My partner Brad starts his post on our newest investment, Meetup, with a rumination on what's causing the introspection that we in web investing land are going through. And he ends his thoughts on that topic with the following:

Two things will need to happen if the recent pace of innovation on the web is going to be sustained over the next few years. The next generation of services will need to have an impact on the real world and the real economy, not just an attention economy driven by self expression and discovery online. These new services will also need to reach real people, many of who use few if any web services today.

Brad is the big thinker at our firm and he's been mulling over these changes he talks about since before we raised our new fund last winter. In his post announcing our new fund, Brad said the following:

All of this means that you will see subtle changes in the way we investour new fund. We will be even more selective about the early stage Webservices we back, looking for compelling differentiation, a discretemarket focus, and clear evidence of sustainable user growth. You willalso see us invest selectively in later stage opportunities that webelieve are poised to grow as more users become more dependent on theWeb to manage their daily lives.

Meetup is a perfect investment for our firm because it's a company we know well and a service we use all the time. We have been wanting to invest in Meetup for years but we never could find the right entry point that worked for us and the company and its founders. We are so pleased that we've finally found it.

But there's a lot more to our investment than simply "the right time this time". You can read Brad's post for the whole story.




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