Fred Wilson: Am I Bored With Web 2.0?

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/06/am-i-bored-with.html

by Mystalic • 18 years ago

30 32 18 years ago

avc.blogs.com

He links to this:

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/06/a_manifesto_f...

I'm having a hard time separating the above from revolutionary socialism, and the best I can do is simply admit that he's completely ignorant--doesn't understand economics at all, and is just spewing received wisdom like so much bilge from a cracked hull.

Google wants to organize the world's information.

Information has these qualities:

1. It is good.

2. It is mostly unstructured.

3. It is found in uncountable places.

So-and-so wants to "Organize the world's hunger." Hunger has these qualities:

1. It is bad.

2. It is a biological phenomena, rather than a product--something you can create, and then move around, and store, like information.

3. It is found in places with undeveloped economies.

...point is, there is absolutely no comparison. The two words have no points of connection. Information is subject to organization, hunger is not. In fact "organize hunger" is a meangingless combination of words.

So, as usual, when someone spouts literal nonsense, it becomes the reader's burden to figure out what he means. Fine. He wants rid of the invisible hand which has tricked google into benefiting mankind, and he wants to set up planning committees to eradicate (not "organize") hunger. And he wants startups to do this. Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the viewpoint, Harvard.

Want to end hunger? No, really? Okay, shoot the latter-day communists in Africa, set up strongmen who will protect property, and let capital flow. Period.

sugaku• 18 years ago

He does make a point that a good deal of the Web 2.0 resources are going into rather banal items: new chat, new social networking, making simple things a bit cooler and maybe a bit simpler. Can you blame him for wanting to be involved in more revolutionary developments, taking all of this great technology and really making a difference in the world?

izaidi• 18 years ago

I don't think the article makes enough sense to be called socialism. It sounds more like what would happen if you gave a 12-year-old a copy of Google's mission statement and a Wikipedia article about Joseph Schumpeter and said, "Misunderstand all of this, then write a thousand words about it."

fredwilson5• 18 years ago

hunger is not a biological phenomenon, it's driven by economics, politics, policy, and a host of other issues that we can change if we have the commitment to do so.

rokhayakebe3• 18 years ago

There’s pretty much nothing I’d rather do outside of family time than spend a few hours talking with the entrepreneurs who run OUR companies about their businesses and the opportunity and challenges facing them

OUR? Okay.

gabrielleydon• 18 years ago

Yeah. I noticed that too.

seekely• 18 years ago

I think it was probably meant more in the 'companies in OUR portfolio' sense than the literal 'these are OUR companies'.

rokhayakebe3• 18 years ago

I think he totally meant well, but I could not resist. I found it funny how one little word can have a big impact.

fredwilson5• 18 years ago

yeah, it's a bad habit of mine that the people who run the companies we have invested in call me on all the time. i don't mean that we own the companies. but it certainly expresses the ownership we feel of the opportunities they are chasing

rokhayakebe3• 18 years ago

I totally get what you meant (+ you are have one of the highest rating 4.3/5 on TheFunded), but it was just funny to me and I could not resist. I should I have added a smily at the end of the comment. :)

wumi5• 18 years ago

first, people have to care enough before they can change the world. in my experiences, many people just don't care about anything outside of their immediate surroundings, for better or worse.

second, the barrier to entry for a web 2.0 company relative to a company that will organize the world's health, hunger,thirst, etc. is a few orders of magnitude lower.

I've got a few friends with prototypes for companies that could effect serious change on the scale Umair constantly references, but they'd need several millions of dollars before having something that's even ready for mass production.

