the hidden fees consumers pay to financial institutions; it then shares best practices to reduce fees and obtain better value. On the same theme, we invested in CoverHound, which enables consumers to compare and purchase insurance policies on an efficient, objective and transparent basis.
Cartel Busters
This category is notable for helping to unfetter people from the restrictive and antiquated grasp of powerful incumbents. We’ve already seen the powerful breakthrough appeal of Uber and Lyft disrupting the taxi industry; Bitcoin challenging the world’s central banks; and Airbnb shaking up the established hotel model.
Another encouraging example is Oscar, which is competing with traditional health insurers by offering people friendly and easy-to-use services. Other prominent investors—including Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, and founder/funder Josh Kushner of Thrive Capital—agree and have invested over $75 million in Oscar. ZipZap and YoyoCard are our investment entries in this disruptive category. The former helps people buy digital currencies such as BitCoins, and the latter helps people spend digital currencies safely, conveniently and ubiquitously.
Enterprise Liberators
Companies in this group help unshackle people in organizations from the constraints of slow technology adoption cycles and centralized procurement bottlenecks. The democratization of technology adoption through SaaS and freemium business models has enabled CIOs and other C-level executives to focus on the hardware and software preferences of employees and become digital facilitators and coordinators. Leading examples of this leveling trend in enterprise IT are Dropbox and Evernote.
Two of our investments that embody this trend are HootSuite and Parsely. HootSuite is a social relationship platform that allows business colleagues to execute social media strategies collaboratively across multiple social networks from a secure, shared dashboard. In the publishing sector, Parsely unlocks the information bottleneck for editors and publishers; this helps liberate and reward individual achievement, by enabling everyone in the organization to measure how individual articles are performing and engaging audience on social media in real time.
The People’s Web is taking shape and taking hold because new technology platforms such as YotPo, FeeX, HootSuite and YoYoCard are making it easier for individuals to assert themselves and overcome non-transparency, information asymmetry, market structure defects, and organizational bottlenecks.
This doesn’t mean that the emerging People’s Web is a utopian vision or entrepreneurial nirvana. Its reality is grounded in solid economic models; but, while it may be easier to launch a start-up today, there are still vast and expensive challenges in terms of scaling.
That’s why I believe dynamic entrepreneurs supported by venture capital will continue to play a strategic role in the value-creation process of disruption and innovation. Seed and early-stage VCs are absolutely critical to entrepreneurs as day-to-day and side-by-side partners and advocates. And larger, later-stage-focused VC firms play an important role, too, because they add much-needed expansion financing, or even liquidity, for founders and early-stage investors.
Again, it’s important to note that Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation are in the business of finding, developing and monetizing new solutions. While the rise of the People’s Web signals a significant change in the balance of power in which innovation for enterprises contends and cooperates with innovation for individuals, it also portends many lucrative entrepreneurial opportunities. Entrepreneurs will increasingly succeed by empowering people through disruptive innovation—doing well by doing good. As wise capitalists say, “Power to the People!”
