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Reading through the tech press since the Facebook IPO, you might get the impression venture capitalists are still reeling from that apocalyptic offering, believe no further successes can be had in the consumer web, and so are fleeing the consumer web in droves to pursue enterprise investments.

That’s because in the past year or so most major tech publications have swung from focusing on consumer products to enterprise companies. GigaOm made this transition first, now TechCrunch and PandoDaily are following suit.

I started working in ad tech in 2005 and during the past eight years, the ad tech ecosystem has progressively become more sophisticated, competitive and oligopolistic. It’s hard to innovate in ad tech. But if you’re looking to start a company in the sector, you’ll need to amass proprietary data or develop a market place with unassailable liquidity to vie successfully in the market.

On the day of Tableau’s IPO, a company known for innovating in data visualization, I thought I would share the most impressive HCI concept I’ve seen in a long time.

In my view, Bret Victor is on the forefront of human computer interaction design. In the first two or three minutes of this video at Stanford, he demonstrates his home-built software that combines data analysis with visualization. It’s magnificent and really hard to describe because it’s so novel.

When I was a little boy, I watched a cooking show on Sundays called “Jacques Pépin.” Over the course of 30 minutes, Jacques would orchestrate a symphony of raw ingredients into a dish that I yearned to smell and taste. That chicken paillard looked sumptuous.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been coding in Rails 3 quite a bit, building a collection of tools to be more effective as a VC. And oddly enough, I think back to Jacques Pepin quite often.

Derek Powazek questions the intrinsic economic viability social networks in his post “What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?”. It’s a logical question to pose in the aftermath of the Digg sale and the wobbly Facebook IPO.

There is one clear lesson from Digg’s sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000.

The Big Digg Lesson

The Atlantic summed up the essence of social networks' business models brilliantly. It’s not the technology that’s intrinisically valuable, but the activity on the network that attracts users and advertisers and produces a data by-product. Once users commit to a network, the network must develop a revenue model based upon the content created by the users. In so doing, social networks can generate huge revenues quite profitably.

APIs are incredibly powerful tools for enabling partners, building ecosystems and engendering success among customers. For example, Salesforce’s Force ecosystem, which enables developers to build products atop customer Salesforce installations and increases the value customers derive from Salesforce selling more seats and retaining customers longer. Google’s Maps API enables developers to spread Google Maps, building the brand, increasing distribution and all the while improving ranking by sending back user feedback signals.

We’re looking for an analyst to join the early stage consumer investment team at Redpoint. This person will help us find and evaluate investments and work closely with the early stage team. If you know anyone who is a recent grad, is passionate about technology and is looking to work hard and learn a ton, please send them our way. Details are below:

Job Specification:

Redpoint Ventures is looking for a full-time analyst to join our investment team. As an analyst you will help us research and develop new investment themes and evaluate investment opportunities in technology startups. The position is full-time and based in Menlo Park.

In the summer of 2008, a crisis evolved on my team at Google: social networks had grown exponentially. The AdSense network was flooded with social network page impressions whose poor performance challenged advertisers and Google alike.

During that summer, we formed a tiger team of about four or five key people. We shed our daily responsibilities, relocated our desks to a conference room in a deserted building on the edge of campus where we brainstormed and debated and wrote patents and developed a plan of action. Those few weeks were some of the most productive of my time at Google.

Craigslist’s generic market place gave rise to fifty or more single-purpose alternatives some of which are quite valuable companies: AirBnB, Care.com, 99Designs, oDesk, CustomMade, Gazelle.

Each of these startups operates verticalized market places that solve customer problems better than Craigslist’s generic platform. In so doing, these startups have grown their observed markets.

The same unbundling trend will happen to social networks.

Who can forget gems like these word problems from 3rd grade math class?

Q: Jack walked from Santa Clara to Palo Alto. It took 1 hour 25 minutes to walk from Santa Clara to Los Altos. Then it took 25 minutes to walk from Los Altos to Palo Alto. He arrived in Palo Alto at 2:45 P.M. At what time did he leave Santa Clara?

It was during those classes that our mathematics teachers taught us how to work backwards through the problem.