the Onda

I lived through one dot-com crash and all of the associated aftereffects, so I'm not psyched about the fact that the day of reckoning has finally come for this cute little kumbaya we've come to call Web 2.0. Sure on the surface it's just Google being slightly off their spectacular growth trajectory, but deep down we all knew this moment was coming. The wonderfully intoxicating "build critical mass and the rest will follow" buoyancy that started with Flickr and ended with Facebook's ridiculous $15b valuation is about to come to a close, and not so much due to one bad quarter of ad revenues, but because it just couldn't last forever.

Small companies struggling with product risk are now going to have to answer the revenue model question as well, and for good reason. Selling to Google— or even selling to someone else who is afraid that Google might buy you first— has just run out of juice. And unfortunately it has done so right at the beginning of a pretty scary set of perfect storm factors in the consumer economy: depressed consumer confidence, tons of credit risk, looming creep of inflation, and an inscrutable political outlook.

But what to do in the middle of all of this? Get somewhere where you can work on something meaningful with a 3-4 year runway. If you are at a startup, either get cashflow positive or raise a buttload of money soon. If you are at a big company, get on the longest lead time (but critical) project that you can find. Put your head down and just shut out the crap that is about to start flying.

It's all going to be good again— it always is. The challenge is that it may take until 2011 for us to get there. Until then, we can all stop worrying about getting rich and get back to grinding it out. Good times.

Post a comment