Fred Wilson, principal of Union Square Ventures, just published his investment area interest list for 2010. The list contains 6 items, which Wilson later abstracts to 5: “mobile, gaming, commerce/currency, cloud platforms/APIs, and education/energy/environment.”
Regarding cloud platforms/APIs, Wilson states:
“5) Cloud based platforms and APIs – Many web services have APIs today. A good example is the Twitter API. These APIs have become development platforms in their own right. On top of that, Amazon and others are offering very robust cloud based platforms for developers. The combination of these two trends means that modern web and mobile development is being done on top of cloud based services and APIs. Until recently, we had not been interested in services aimed at developers but the emergence of cloud based platforms and open APIs is changing that. We’ve made two investments in this sector to date, MongoDB, a cloud based open source datastore, and Twilio, an API that allows web developers to access telephony resources from the cloud. Developers are the new power users. If you cater to them, you can build a large user base with significant network effects. And that is one of the key things we look for in our investments.”
Interestingly, in his mobile write-up, Wilson calls out Android and the power of an open platform for developers. As well, in describing his education/energy/environment choice, Wilson calls out a cloud-based investment: “AMEE, which is a cloud based API for recording and measuring energy and carbon consumption.”
So, if you were to look for themes across the themes, I’d start with developers, APIs and cloud-based platforms. Abstracting that up to one, I’d be inclined to say “The future is platforms”.
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