Articles filed under 'Web X.0'
While in the technology and venture capital world, a mention of cloud computing these days is more likely to elicit yawns than excitement, in 99% of the rest of the business world it is all too often looked upon as ‘just another new technology’, something for IT to think and or worry about. Whenever I’m in this other world I try to make the case that ‘the Cloud’ is as transformational a technology as electrification or the invention of the microchip. In fact, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that it will be the technology that lies at the core of the sixth techno-economic paradigm of the modern era:
Just as Intel’s 4004 microprocessor was the catalyst for a wave of creative destruction in the 70s and 80s, will AWS prove the same for the 00s and 10s? Probably. We’re seeing it already. And it’s going to disrupt the hell out of the mastodons of industry across most sectors of the economy. Why? Because their cultures and leaders are entirely ill-equipped to face such a fundamental paradigm shift. They know how to play by the old rules. The strategic competitive advantages they built up over decades risk suddenly – poof! – to become obsolete.
And yet all too often, I’m met not with disbelief but with apathy, indifference. You can see the thoughts forming in their heads: “I’m a CEO, a business man, a producer! Why is Sean boring me with this technology stuff? Why doesn’t he just talk to the CIO?” Worse, too often when I talk to senior technology managers in big corporations, they also are disdainful, thinking: “Yeah, yeah, that’s all fine for your start-ups and Web2.whatever companies, but this is a real business. Serious. Not some website for teenagers to swap gossip.” Ok I’m exaggerating but a lot less than you think. Sometimes I figure I must not be saying it right. So I’m always on the lookout for good articulations of the potential and importance of cloud computing and its incredible relevance to anyone who is pretending to run a business. Especially a big one.
Peter Fingar has written a great one, a summary of the new book Dot Cloud: The 21st Century Business Platform. He sums it up nicely:
In short, Enterprise IT must extend out to Consumer IT, otherwise those companies simply won’t be able to compete. As we’ll explore, Web 2.0 has changed the landscape with social networks, and companies can ill afford to ignore the shift…
…Cloud computing isn’t just about on-demand IT; it’s about on-demand business innovation…
…Cloud computing isn’t just for small- and medium-sized companies and garage startups. Cloud computing makes it possible to create new business platforms that will allow companies to change their business models and collaborate in powerful new ways that weren’t practical before. What’s important for companies to consider is that cloud computing isn’t about technology, it’s about technology-enabled business models.
So if you know a CEO, or any senior managers (in any business) pass them this article. It will only take 10 minutes to read. And maybe it just might make them reconsider. And maybe they’ll invite me to lunch! 
If innovation grows at Nauiokas Park, some of the best seedlings come from the fantastic seedcamp nursery. We were particularly pleased that folks like Timetric, CityOdds and GymFu walked away winners from the London Mini Seedcamp in April after we had encouraged them to apply. And so with this in mind I want to encourage ambitious, intelligent and passionate entrepreneurs, young and old(er) to test out their vision, ideas and execution skills at seedcamp week 2009. There is only two weeks left to apply and I sense that the competition for places will be very keen indeed, so don’t leave it until the last minute to get working on your application.
On behalf of Nauiokas Park, I would particularly like to encourage and see more start-ups focusing on disruptive innovation in the financial services arena. There is so much opportunity in this vast sector of our economy and yet it seems as if many or most entrepreneurs tend to avoid applying their technological or business model creativity and innovation to this market. Clearly there are some barriers that don’t exist in other sectors or markets but by the same token, in many instances, the potential rewards are accordingly significantly higher.
In any event, for any ambitious start-up in Europe (or even further afield) today, applying to seedcamp is a no-brainer: even if you aren’t selected as a finalist, the work needed to submit a robust and cogent application will serve you in good stead as you look to build out and finance your new business. If you are a finalist, the contacts you make and the information you will absorb during the week are something that can not be bought for any amount of money. And if you happen to win – well that’s just icing on the cake! So what are you waiting for? Apply! You’ve really got nothing to lose.
