Good quotes from IBDNetwork Stepping on the Web 2.0 Scale, with these panelists: Adam Gross, Shawn Hardin, Jason Pressman, and Sam Schillace.
Stepping on the Web 2.0 Scale at IBDNetwork Jan-23-07
Last night I attended the IBDNetwork Strategies Series: Stepping on the Web 2.0 Scale. The event was hosted at Shasta Ventures and featured these guest speakers:
- Moderator: Tod Francis, Managing Director, Shasta Ventures
- Panel of Experts:
- Adam Gross, VP Developer Marketing, Salesforce
- Shawn Hardin, CEO, Flock
- Jason Pressman, Partner, Shasta Ventures
- Sam Schillace, Engineer, Writely/Google
The panel addressed these questions and more:
- What does a scalable Web 2.0 business model look like?
- Is the ad model really the only viable option?
- Are you a feature or a business? How does this impact your business outlook?
- What are the long-run goals? Acquisition or go it alone?
- How does team building affect a company’s success? What other factors come into play?
I noted a couple of good quotes, the first were two answers to “How would you define Web 2.0?”
Sam Schillace stated that Web 2.0 revolves around collaboration. It is a better model for interacting with customers and quicker release times due to user demand.
Jason Pressman believes an ideal Web 2.0 application should be built with AJAX or a LAMP Stack. The application should allow interaction with data that comes mostly from the users vs. company generated. He believes a good example of a Web 2.0 company is Logoworks.
The next were some detailed answers to “What does it take to be a successful ad website?”
Jason Pressman believes that it needs to be a consumer conversation driven website for three reasons:
- Nobody is buying technology anymore, there is always more than one person developing the same technology
- Investors are buying teams that can execute and provide returns
- Investors want companies with defensibility, competitive advantage, IP, a good team
Pressman indicated that there were significant Web 2.0 opportunities for E-commerce: continues to grow, more people shop online; security has improved but needs to continue to develop; the key challenges are scaling and inventory.
There is also event recap on the Under the Radar Blog.
Event Recap – Scaling in the Web 2.0 Arena
Strategy Series—Stepping on the Web 2.0 Scale
January 23, 2007 | Shasta Ventures | Menlo Park, CA
Moderator: Tod Francis, Managing Director, Shasta Ventures
Speakers: Adam Gross, VP Developer Marketing, Salesforce | Shawn Hardin, CEO, Flock | Jason Pressman, Partner, Shasta Ventures | Sam Schillace, Engineer, Writely/Google
Scaling a Web 2.0 business is a very popular topic (we sold out this session a few weeks in advance) but there’s no magic formula, yet… Sitting in a room full of smart people is a pretty sweet way to acquire some knowledge; we all walked away with new ideas and new ways to look at how this business is evolving.
Here’s a summary of what went down:
Business Plans/Business Models:
-Sam Schillace claims Writely never had a chance to even write a business plan, they weren’t setting out to get acquired but it happened quickly anyway. “You don’t sell your business, a business buys you”. So don’t start out aiming to get acquired. It probably won’t work.
-A plan to make money from advertising had better come with a way to deliver a massive (or extremely qualified leads) audience
-Venture is investing in solution companies – find a problem and fix it, your team is as important as the software
-To become a large market blockbuster you’ll need to have proprietary technology, mass distribution, deep customer relations
Making That Dollar:
-It comes down to three ways to monetize: advertising, transactional or get acquired
-The money for transactional is in services
-The user is the buyer, stay focused on them, this is particularly true for Office 2.0, the IT department can’t regulate web-based apps like they could with desktop apps, so customers use what they like
-Users sharing apps with each other, using the web to generate sales, no actual salesforce needed (this came from Adam of salesforce.com)
Top predictions for the future:
-Kids think email is ‘too slow’ – grownups – pay attention
–Semantic web – that same youth market will grow up and demand the extreme level of data exchange that unbound data can deliver
-Commerce is a big market, there is still room for growth, another huge retailer/service provider may be emerging around the corner (but no one is sure what it will be)
-Mobile will be huge but gatekeepers (carriers) all want a chunk of anything new that emerges
-We predict that Office 2.0 is really the big growth for the Web 2.0, subscription and licensing are the routes to profit
-Advertising won’t work with Office 2.0, it will be driven by consumer facing Web 2.0 companies