I have no doubt that the mobile and social web are in inning TWO to borrow from my often used baseball analogy. The veteran venture capitalist in mobile will tell you horror stories and to stay away from this ‘Fekukta’ space, but I just think they were too early. The iPhone was day one of the true smartphone.
As entrepreneurs, investors and people focused on making a living, America, despite all the hip and negative talk that we are broke (we truly are and it matters ), is at the center of the universe for social web and a key growth spot in the smartphone explosion.
There are many exciting ways to invest in the demise of America, it’s why I invest in other currencies and own some metal and commodity stocks, but it’s very crowded. It’s very noisy at the public stock market level. Furthermore, I prefer to invest the bulk of my time and money in growth areas that I understand from the get go and areas that I can be passionately knowledgeable.
As Om Malik perfectly summarizes again today, the ‘Great Internet Buildout Continues ‘…and it’s a great fast read on what’s at stake and what needs to happen. Read it and let’s discuss ideas that will best capitalize on the continued buildout.
There are so many exciting, uncrowded ways to capitalize on just this one simple theme. Despite the bleak all-time high list for me to choose from in the public markets until very recently, my conviction in this trend has my portfolio loaded to the gills in the continued build out and I am having a continued blast being a part of the jetstream.
I have chosen to focus on the ‘Social’ aspect of the buildout and the sales and marketing niches that are developing. That’s where I feel my personal edge is when attached to this sector. I had my Social Web moment in 2005 when I started a blog on Google and got my first few positive comments. I was hooked. Today, those ‘moments’ are coming fast and furious . They are happening at an exponential rate.
To further drive home my thinking, here is a video that I watch often when I get nervous about my lack of recent diversification or conviction in the mostly profitless space to date:
Remember that you can learn to trade and make a living off the public markets, you should develop a real edge in an area of long-term burgeoning growth and participate privately, as an entreprenuer and as a public market investor. That’s how you will create long-term wealth.
The market bites right now. For good reason. Financial leverage and greed run amock. Guess what…It will pass.
The next long-term bubble will be bigger and better. It will be so because of Social Leverage. It is the perfect currency for making money. Furthermore, social leverage is not something any government body will likely have to control. Everybody will have access to it. Look at on-line poker. A kid in Russia can sit at the same table as a bank CEO in Manhattan. No edge. The US Government mucked that up. They won’t be able to for long and in non-gaming areas of leverage will not have any control.
More important to me is Social Leverage. Social Leverage is the value diverse and people on the edge of the graph can obtain from tapping the graph. Sure the super connected and rich don’t necessarily need or use the communities and therefore the graph. But they will listen to the noise because it will be deafening when properly used.
There are going to be thousands more Wallstrip’s built in record pace over the next century that did not even have the better developed benefit of current social networks. We had blogs, airplanes and Craig’s List.
Countrywide Credit, Enron, WorldCom….financial leverage and greed. They always end the same way.
Business built using social networks as the backbone…social leverage and endless opportunity. Thousands of ways to get in the game. It’s just the beginning.
I know where my money is being invested for a long time.
I have been thinking about the term that aptly describes the chase/war going on right for your social/business networking.
Yesterday I blogged about the possibility that Social Networks were UNDERvalued . I strongly believe that. I have used all the available ‘ancient tools’ – My Blog, Wordpress.com, MyBlogLog.com, hand written notes, mail, e-mail and the telephone – to grow my businesses to this point, but there is a new set of tools coming to allow me to leverage my social and business networking skills.
The good news is that as a customer in this war, let’s call it NERD WAR 2.0, you are not being forced to choose sides. We all win with better features and tools to employ our own style of social/business leverage. Marc Andreesen chimes in on the war as well .
Seeing that the media is nervous and cranky that we are in a social networking bubble, I thought it would make sense to look at the other side of the trade here and consider this is inning 2 or 3. I am long anyway so might as well speculate as to why it could continue.