For the last 15 years of my life, the biggest, most consistent and important professional challenge I have faced is convincing (usually well-paid) professional middlemen that the forward march of information and communication technologies is:
- Inevitable. And as Andrew Carnegie once said, it’s a waste of time to criticize the inevitable. Get over it.
- Sort of like electricity. Dangerous to those who are ignorant of it (don’t stick a fork in the power outlet); and extremely powerful and useful to those who understand it and/or can harness it.
Of course there are variations, and this is strictly anecdotal based on my very own proprietary inside-my-head number crunching, but typically the population in question looks something like:
If you are tasked with managing or catalyzing a paradigm shift, you don’t need to worry about the “Aging Rock Stars”, these people are either too old or too good to care about paradigm shifts: either they will adapt naturally or gracefully retire and most of them don’t mind either outcome (ie they can afford it.) They won’t support change per se, but neither will they actively resist it as they don’t suffer normal insecurities. Ignore them.
The second category you should ignore (“Toast – Clueless”) might come as a bit more of a surprise, especially as they typically make up approximately half the population; these are folks that are clearly doomed in the new world (in the sense that nothing they do today will be recognized as valuable, not that they can’t do anything else if/when reality dawns…) but are blissfully unaware of their impending irrelevancy. Like the rock stars, this group will not support change but you’ll be surprised how little they resist it – at least in ways that are potentially effective. I chalk this up to they fact that they don’t see the train coming so what is there to worry about? Resist what? Don’t get me wrong, on balance this population will be against change but there won’t be any depth to the resistance and so you can get sidetracked if you expend your energy here.
As a change-agent, most of your time, energy and resources needs to be concentrated on those who are doomed and realize it (“Toast – Know it”), they will fight change kicking and screaming; and those who accept the inevitability of change, (usually) get the potential upside and downside but are scared/unsure as to whether or not they will succeed at adapting. With the first group, you need a two step process: see if any can be brought into the second camp, for those that cannot (usually 80%) the only recourse is to try to isolate them and prevent them from doing harm: accept that you cannot please all the people all the time. The second group (“Good but scared”) is where you should spend most of your time and resources, showing them and helping them to understand and become comfortable operating in the new paradigm. Demystify. Be honest: “you know that thing you used to count as your best skill, well it’s useless now, BUT this thing you are very good at that wasn’t so important before well now it’s key…” Win them over.
The last group (“Looking to breakthrough”) are the adopters – they are your allies, but be careful don’t get too close: they see this (rightly) as an opportunity to become the new rock stars and don’t necessarily care about the overall market; if you align yourself too closely too them, you’ll scare off the 20-30% ‘swing vote’ that can make or break the success of your company’s/industry’s transition. Also you’re selling to the sold.
Which brings me (at last!) to my story. It’s about seeing the future of an industry by looking at the recent past of another. It’s about understanding that property markets in 2009 are like bond markets in 1989. And Estate Agents in 2009 bear a frightening resemblance to bond salesmen c. 1989. Both define themselves in terms of relationships and proprietary, local knowledge. Their ability to extract value from their chosen marketplace depends to a significant extent on exploiting an information asymmetry. Of course this is not all that they do, and certainly the best do much more and in fact rely on information arbitrage only tangentially, but nonetheless for a significant majority of practitioners, take away this asymmetry and you’ve taken away their raison-d’etre. (For those of you who didn’t have the good fortune of working on a fixed income trading floor in the 80s or 90s, but want to get a better feel for what I’m saying, both Liar’s Poker
and Bombardiers
are excellent reads.)
