The next big thing is…

Augmented Reality.  After decades of R&D at universities I am convinced that the second half of this decade will be the beginning of a long boom on AR that will rival all previous waves of computing.  If you are starting an AR company, come talk to us.

The next social is “E Pluribus Unum”

After a decade with social media the landscape has quickly matured.  Web 2.0 winners (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc)  have something in common.  They are all part of the dependent web and are to social what early versions of Yahoo, Excite and Lycos were to search in the 90’s.

Who will be the leaders of the next wave?  I think it will be companies that bring conversational media mainstream.  Those that can link context across the independent web of millions of and vertical media blogs in places like Tumblr, Drupal Gardens, Posterous, etc. and create one out of many.  One of the best examples of web 3.0 is Disqus which is already used by a whopping 480 million unique users per month as of March 2011 (up from 70M at the beginning of 2010).

The chart below shows monthly users in the United States for Disqus vs Facebook.  

Disqus unites users across almost 1M sites ranging from the smallest blogs to CNN and Engadget.  In less than two years it has grown to be third largest network on the web and they are adding tens of thousands of sites per month. 

The reason Disqus is and will continue to grow faster in usage is because it links community across a huge federation.  You could argue that they don’t own their traffic but I actually think its traffic is a lot stickier than a destination site which can go away when it gets crowded and out of fashion.  Everything eventually goes out of fashion.  We have a long history of large destination communities going away and its likely one day Facebook go away too…the network effect can work backwards as much as it can work forward.  R.I.P. Firefly, The Globe, Tripod, Orkut, Friendster, and our favorite sewer MySpace.  They were all hot and they all went away.  Yes, I agree Facebook has reached escape velocity but as it becomes mainstream it looses the early adopters that put it on the map in the first place and early adopters never stop…they find something new to adopt…like Disqus.

What makes Disqus so interesting is that it enables communities on almost a million sites in a way in which the users can be linked across a large independent ecosystem.  With code embedded and content being created on such a large federation it makes it an incredibly sticky platform…one that will likely outlive the current generation of social destinations.

I think that’s the future and so I have voted with my wallet.  Last week I led a $10M investment in Disqus.

E Pluribus Unum.

On picking good co-founders…

The MIT $100K business plan competition invited me to write a post to help students. I can’t think of a better topic than picking good partners.

One of the most important decisions anyone makes in their life is picking who they get married to. Picking a co-founder is like picking your husband or wife. Startups are very intense life experiences and it’s almost a given that when you start a company you will spend as much or more time at work than you will at home. You usually spend years dating someone before you decide to marry them but you rarely have that luxury when you pick a co-founder. Would you like to be hitched to someone at work who you don’t like?

One of the things that I think made the biggest difference on the success or failure of my previous companies are who I decided to co-found them with. A123 being a great example of one of the best teams I’ve worked with.

Having started six companies I have developed some basic hygiene rules on what to look for:

Number one - different is better than equal: A startup’s chances of success are much better when you have a well rounded founder team. If you are an engineer, pick a co-founder who is good in business development or marketing.

Number two - friction is good but whatch out for mutual respect: Startups are very stressful and often circumstances put founders at odds on key decisions. There is a saying that it takes a lifetime to earn someone’s respect and a minute to loose it. Co-founders who don’t respect each other don’t make good partners. Figure that out early and save everyone the pain.

Number three - synchronized ambition and emotional maturity: Startups are always facing significant emotional volatility. One minute you are on a big high and the next you are on a big low. I think a really important quality of good co-founder relationships is to reduce volatility and bring each other back to the middle. I’ve met 20 year olds with more emotional maturity and ambition than a Fortune 500 CEO and thats great but what’s really important is that co-founders are at a similar emotional maturity level. Infighting kills perfectly good startups and there is no better source of friction than a mismatch in maturity or ambition.

The bubble is back…let’s resuscitate http://www.suck.com

Backward network effect…John, we need an update

About 4 years ago John Battelle wrote a set of great posts defining the concept of conversational media.

We need an update considering the leaders in the piece have mostly changed.

* Myspace is now Facebook

* Wordpress is now Tumlr

* digg is now reddit

How come so many popular companies went sideways?  It goes to show that even with a lot of traction a large site can be a fad if its a destination service.   Even with a lot of user generated content large web properties can loose steam in a short period of time.

Perhaps the network effect is as strong going backwards as it can be going forward.