(edit: these buddies of mine, will end up working for corporate america in non-innovative companies because they just don't have the resources to be able to take their prototypes and build them into companies. One of the guys would need about 18 months and 6 full-time research technicians/machinists.)

even with PG's "be good" it's debatable how much the majority of YC companies are going to have a positive impact on the world ... but then again, is that their aim?

maybe Fred, Umair, and a few other big players idea/operations/capital wise should start a YC to attack those very problems with young, hungry, entrepreneurs. $250-$500k per entrepreneur should be fairly reasonable to get to marketable prototype/ alpha version.

fredwilson5• 18 years ago

that's a good idea. i have certain responsibilities to our investors that i have to live up to. but a YC to change the world is a great idea

ryanspahn• 18 years ago

Yes that would be a good idea!

As for organizing the world's health, we may look to the future toilet connected to the Internet as a solution?

Upon use this smart toilet sends your specimen data over the net to doctor's computer. If there are any irregularities in the data you receive an email to schedule an appointment. With the world using such a technology and all the data compiled, I'm thinking our life expectancy rate would increase!

Im not in the medical field so Im not sure if using specimen data would be a fool proof way for early detection of life threatening diseases or not?

*Not sure why this got dugg down? Is there someone in the medical field who knows this concept would not work or argue against it?

fredwilson5• 18 years ago

i'd like to say once more for the record that this conversation should be happening (or at least replicated) on my blog so that the people who don't know about hacker news can participate in this discussion

bootload• 18 years ago

"... i'd like to say once more for the record that this conversation should be happening (or at least replicated) on my blog ..."

Hey Fred, I note from your comment getting modded down indicates not too many readers care about where the conversation occurs ~ http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/05/a-vc-web-discus.htm... and thinking about it I sort of agree.

Quite a few hackers, entrepreneur types have figured out there is value to be extracted from "aggregation" of links and the associated attention. The comments here and at other places like friendfeed ~ http://friendfeed.com/fredwilson/comments

  "... 10 people liked it but nobody commented ..."

are the result of someone else working on building the software, creating the community and collecting this information. Maybe even making a business out of it? Downstream attention collectors are gaining the advantage by collecting your ("and many others") articles. It's not really fair, but it is also a "free market". Working for a rival VC firm does not help either. If you want your readers to benefit, do something about it. Manually summarise the best bits on your blog. Better still get some tools written to scour the Internet to do this automatically - a process that scales better.

If this attention leakage, the inability to maintain and capture attention is happening to your blog, a blog with readership and attention most hackers would readily kill for, it could also be happening to others.

An "itch" that needs scratching perhaps hackers?

Mystalic2• 18 years ago

Fred, with all due respect, there's almost no way to centralize the conversation anymore. Twitter, FriendFeed, Social Media, Digg, Hacker News...it has spread the conversation to many, many corners so people in many niches can discuss what's going on.

Yes, in an ideal world, the conversation would happen in one place (that's part of why I think Disqus was a great investment and FriendFeed is destined for greatness), but this is a fragmented world and fragmented conversations are going to always be a part of the world's dynamic.

goodgoblin• 18 years ago

"That’s partially why I want to spend a month in Europe and will do that starting tomorrow." I can't wait until I can offhandedly toss out comments like this and follow through on them.

jasonlbaptiste3• 18 years ago

well i think theres a lot of room to mix the two together

web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it allows us to do two main things: move information a whole lot faster and with people anywhere in the world that we may not have known before. similar to what zuckerberg refers to as information flow. if you could leverage those concepts to help do good in the world, i think that would make a huge impact. some companies that i can think of:

a) causes by sean parker and joe green. helping spread causes youre passionate about with your network

b) terrapass. helping buy carbon offsets and green products.

long story short, but my niece and nephew had a fatal disease. my family was told they had no more than 6 months to live. first thing we did was use the internet and find other families who were afflicted with the disease+ doctors trying to solve it. Theyre now 11 and 10 years old, because we were able to connect with other people who knew otherwise. This was back in 1998. If it were 1988, they would be dead. that right there is power. Think what we could do in 2008. Thinking about this sometimes makes me think that although I love what I do on a daily basis, the world doesnt need a software company. What ive learned could be used to build an application to help connect doctors, families, companies with cures,etc. more easily.

hmm, and my hacker news comment has now turned into a blog post.

wumi5• 18 years ago

Jason, a question to ask, of course, would be -- 'what about those who can't access that information?'