Often, perhaps even most of the time, the bond salesman of 1990 had an adversarial relationship with their clients; it was certainly a relationship based on power – the salesperson was seen as a necessary evil: they had access to the market, to prices, to information. If you wanted to participate in that market, well…there really wasn’t any alternative to paying an agent to look out for your interests, however expensive and/or poor the service. You could say this could have been true of any capital market but in the bond market it was especially acute: the information asymmetry is structurally orders of magnitude more significant than say for listed equity markets: even 20 years ago, the fixed income markets consisted of hundreds of thousands, even millions of individual securities. Clearly most had a core of consistent defining characteristics – currency, coupon, maturity – but beyond these their was a multitude of idiosyncratic variables that were very hard to keep track of but often crucial to determining value. The fine print mattered. And a professional bond salesman ostensibly knew how to navigate the fine print. And nobody – including the salespeople – had robust tools for managing, searching and analyzing this vast universe of securities – the banks and brokers were at best one-eyed men in the land of the blind.
And then the future mayor of New York invented the Bloomberg. And the folks in Seattle put a spreadsheet on every desktop. And a few crazy scientists in Switzerland invented the world-wide web. And before you knew it a bond trader could make markets in a 1000 securities instead of 100. And an investor could run an analytic screen on thousands, or tens of thousands of securities, without ever talking to a salesperson. And then electronic trading and bookbuilding came along and the customer could even trade without picking up the phone once. So did the salesman disappear? Well yes and no. The bond salesman of 1990 is no more: the job that essentially revolved around collecting, parsing and organizing scarce and opaque information in order to make a turn on a trade has been consigned to the dustbin: the most rudimentary use of 2009 technology by an intern would produce a service that is an order of magnitude better than the world’s best bond salesman could produce in 1990. But the value of a truly excellent salesperson today – even post crisis (perhaps especially post-crisis) – is higher than ever, as such a person can leverage the enormous power of the information gathering and analytic tools serving the market and synthesize what is relevant or valuable for each of her clients.
Hopefully you’ll have jumped ahead and understood that the property market bears a striking resemblance to the bond market. Take the UK: 26 million residential properties. Each one a bit different, but also large numbers that are relatively similar and can be benchmarked by size or postcode or property type (detached, etc.) It is abundantly clear that this market is more than ripe for disruption: most people now intuitively feel that the pricing structure is wrong and the business model is wrong. Information is no longer scarce and so people will increasingly resent being asked to pay for it. Think back if you can 15 years to 1994: you want to buy or sell your property, what is it worth? You can get a sense from the property ads in the papers but not much more. The implicit knowledge embedded in your local estate agent is worth something. Fast forward to 2009: using tools like Zoopla, anybody now has access to more powerful pricing tools than were available to the best agents 15 years ago. The same model doesn’t work anymore. (That in reality this model is still largely intact as I write is testimony more to the power of inertia and the fact that most significant business model changes happen relatively suddenly and violently rather than slowly and linearly than to the possibility this business is immune to change.)
So does the estate agent disappear? No of course not. Many individual estate agents will perish, but the best – including many new entrants to the profession – will not only survive but thrive. Indeed the individual or team of estate agents will become more important than the brand (ie Note to Private Equity firms: make your LPs happy, don’t buy anymore Estate Agencies…) The superstar agent of 2015 will enable his customers, embrace innovation: interesting property – how about a blog? and not compete on price discovery but embed these tools in an overall process that will create trust and a real value-driven relationship with their clients (who will be much more likely to become clients for life.) There is a fantastic opportunity to transform perceptions, to create a true profession. To become massively successful by adding real value to 99% of home buyers or sellers who today are at best ambivalent towards the agents and agencies they feel compelled to work with, and a worst are outright hostile to them.
If this sounds too easy, well it is but only because the informational substrate and transactional platforms now exist (or are relatively easy to invent.) That wasn’t the case 15 years ago, and probably not even 5 years ago. But somethings never change: listening Alex walk on eggshells as he articulates the benefits of Zoopla to estate agents is like deja vu all over again, as I remembered the first presentations of electronic trading and book-building to room full of frowning bond salesmen, arms crossed, minds closed. But a few of those men and women got it, and got it quickly. Ten years later they are now in charge. The lesson? Yes you need to be careful not to antagonize an important constituency in your marketplace. You may even go out of your way to be helpful to them. But also remember the pie chart above: don’t waste your energy on the irreconcilable, empower and co-opt your supporters they will be small in number but they exist and spend most of your time and energy ‘holding the hand’ of the strong minority who “get it” but are intimidated by the potential pace and/or scope of change.