Facebook is a benefactor of the MEGAtrend developing that is social networks. It has tapped into an amazing timing influence of cheap money, a booming global economy and venture capitalists with huge assets chasing a limited supply of MEGA deals.
I hope to continue to show you how we can continue to make money off the MEGAtrends in the public market of Search, Social Networking, Gaming, GPS, Communication and Software through Google, Apple, RIMM, ERTS, Garmin, Adobe etc… BUT ALSO contend that you can make huge money from understanding the intense smaller groups of trends that are developing and booming in all directions.
It is now almost two years since I started this blog with ZERO readers. Now I have over 3,000 subscribers (seems like a lot to me). I have leveraged my blog to build an amazing social and business network well beyond my wildest lifetime network dreams just two years earlier.
In the last 12 months I have grown my blog, managed and grown my hedge fund, built and sold Wallstrip with the help of a dispersed network of partners and friends, of course failed a few times as well, helped finance $100 plus million in real estate loans, started Biltmore Ventures (made 5 investments), been an angel in 5 investments that I actually lend a hand to in Silicon Valley, Phoenix, New York, Louisville and London and I just finally hired my first employee in 7 years.
This list is all an offshoot of my blog, the social tools I have incorporated and shows the power of the social network. ALL this possible personal growth and its offshoots was not CLOSELY possible without the social network.
In terms of friends, just this week I sat with Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), James Altucher (TheStreet.com), Quincy Smith (CBS) and Rikki Tahta (Covestor and Amazon.co.uk founder) four icons in the internet and stock and finance world that I did not know 12 months ago.
Obviously, MySpace was a steal based on Facebook’s new valuation, but kids in college already consider this a wasteland, so maybe social networks are like nightclubs, but I doubt it. As it relates to the behemoth that is News Corp stock, the stock has risen approximately 40 percent since the July 2005 merger. With such a conglomerate though it’s hard to figure out how much of the stock rise is general market and how much is MySpace. .
Going forward, what does that mean for other possible investments?
For one, I think Facebook is now set to do an IPO. They could use their valuation boost to do many things. They could make millions of others rich, for sure thousands.
To quickly solidify their space in business networking, they could gobble up Linked in and do an IPO right now. They may just try and figure it all out themselves.
To think that Facebook is the ultimate, or even biggest winner of this era of social networks is lazy thinking. There is too much leverage from so little to think that billions more investor capital won’t pour in to this space in the next 20 years.
What niche will trigger the next big social networking craze and trend? That’s what you should be thinking about as an entrepreneur. The tools have never been more available and starting a company never been cheaper. Media rarely asks these questions. The Bubble article above surely doesn’t.
I love referring to the simple fun book “The World is Flat’ and the term ‘Shrinking World’ and ‘Small is the New Big’. They are not just buzz phrases and/or too late to read. They are ACCELERATING in importance. I plan on continuing to look at the world with a ‘glass half full’ attitude. You should too.
Mike’s an ass (TechCrunch) and he and I have come to an understanding about that (he thinks I despise him..I don’t), but Covestor was Crunched today by their new writing honcho Erick Schonfeld, their east coast meanie, formerly of defunct Business 2.0.
At first I did not think that people who were actually good would want to spend the time doing this, but they are and I would too if not for conflicts.
Meghann and Rose in my office are ready to go though and should be live shortly with their accounts. Pressure is on as they are relying on Wallstrip stocks.
MyBlogLog started this for bloggers in a big way. It can go much deeper.
I was visiting the kickapps office last week in New York and they are on to something big. I think Wordpress, Google Blogger and Typepad could be the real launching pad for communities of the future.
If Wordpress were to roll out kickapps feature set within their software, the real community building could start and get viral from the outside in (or inside out ) .
My friend Bijan at Spark Capital was an investor in kickapps and I am excited to see what they create.
What a great trend unfolding here in social networking and community building on the net. Mucho money to be made here despite the noise. The winners will be gigantic.
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