Signs of a maturing web?
Uno as Online, Products, Web2.0
Jun|20|2008
I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been getting that the days of garage web-startups are over.
My sense of the web is that we’ve reached some level of maturity where most of the apps we’re seeing coming out now are from established houses. Pownce came from the Digg stable, Twitter wasn’t an idea cooked up in a dormroom, it came from Biz Stone (read his history) and Evan Williams, established people in the web industry. Ning has had backing from Marc Andreessen from day 1. Sure that’s only 3 companys, but KickApps isn’t a small basement outfit either. Last.fm started out as being small app, but they’ve grown in stature and are now owned by CBS. If you wanted to compete with Last.fm, you needed to do that 2 years ago, but you need to be a bigger player to do that now.
Whether I’m right or wrong, I get the feeling that there is a myth that shit hot new startups come from a bunch of guys tinkering away at a project in a garage. The reason I’m saying it’s a myth is because I believe the real big web apps will come from large established companies, or at least established minds. I think we’ve matured to a certain level now, where you can just smack out a quick web-app, your app needs to have some level of maturity. I obviously still believe that we’ll see lot’s of smaller apps coming from garage startups, but the ones that will be more successful will come from larger groups, with funding already baked in. I don’t think that we’re in the Wild West days anymore. Maybe in emerging markets there is more scope, but then again websites are international…
This also of course means that if you want to invest in “building the next big thing” you need to start off with a pretty sizable group of people, more than 2 or 3 for example.
I’d love to bounce some ideas around on this, so please comment below.
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