It’s just a guess, but I suspect this approach – the empowered individual – is about to become more and more the rule rather than the exception at the top of the property brokerage world. I’m even wondering if it’s something I should just do myself…
Reuters reports:
Research conducted by the blog UberCEO.com looked at Fortune’s 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs to determine how many were using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or had a blog — and found they were mostly absent from the rapidly growing social media community.
The study found only two CEOs had Twitter accounts and 81 percent of CEOs did not have a personal Facebook page.
Only 13 CEOs had profiles on the professional networking site LinkedIn. Three CEOs stood out with more than 80 connections but they were all from technology companies — Michael Dell from computer maker Dell Inc., Gregory Spierkel from technology products distributor Ingram Micro Inc., and John Chambers from Cisco Systems Ltd.
…Not one Fortune 100 CEO had a blog. (my emphasis)
“It’s shocking that the top CEOs can appear to be so disconnected from the way their own customers are communicating. They’re giving the impression that they’re disconnected, disengaged and disinterested,” said Sharon Barclay, editor at UberCEO.com who runs executive PR firm Blue Trumpet Group.
The important thing isn’t whether they are blogging or not – it’s not for everyone – or that Facebook is critical for their job or their company. The important thing is that no knowledge – and (too) often outright hostility – to social media, the real-time web, etc. means that their understanding of the world in which they operate is frighteningly lacking. This has been a problem for time eternal for leaders of large organisations and is not specific to the advent of social media per se, but I would suggest that this time it is even more unfortunate than usual. One the speed of change and the deep structural paradigm shift that our society and economies are experiencing is more profound than normal ‘linear’ change. Secondly, their ability to ‘do something about it’ is real. In the past, I would of had much more sympathy for the corporate or political leader who said – “ok fair enough I’m a bit out of touch up here in my ivory citadel but what can I do about it”. Today that doesn’t wash. Or to a much much lesser extent.
So why are these leaders seemingly so ignorant and on the face of it disdainful of this new paradigm? Partly I’m sure it’s because they are really busy and have a never ending call on their attention: the urgent pushes out the important. This happens to all of us. More disappointingly – and here I can only speculate, I don’t know any of these 100 CEOs – I suspect that for many it is driven by fear. Not fear in a cowardly sense, but fear of looking dumb. Most people are afraid of this, and I’m sure toiling under the spotlight associated with running a Fortune 100 company only exacerbates this. These smart, ambitious, driven men and women must feel some annoyance after having spent 20 or 30 years climbing the corporate ladder to reach the pinnacle, only to find the rules of the game changed.
Here’s a suggestion. The Boards’ of these companies should ask there CEO’s to take a 1-2 month sabbatical to immerse themselves in the 21st web, preferably supported by a mentor or coach. When they came back they still might not blog. Or tweet. Or have a Facebook page. And that might be ok. But I’m certain they would have a much better understanding of why they don’t and what tools they might actually want to adopt. But most importantly they would have a better understanding of the world in which their company operates. First hand knowledge; not “Oh yeah my kid was telling me about that and tried to get me signed up. Damn teenagers!”
GigaOm writes today on the growing divide between the leading and lagging companies on the web:
The web is entering a period of intense creativity. Companies like Google and Apple are positioned to ride, if not generate, the momentum driving that creativity. The laggards are at risk of being stuck in perpetual catch-up mode. If that happens, the bluebirds will have flown for good — and the landscape of Internet companies will soon look dramatically different.
