what it used to be.

Comments

[Steve Shu]

"... my little boy still thinks I'm pretty cool ..." Do you have to dress up like Batman like I do to get that kind of treatment? :)

As for the list, I'm actually surprised there aren't some other names on the list too. I think it's great when larger companies invest. Although you don't need to respond, it might be interesting to get your perspectives on whether you (as part of SAP Ventures) ever need/can put anticompetitive measures clauses as part of the equity papers or whether there are any new corporate VC terms you are seeing these days.

[jeff]

batman scares him, he's a Higglytown Heroes man himself. :)

We haven't done any exotic clauses in our standard side letter, we do put in a confidentiality clause and board observer rights but that's about it. It really depends on the corporate investor, some of them can get pretty demanding.

[Jeff Clavier]

Eh Dude, you made the CNet 100 list - got to leave some lists to others :-).

[Dan Gottlieb]

Jeff,

I like your definition of web 2.0, but when I'm asked what it is (which has been pretty often recently) I tend to simplify even further. In my opinion, web 2.0 is the embodiment of the Unix "small pieces loosely joined" model in web applications. Therefore, a web 2.0 site is a small component (or set of small components) with an optional GUI, that sucks in existing data from where ever the user specifies (storing data on the site is optional), does some simple processing, and then spits data back out (again storing the data on the site is optional). I wrote a short piece about turning a web 1.0 app into a web 2.0 app on my blog a few days ago (http://www.dan-gottlieb.com/blog/?p=5). Let me know what you think.

Dan

[jeff]

Thanks Dan.

and those "small parts" are "loosely connected" with a scripting language, whether it be php, python, ajax, whatever.

I'll check out your post, thanks for the pointer.