Hi Folks!  First lemme say thanks to Richie and the bootstapper team for setting this up and doing  a large part to bring together the early stage community in NYC. Now on to my first post!

I just got back from Miami for the Future of Web Apps conference and in addition to getting me away from the fantastic NY weather for a few days, I have to say the team at Carsonified did a great job of pulling together some really interesting and intelligent people from the Web community.  A number of different themes were touched on at the conference so lets take a minute to go over the main take-aways and my VC perspective for each:

1)      Build it now – if you’ve got a great idea for a web app and are thinking of building it, don’t wait.  This was a pretty common theme among presenters and it resonated well with much of the audience.  Advances in development tools are making it easier to build and deploy apps quicker every day.  Once you’re app is out there let everyone else figure out what its for.

VC Perspective:  Innovation and continuous improvement are what drives technology.  I like to see that there is a large and growing community around improving user experiences and usability of the web.  In some respects this is a model for a distributed R&D organization, using the web developer community to provide feedback and hone in on a real and valuable use case.  “build it and they will come” has been the mantra in the ether for some time and I worry that consumer behavior outside the tech savvy community dictates that consumers on a large scale like to be told what they need.  I still think this model can work but I think companies / developers need to get a handle on what they are trying to build earlier and more concretely than before.

2)      Don’t worry about the business model – ties in with the above point. This is the point that making money is a trivial concern and can be addressed once you have scale.

VC Perspective:  Ummm, not so much. Having a product with a clear commercial application / path to monetization always gets points in my book.  I know there are tons of examples of successful businesses to prove me wrong on this one, but without a clear strategy for a company, startups risk getting marginalized quickly and fall more into the feature rather than company category.

3)      APIs  are the jam – much love was touted for fostering of collaboration and openness enabled by APIs.  From both the startup side and independent developer side, APIs were viewed as an easy way to put feature development on steroids.  In fact, Leah Culver of Pownce stood up in front of the crowd and apologized for not making their API open enough initially and announced the availability of a newer more powerful one.

VC Perspective:  Great way to get people excited about your product, get inexpensive feature development and see what people are doing with your service.  Once again though, if you’re not careful, you could find yourself falling to the feature vs company problem all over again.

4)      Focus on the user base – there was no better speaker for this topic than Gary Vaynerchuck of WineLibraryTV.  In case you haven’t checked out the “Thunder Show” you are seriously missing out.  Gary’s point, echoed by others as well, was that listening to, be available to, and connecting with your audience is critically important to developing and maintaining a brand.  If not the founder, there should be at least one brand evangelist on the team who’s sole purpose is to connect to users, respond to every email personally and put a face with your service.

VC Perspective: Important to building a brand, definitely, but more applicable for some companies than others.  I don’t think Larry or Sergey’s faces would have made me use Google more, but the Kevin Rose example is applicable.  Mr. Rose carried a large fan base with him when he went from a host on Tech TV to starting Revision3 and digg.

5)      Continuous integration – Cal Henderson of Flickr really banged this point home. In not letting your feature development and staging stray too far from the actual production version of your app, you run fewer risks of launch failures and negative reactions to major overhauls for the user base.

VC Perspective: Totally makes sense to me. The methodology that keeps your team on a steady development trajectory as well as minimizes the risk of catastrophic events makes a site more reliable and user friendly.

All in all, it was a good conference, met some very cool people and heard about some interesting new technologies.  Although, as a VC, I feel obligated to say that even the world for web companies is changing, and startups need to be more conscious of where they fit into the economics of the internet going forward.  This is not just because of the leveling of the development field and the growing power of web apps, but because of the changing nature of the parties involved.  No longer is a large user base the key to monetization or exit.  I can go on and on about where that is going, but this post is already too long and I’ll save that for another time.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topics above so drop a comment. Also let me know if there’s a topic you’d like to hear me blabber on about, upcoming topics include, Microformats and Google as the OS for the web, Health 2.0, and the inevitable economics of creating a company.