And yet this is nothing compared to the ‘creativity gulf’ that is emerging between leaders and laggards in other sectors of the economy, including in banking, insurance and finance generally. Only here, the leaders are still small and just starting to emerge. Further, GigaOm points out that even once this creativity divide is created and continues to grow, the deleterious effects of being on the wrong side of this divide can take many years to really start to bite:
Other Internet names seem mired even further in the past. Yahoo’s interest in a deal with Microsoft for “boatloads of money” is a headline that belongs in 2008. eBay keeps trying to recapture the magic it had five years ago. And MySpace is still trying to renew its lifeline to Google.
None of these laggards will see a quick end. They’ll be able to endure for years serving the people who haven’t taken to Facebook or maybe tried and then abandoned Twitter, people who are comfortable with a simpler, more familiar experience on the web. But it’s an ever-shrinking crowd. A decade ago, AOL chose a complacent path by maintaining its gated online community, shunning the migration of content and services to the web itself. And look where AOL is today.
Substitute ‘financial’ for ‘internet’ in the analysis above and the parallels are obvious. The big difference of course is that the analogs for Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter in finance are not yet obvious and indeed probably don’t yet exist (or are at the very early stages of their development.) However, the environment supporting the emergence of new digital leaders in finance has never been more fertile. This is one of the main reasons I created Nauiokas Park with Amy: in order to discover, support and develop the next generation of leading companies delivering financial services and products from the right side of the digital divide. The next several years promise to be exceptional vintages in our opinion.
In May 2007 I wrote a post entitled “A requiem for last.fm?” in which I expressed my anxiety (as a very happy customer of last.fm) at CBS‘s ability to f*ck things up:
As a customer, I just hope that in the medium term they are allowed to continue to innovate and especially that they are able to continue to treat their customers with respect. As partners. That may seem self-evident, but the track record of the music industry in this regard does not inspire much confidence. Indeed it is testimony to the compelling and real value of creative artists and their product, that the industry continues to function at all. If music truly was a ‘discretionary’ good, I suspect the industry would have collapsed on itself as customers disgusted by the convoluted and adversarial service they are asked to endure simply said ‘enough, I’ll take my money elsewhere…’ There is also the more universal (non-sector specific) issue of the inability of large organisations to avoid suffocating innovation.
So when I read things like this, well I wonder, sadly, if my fears are being fulfilled:
Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.
Here’s what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for “internal use only.” It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.
At best, CBS is living down to low expectations: once again large corporate antibodies do their best to kill off the virus of innovation.
It’s really sad because last.fm not only has a great product but one where – if CBS spent less time, energy and money on lawyers and corporate pencil pushers – and more on building and promoting the business – they would discover that there are real, paradigm shifting, monetizable business opportunities screaming out to be truly developed. But of course many, perhaps all of these would probably end up destroying the old businesses and ways of operating. Hard to get the turkeys to vote for that…
My last two significant music purchases, and the last live music event I went to were all driven by last.fm. The music purchases were buying (several) albums of a couple artists I had never before heard of which last.fm recommended to me on the basis of my listening history. No way I would have discovered them otherwise. No way. Not at my age anyway. And by the way both of these artists are reasonably obscure – ie have not been promoted up the ying yang by the traditional manufactured music business. So the profit margins are great. No wasted marketing spend. And the “Events recommended for you” functionality is quite frankly unbeatable – geographically and musically relevant. Blows any other events listing service out of the water. Awesome.
I’m a paying customer of last.fm but if packaged in the right way, I’d be happy to pay even more. And it’s not because I’m particularly generous. It’s because they provide a bloody good service and I think it gives value for money. And by the way I’m pretty unhappy about them having sent my listening data to the RIAA. I’m happy and chose to give this data to last.fm because I get value from it and I trust(ed) them. The RIAA? I can’t say anything nice so will leave it at that.
If Apple had bought last.fm it would be ruling the world right now. I wonder if this was ever an option that was on the table?
