and managing director Joel Cutler. Hughes says the two had “a lot of fun” and seemed to “sort of have the same world view.” He also got the strong message that “GC’s wide open for business.”
In his role at General Catalyst, Hughes comes to Cambridge for one week a month. The rest of the time, he lives in New York. In his entrepreneur-in-residence role, he says, “I’m really focusing my time on two things.” One is pretty typical EIR stuff, talking to a lot of smart people, asking questions, assimilating their ideas, learning, and so forth. Hughes says he is speaking to people from a variety of fields—including energy—but that really he is focusing on the Web, “just because that’s my background.”
“The other half of the time I’m getting the chance to support a lot of young people,” he says. So far, his forays include meetings at Columbia, Yale, and MIT. Hughes says he has done both classroom meetings and larger get-togethers, but likes going out on a lawn and chatting—seeking what he describes as “personal interactions with smart students who have good ideas.”
I asked him if he had a main message for students—and he pointed to three things. First was to develop a strong sense of confidence. Not, he was quick to add, “You can do it, and a big pat on the back” type of confidence. Rather, the confidence that comes from really thinking through an idea, the technology, the market, the business model, and so on. And that relates to the other two things he tells students: work on something that’s realistic, and build solutions for basic human problems—so that “they can build something that’s realistic, significant, and can eventually be profitable.”
Hughes also is seeking to connect student entrepreneurs with other people with similar ideas, as well as with mentors and funding sources. He says he plans to be one of those funding sources himself—by helping GC make investments in Web startups. Investing is something completely new to him—he’s always been on the entrepreneurial side of deals. So he’s also learning from the partners. “I get to learn how these guys think about things and see [things] from the other side of the table.”
Lastly, Hughes is also looking for the next thing to light his own entrepreneurial fire—whether it’s his idea or someone else’s. But he’s in no hurry to take this step. “If I find…a great idea that I want to work on full time, I can do that,” he says. However, he adds, “I’m also not in a rush.”
As we spoke about social media, I couldn’t help but ask how Hughes thinks New England and the East Coast stack up against the West Coast in that regard. No surprise that he says the center of gravity is still out West, but that he thinks the East Coast is also strong—especially New York. Hughes pointed to a General Catalyst funded, New York-based startup called Hunch—a social decision engine Wade has written about, as one example. (By the way, to my knowledge General Catalyst has never before confirmed it is an investor in Hunch, which was founded by a group of former MIT students and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, though that has been widely speculated.)
In one sense, Hughes says, social applications and tools are merely new ways for enabling people to do things people have always done. “People share information with their friends–that’s what people do,” he says. That’s what Facebook helps enable. And that’s all they did with my.BarackObama.com, as well. People have organized politically, raised money, and held campaign coffees and events forever, he says. “We just made it easy for people to do all this stuff.”
At the same time, Hughes says there is a real transformation underway that does have “pretty large” economic and business implications. “More people are sharing more information,” he says. “[And] people for the first time are understanding that there are a lot of different ways to share.”
That’s why he thinks Facebook and Twitter are not so much rivals as contemporaries—because they both enable people to share information and interact in different ways. “Twitter will easily coexist with Facebook,” Hughes says. And both, he adds, will look wildly different in five years than they do today.
