The Valley, which has so far been most unaffected by the downturn in the economy, may be reaching the end of it’s golden thread. Sequoia Capital, one of the largest Venture Capital firms in the Valley, had a meeting with their portfolio companies advising them to “tighten their belts” according to Om Malik of GigaOm.
Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson is a legend of contemporary venture capital — a title previously reserved for West Coast luminaries like Michael Moritz and John Doerr, and maybe a couple others. At Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, Wilson was greeted with cheers usually reserved for celebrities. . . or rock musicians.
Much has been said about Google Chrome Shiny this week. Google stormed the internet by announcing that they too had a browser that web users could be proud of. They claimed the best of all browsers while slipping in some legal language into the EULA that revoked privacy of user browsing data while using the product. That was quickly changed when their bluff was called.
We like to tell people we are filters. We like to think we are influencers and powerful. We like to think we have an inside angle on what works and what doesn’t work, but we are just small insignificant people in the grand scheme of things, and largely irrelevant.