It’s lovely that you have a website and that you even allow Companies to file (some) documents online. And wait until Google and others find out about your revolutionary business model of paid search! (Imagine if Google caught on and started charging a pound for every search! I can’t believe they didn’t think of this, but think I should buy some shares in case they see this. Just imagine – they would make billions!) Isn’t modern technology wonderful? But although you do seem to be quite ‘au fait’ with this whole internet thingy, there are a couple really neat newfangled things that could make your site even better. Things like relational databases for example. And if you really want to live on the edge, check out what the crazy kids at places like LinkedIn and Facebook have done. And then there’s this stuff called UI and UX, but I understand if you think this is perhaps a step to far. Maybe in 2015. In any event, the blue is very nice. Most people like blue. Very clever! Best regards, – A. Director
Say you are a Director of a UK limited company. Say you are a Director of many UK limited companies. You would think that in 2009, you’d be able to go to the Companies House website and ‘manage your profile’, no? (Address, contact details, present and former Directorships, qualifications, etc.) Well, you’d be wrong. You can’t even search on a person. Only on Companies. God help the poor bastard who is Director of 50 companies and has the stupidity to move: 50 change of address forms to fill in and submit. Online. Sort of. (Only for Limited companies, by post for LLP’s.) Aaaarrgh! I mean c’mon! WTF?!? Just because it is a government organization doesn’t mean it needs to be devoid of innovation, especially since:
The Minister responsible for Companies House is Ian Pearson MP, Minister of State for Science and Innovation. The agency also has Trading Fund status which allows the agency to directly manage its own finances.
Maybe next time he’s in the UK, Reid Hoffman might want to spend an hour with the Companies House Board…(could be mistaken but a cursory google search would suggest that none of the Companies House directors are on LinkedIn so perhaps they do think they are on top of their game…)
In the ten minutes I’ve taken to write this one could sketch out the business model for Companies House 2.0 and given it’s key monopoly status, I’m sure you could build a killer revenue model (without fleecing your customers.) Better service. More revenues. Smarter business.
Please?
Ok…if you (C-Suite executives of Fortune 1000 financial institutions, commanders of capital and asset allocation, etc.) won’t listen to me, at least please listen to Fred. He’s a legend. He’s a star. He’s got 20k+ Twitter followers. And most importantly, he’s bang on:
[Don't ignore the slides. Go back. Click through the deck. Please.]
What he said.
Oh, and never underestimate the value of looking at the world through a different lens (link to my – now very old – AmazonBay video).
Carlota Perez is one of my heroes. Her fantastic articulation (in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
) of how technological revolutions mark turning points in long economic cycles, building on the work of Schumpeter and Hayek, is in my opinion an incredible lens through which to understand long term economic growth and its effect on financial markets. Her approach is a key foundational pillar for our investment thesis, and is why we feel confident that it is possible to generate excess returns by catching the long term secular economic waves that ultimately govern capital markets. (Think of it as the polar opposite of day trading.)
In her thesis, each successive long wave of the economic cycle is initially catalyzed by a technological revolution, usually only visible in hindsight:
My suspicion is that we are living through a “phase change” now (be careful, “now” in this context means a period of a few years, not “today” or “this quarter”…) – and so I’ve been wondering what will come to be seen as the foundational technological revolution of the sixth paradigm. The previous five, as defined by Perez, are below:
There are many possibilities, but I’m starting to think that the transition to cloud computing (enhanced by ubiquitous wireless connectivity) just might be it. And for the sake of taking a punt on what might be a good symbolic starting point for this revolution, how about the launch of Amazon‘s S3 and EC2 in 2006?
And it just keeps getting better (via GigaOm):
Amazon today said it would bring web-scale computing power for use in workloads such as web indexing and data mining to just about anyone. The bookseller now offers MapReduce (a programming model created by Google to help deal with incredibly large data sets) using Hadoop on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service. This allows AWS customers to access the power of a Google- or Yahoo-style server and programming infrastructure to model business decisions and analyze huges sets of customer or corporate data without having to invest in thousands of servers (as well as dozens of programmers). Dana Gardner over at ZDNet says one could think of it as having access to a personal supercomputer.
