Blog Renamed: Infectious Greed 2.0
Having been accused in a comment of running a “Web 2.0 Week“ here at Infectious Greed, I thought it best to just rename the site: Infectious Greed 2.0. I’m kidding.
More seriously, the ideas underlying any supposed change are what’s interesting, not the amped-up conversation itself. The whole dog-star-dog cycle of “Old Thing Sucks / New Thing Rules / Old (New) Thing Sucks” gets awfully high school-ish if you have been around tech investing for a while.
So why does it happen like clockwork every darn time? I wish I knew, and I wish both the predictable hypesters (you know who you are) and the predictable skeptics (you know who you are too) would go lie down for a while. Watching them wander around with no apparent idea of the part that they’re playing in an infinitely repeating tech market drama reminds me of a multi-dimensional Tom Stoppard play (“Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Get Hyped”).
The real question, at least the one that interests me is this one. Can you make money from this stuff? Yes, and there are three ways:
11) Build a hype-y 2.0 company that is fully buzzword compliant and sell it before the “Best Before” data. Happily, at least to me, that date has arguably passed.
2) Recognize that building a profitable company around conversations, open source, syndication, and blogs is really, really tough, so go and build a great & profitable tech company in some other area of consumer or enterprise software. Cool, do it and tell me. It could be investable.
3) Build a company that grows quickly and profitably by cheaply exploiting the rapidly increasing number of interconnected people and data sources online. Is that Web 2.0? I have no idea and I don’t care, but it could be investable.