This week, I got the opportunity to participate on an investor panel at the Glimpse Social Discovery Conference in San Francisco. I was onstage with Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Josh Elman of Greylock, Christina Brodbeck (Co-Founder of theicebreak, and prominent angel investor), with Dylan Tweney of VentureBeat moderating.
It was an interesting discussion for a few reasons. First, there had been a pretty prominent set of press the morning of the event around a recent Paul Graham note to his YC companies and alums saying that the fund-raising environment was going to get more challenging as a result of the weakness of the Facebook IPO. Also, there was a lot of interest in the category of “Social Discovery,” in part owing to Facebook and LinkedIn’s recent IPOs, and with the excitement and interest that we’re seeing with services like Pinterest, Instagram, and others.
I thought the insights from the other panelists was great. Elman, in particular, whom I’d not met before, really I think framed well the whole category as basically saying that he thought social and social discovery was basically just replacing what he called “media”. I think this is apparent–but what I liked here as that he’s just thinking about it simply. Nothing fancy, just good old fashion disruption. Elman also pointed out, based on his experiences working at Facebook, Twitter and others, that for him as an investor, distribution is really key. Figuring out how the flows of the product and the sharing really draws people in and enables you to gain new users is vital as he evaluates early stage teams and business opportunities. Great advice here, and indeed this is something that in my experience many teams skip over or think about too lightly.
Another point that was a fun discussion was raised when Dylan asked us how businesses get built via social discovery. In my view, again, borrowing from Elman’s thesis that this is all replacing media, is that with eyeballs comes the opportunity for revenue from businesses. With all the information and intent information that these new services are capturing–where you are, what you like, what you want, etc.–the proposition in terms of promotions to offer are way more interesting and useful than what I’d call old world media. I continue ot believe that. I also talked a bit about how I believe that we’ll continue to see growing social media channels–how I interact on Path is different from how I interact on Twitter is different from Facebook, etc. Given that, I think we’ll have different media channels, as we have many different cable TV channels today on TV. This was basically just a reprise of articles I’ve written before.
So all in all, a lot of fun and I got some good info from. Hope to get chance to participate next year!
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