I don't have a particularly well thought out road map for investing in social media. I just use the stuff as much as I can and I get urges to do things I can't do. The rest of our team does the same thing. Then we look for people addressing those urges. Every once in a while we are so impressed with these people that we fund them. That has led to many of the investments in our portfolio.
There are also times when we find people doing interesting things and we can't fund them, like FriendFeed or Wordpress or Facebook. We try to use those tools as much as the tools we have invested in because it's the using that informs.
My friend Robert Seidman, who was one of the earliest chroniclers of the Internet with his Online Insider newsletter, wrote me an email yesterday asking me to articulate my "grand vision" social media. He wrote:
There’s no doubt in my mind that you have a vision for what “social media” is and that it’s much grander than anything that’s currently happening. I think to some degree I’m simply not thinking as big as you are and so I don’t really see what you’re envisioning. I’m not suggesting in any way that you’re wrong, only suggesting that I have not had the “a-ha!” moment.
Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.
That's it in a nutshell. Many people will say that's a ridiculous notion. That not everyone is an extrovert. That most people don't have anything interesting to say or share. To which I say bullshit. I believe that we are headed to a world which everyone will share their lives with the rest of the world via the Internet. That is social media. It's a huge movement and we are at the start of it.
To read more from Fred, go to his blog.