I believe this is why so many are saying that mobile is the future, because all that information flow moves to those without computers -- and even those with, wherever they are.

jasonlbaptiste3• 18 years ago

make it everywhere. I think you make a BIG focus on helping bring access to those who wouldnt know about it. We were fortunate, we knew about the internet and what to do. in 1998, im pretty sure not many people were yahoo experts (google was in a garage still). What about those in poor areas of the country + world? They're kids + loved ones are afflicted with diseases just as much as anyone else. I would have a huge focus on making sure they knew this resource existed. Mobile is also key. i think we need to make information ubiquitous across all platforms. the faster you can make it flow, the better.

xccx• 18 years ago

i agree that lots of problem solving talent could go to the root and tell a more meaningful story.. i'm hoping web 3.0 is less about threadless t-shirts levering "architectures of participation" for private gain and more about the next billion of us, connecting, cooperating, identifying and solving real problems, like maybe the biodiversity crisis and finding smarter energy.

maybe better connecting we'll have chance to bust out of our monkeyspheres and denials.. it's powerful potential. then again, in 1990's i remember a John Gage quote: "What stopped the vietnam war was we told the truth about what was happening. Now the truth telling mechanisms are a thousand times more powerful".. sounds great, but look what happened: the trwtf telling mechanisms of today have sold endless war with victims unknown and gross costs, all to control stupid and ugly oil.

yes i'm complaining.. no i can't solve biodiversity and energy.. the best i can do, in my dream, is work toward universal literacy.. so even the final billion can someday read wikipedia, get informed and solve real problems..

wumi5• 18 years ago

the original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222486

peakok• 18 years ago

"As the “rest” modernizes in the next 20-40 years, we have a unique opportunity to create a world where people all feel like they belong to the same society. It’s already happening in business. Look at the EU to see a model of what the entire world could become."

Scary. I thought 1984 was a popular book in the US, so why is that so much people buy in that "One World, One Government, One Society" distopian future ?

By the way, did he follow the actuality of Europe at all ? When we asked the people directly (by referendum), in France, Netherlands, and very recently Ireland, they said NO to the next step of European construction. A world where the technocratic elites go against the will of the majority (aka people) isn't supposed to be a model to be followed. That's precisely what is slowely happening in Europe, you can bet that Ireland was the last referendum ever organized.

dreish• 18 years ago

They still don't want to be governed by people with different cultures -- I think that's what it boils down to, and it's mainly a phenomenon of the lower classes who aren't really as hip to the Internet, or whose interests aren't broad enough to bring them together with people in other countries very often.

But increased communication, economic mobility, and business' willingness to adopt English as a standard language even in (gasp) France, are clearly knitting the continent together socially and economically.

I agree with the consensus that this guy goes a little nuts at the end. When I read it, I couldn't help thinking, "So, what, are we going to put hunger in neatly-labeled boxes?"

ph0rque• 18 years ago

> Organize the world's education.

That's what I'm working on with my app, ezlearnz

gscott• 18 years ago

Re: Umair’s questions

First you have to organize people. What I work on, OfficeZilla.com helps organize people accross hundreds of non-profit organizations.

For example Mercy Ships uses OfficeZilla to upload pictures, video, and documents created out at Sea and the communications department uses that information to raise awareness of what they are doing and raise funds to do more.

Organizing people is much more power then say creating a database of resources. Organizing people creates capacity to act.

I have a child starting 6th grade. Before she starts school they are having a class on how she can get more out of school by being more organized. Using time, etc. This way she gets the most out of her own resources. Non-profits are the same way. You have to organize human resources but it is not easy, that is where OfficeZilla comes in.

Fred Wilson: Am I Bored With Web 2.0?

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