A lament for lost writing: When, oh when, will I ever learn? After packaging up snippets and takeaway thoughts from the 2006 Silicon Valley Summit, I was horrified to watch as Firefox hung...all....day. After many hours, I sadly clicked over to Force Quit and let the form data slip away.
So far as the Silicon Valley Summit goes, however, here are some of the key concepts. (In a substantially less nuanced iteration.)
- High Tech Outlook: China is hot, VCs are worried by valuations that are going bubble-high, and Internet businesses are once again investing in scale rather than developing revenue.
- The Internet Sector: Media companies think that user-generated content will wither and die once professionally developed content becomes more readily available, particulary given the value buried in their archives. Internet businesses counter that user-generated content will always be king, since that's where consumers are more likely to find relevance. (It's probably safe to assume that the actual outcome lies somewhere in between.)
- Private Equity Buyers: As the Internet sector becomes frothy, private equity buyers are enjoying an opportunity to discover undervalued assets. This ranged from non-core product lines that are worth building a separate business around (and thereby exponentially increasing their sales), to products that would be a great addition to an existing team's sales kit (and thereby substantially reducing dedicated overhead.)
Some of the morning panelists whose commentary resonated for me: Cole Bader of Thomas Weisel, Mark Barrenechea at Garnett & Helfrich, Toby Coppel from Yahoo!, James Slavet at Greylock, and my former classmate Glenn Solomon from Granite Global Ventures.
Of course I know better than to leave a Typepad form unposted, tempting the Mac's Spinning Rainbow of Death. This is a risk easily mitigated by a quick apple+C and click onto Save As Draft. I must be an adrenaline junkie after all.