Just as Intel’s 4004 microprocessor was the catalyst for a wave of creative destruction in the 70s and 80s, will AWS prove the same for the 00s and 10s? Probably. We’re seeing it already. And it’s going to disrupt the hell out of the mastodons of industry across most sectors of the economy. Why? Because their cultures and leaders are entirely ill-equipped to face such a fundamental paradigm shift. They know how to play by the old rules. The strategic competitive advantages they built up over decades risk suddenly – poof! – to become obsolete. (from Dan Gardner:)
Think of it as having your own tuned supercomputer that you can plug gigantic data sets into and ask questions that will determine the course of your businesses for the next decade. Oh, and you can pay for the pleasure on a credit card.
This high-end BI value has pretty much been the sole purview of large, skilled and deep-pocketed enterprises. But there are plenty of people, researchers, government agencies, academics, small to medium enterprises, venture capitalists and the like that would hugely benefit from sussing out important trends and findings from the growing reams of raw data generated by modern businesses and societies. Talk about metadata on steroids!
“This high-end BI value has pretty much been the sole purview of large, skilled and deep-pocketed enterprises.” Not anymore… Think about that for a moment.
Size used to be an advantage in almost any industry…now? Not so much. New rules, new winners.
Thought experiment: Let’s take, oh say…banking. Which would you rather run (if say your life depended on success, which I know these days is a bit far-fetched but humor me…)?
- A greenfield start-from-scratch-bank (assuming you had access to sufficient capital to get started, say $100 million or so)? Or,
- [insert favorite megabank here] (assuming you had access to sufficient capital to not be immediately insolvent, say $100 billion or so)?
Well unless you are a sociopath as per Hugh 
and see the key metric of success being how many people report to you and whether or not global political leaders will take your call, I think the answer is pretty bloody obvious.
So what does all this mean? Well, for us it means investing in companies that are positioned to ride this wave (not build a levee against it, hoping it won’t break.) Some – like cohesiveFT are right in the heart of the technology facilitating this new paradigm. Others, like our most recent investments Zoopla and FX Capital Group, are building new business models adapted to the new technological landscape that will allow them to disrupt and extend existing markets. But it also means remembering that you can be right (about the future) but still not come out on top:
The network is the computer. - Sun Microsystems (1982-2009)
These really are incredibly exciting times.
UPDATE (jan2011): Great graph from Cloudkick via The Economist:
UPDATE (apr2011): Nice summary of recent MSFT white paper on the (overwhelming) economic advantages of cloud computing.
The deadline (midnight, 6th April) for applying to Mini Seedcamp London is rushing up quickly (where does time go?) and for any budding entrepreneurs out there with a company up their sleeve or in their garage, I can think of no better place to start ‘growing innovation’ than in the seedcamp community.
Mini Seedcamp London aims to connect the UK and Ireland’s thriving startup community, but the buck doesn’t stop there. If you are a startup team that is ready to wow us and you hail from anywhere in the EMEA, don’t hesitate to apply.
Mini Seedcamp London will be bringing together 20 of the best seed stage web tech startups with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from the UK and all over Europe to participate in a day of intense mentoring, panel discussions and presentations at NESTA’s HQ in central London.
London is increasingly becoming the hub of the European entrepreneurial ecosystem, with a high concentration of investors, startups and talent and we’re exciting to see what teams and ideas emerge on 20th April!
Of course as founding investors in seedcamp we have a particular interest to encourage the best and brightest and most energetic entrepreneurs and engineers to join the community but I think you’ll find that it is worth it. We’d especially like to see more companies focused on disrupting financial services and markets. Media and consumer internet are fascinating sectors but there is more to life and if an industry ever screamed out to be disrupted, it’s finance in 2009…So what are you waiting for? Apply now!
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