August Capital Summer Party!!

A couple friends I met at the TechCrunch conference and I managed to get into the annual August Capital Summer Party. This was big. I was elated once we got in. August Capital is one of the most respected and prominent VC firms in the Silicon Valley and the party had some very big people attending. Not to mention the awesome gourmet food, and the drinks. Some of the highlights of the night - I shook hands and spoke to Guy Kawasaki for a couple minutes! It was beyond amazing. He's a really cool guy and very humble. I also got a chance to talk to Ron Conway, a prominent VC in the area, who was on his way out. I got both their business cards :)

I interacted with many others, some of whom were CEOs of their own startups, some VCs, and one who was a professor, Andreas Weigand, at Stanford doing data mining research. I also recognized some MIT alums by their class ring! One prominent person who was there that I didn't get a chance to meet was Paul Allen.

All-in-all, the event was a blast! I learned many things and had tons of fun.

TechCrunch Real-time Stream Event

A few days back (yes, I am a little behind on the blogging...) I had an opportunity to attend the TechCrunch Real-time Stream conference in Redwood City. The theme was the real-time web. And as usual, I volunteered my way in to avoid paying the $99 student price. This conference was spawned due the increasing popularity of many real-time web applications that are taking over our lives, namely Twitter among other things. I personally am not a huge Twitter fan, but it is gaining a huge following lately, with all the media attention in Iran, etc...


The real-time web does not revolve solely around Twitter however. Many startups are jumping at this opportunity to providing real-time data. Real-time search has attracted a whole slew of companies trying to dominate this niche. There are also a lot of startups like NetVibes and Seesmic which are trying to congregate all the real-time data from all the different social networks and showcase it in easy-to-use application. Over the course of the conference I would estimate hearing about 100 startup names, and those only represent the prominent ones in Silicon Valley. Who knows how many have actually entered this space. Ron Conway, a prominent venture capitalist who has been known to have invested in Google, PayPal, and other big successes has estimated the entire real-time web market to be worth about $5 billion.

My views: Unlike many, I do see a monetization opportunity here. However, I also see room for only a few prominent players, Twitter being one of them. Two reasons: First reason is that right now, I think real-time is vastly over-hyped with hundreds of startups in this space. This is going to produce a lot of clutter on the web, which I cannot imagine users handling. This in turn is going to reduce the hype and need of having real-time instant updates all the time, leaving room for only a few players to monetize this space sufficiently to stay in business.

Second reason is intellectual property. There is virtually no IP in this concept. I can see there being one in real-time search but that will converge with traditional search algorithms, which Google is leading. In other domains, the winners are going to be decided because of aggressive marketing, viral-ness of the software, and UI design. Users are not going to be switching between applications doing the same thing as that will be a hassle, so whoever gets them first will win.

All-in-all, I'm not too excited about this space, though I will be keeping tabs on how things progress.