Quote

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.

Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.

I've always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That's how Facebook started, after all.

The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.

I have invested in four social networks. More than any other.

Investors can see that Facebook is feeling old and tired and isn't seeming to be that innovative.

The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.

Social media is an information channel; it's like radio or TV... In Cisco, we made a lot of money on public protocol. I think the social media model replicates that protocol.

I have invested in four social networks. More than any other. But that's in Russia and Poland.

There certainly was a lot of potential in the air for doing a magazine which focused on the way business, in particular, was being transformed by the Internet.