Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is a venture capital firm that’s played a large role in the development of companies like Google, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems. And now the backer of these winning corporations wants nothing to do with Web 2.0.
Randy Komisar’s comment seemed pretty straightforward. Komisar, a partner at KPCB, simply told Tom Foremski, “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies.”
That sounds bad, but before everyone in Silicon Valley starts cashing stocks and buying canned food, it’s only responsible to explore a few possibilities. First: maybe Komisar has essentially “gone rogue,” and no longer speaks for KPCB. Second: perhaps Web 2.0 has lost its appeal (“interest”), but Komisar and KPCB still intend to throw money at it. Or, as a much more likely alternative, this could all be a matter of definitions.
Following Foremski’s article, Tim O’Reilly wrote, “I think the real way to interpret this comment is to say that if a company needs to identify itself as a ‘Web 2.0’ company rather than describing the problem they are solving, or the opportunity they are creating, then they are just playing the buzzword game, and aren’t worth investing in, regardless of the buzzword!”
Maybe so. This news, combined with the recent Bubble 2.0 talk, is still going to sadden a lot of people, though.
