Following the news that Yahoo will acquire social sharing platform Tumblr for a massive $1.1 billion in cash, it’s becoming clear that two of these investing svengalis are Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. They’re the venture capital rockstars of the social web as their jaw-dropping track records shows — they have been very early investors in companies like Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare. Wilson was also early to Zynga, Etsy and Kickstarter.

David Karp, Founder and CEO, Tumblr paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

We’ve seen this pattern before. During the networking boom of the late 1990s, it was Vinod Khosla and Promod Haque of Norwest Venture Partners who scored many of the top deals. Khosla was early to the table with companies like Cerent, Siara and Juniper Networks.

For the first wave of the consumer Internet it was John Doerr who owned it all, and later during the search boom, he and Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz led the charge by investing in Google. Similarly, the shift to the social web (or post Web 2.0) has been a happy hunting ground for Wilson and Sabet.

While there are others such as David Sze of Greylock and Jim Breyer of Accel Partners who have found success in social with Facebook, the Sabet and Wilson team has a better on-base percentage. And one of the reasons why these two guys have found gold faster than others is because they are active participants in the social web and invest in what they know.

Sabet, who moved up to number 51 on Forbes’ Midas List in 2013, was described by Tumblr’s founder and CEO David Karp as someone who “lives and breathes,” social media, and as Karp’s “mentor, friend and partner from day zero.” Sabet said in a post this morning that he met Karp when he was 19 and “was immediately taken with his passion and drive to create wonderful things.” His other investments include Twitter, Foursquare, OMGPOP (sold to Zynga for $180 million), and thePlatform (acquired by Comcast), as well as RunKeeper, Boxee, Jelly, Lyft and Stack Exchange.

Wilson, who writes the popular blog AVC, is one of the most winning venture investors thus far in the new century. He rose to number 16 on Forbes’ Midas List in 2013. In addition to Tumblr, Wilson has backed Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, Kickstarter, FeedBurner, Lending Club, Zemanta, ComScore and Tacoda (sold to AOL in 2007).

In a sign of the new power of the New York startup ecosystem, Tumblr is run out of New York, and both Wilson and Sabet are East Coasters — Wilson in New York, Sabet in Boston — but of course spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley. It’s through these two investors, who live across the country from Sand Hill Road, that a major chunk of the web’s leading social brands have emerged.

Pulling out lessons from these master’s investing practices, would be a good topic for a book. But I’ll run through just a couple I see that are obvious. Sabet clearly has an eye for finding the passionate creator founder early, and has an ability to see the future. Wilson has long practiced what he has preached, is utterly immersed in social and has a unique way with words. He writes this morning on his blog about one of the cliches of VC investing: “success has a thousand fathers.”

Clearly Sabet and Wilson are two of the main fathers of this morning’s success story.

Updated at 1:20 PM on May 20, with comment from Fred Wilson. Wilson attributed some of the deals to his Union Square venture partners and says that “investment syndicates are a team.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Nevertheless, what amazed me was that there was such amazing conversation about the topic on the web. In a way, this is what blogging was and is always about — discussion. I am aggregating a few responses just to highlight what people were thinking.

Ariel Seidman, founder of Gigwalk, pointed out that not all data is created equal.

 As an Uber driver optimizing to maintain a 5-star rating, which job would you rather do? Drive four drunk and angry customers to a club at 1 a.m., or drive a kind and generous venture capitalist from downtown Palo Alto to Sand Hill Road at 2 p.m.? Uber has no idea that your customers were drunk and nasty. All they know is that you got a 1-star rating.

Nick Brisbourne drew the parallels between the dilemmas faced by the workforce and the privacy debates:

The same point can be made about the current battle raging between privacy advocates and big online advertising companies like Google and Facebook. As a society we need to figure out what constitutes acceptable practice for the harvesting and use of personal data for advertising purposes. In both these debates there is much to be gained from getting it right and much to lost by getting it wrong.

My favorite response came from Fred Wilson, who is co-founder of big-time venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. He writes on his blog:

This redrawing of societal expectations is likely to be the political battle of our time. Om goes on to talk about this in the context of the labor issues that Uber is having in San Francisco. That is a good example of what happens when networks and the data they produce reshape a market that has been operating in a traditional framework. We are at the start of this battle between incumbents, be they black car drivers or cable companies or government itself, and the network-driven upstarts. And we have many of those upstarts in our portfolio.

P.S.: If you don’t have time to read the article, here is a tl:dr version of it. Damn, this is one useful service.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Fred Wilson is a good person to ask. He’s a prominent venture capitalist who has invested in dozens of tech companies – including Tumblr and, once upon a time, GeoCities too. Speaking at Ad Tech New York on Wednesday, Wilson explained how both companies built massive audiences in a very short period of time by appealing to community and self-expression.

Wilson believes, however, that Tumblr will escape its predecessor’s fate in part because the popular sharing blog is unspoiled by advertising.

“GeoCities slapped ads everywhere. The performance and appearance was ugly,” said Wilson. “At Tumblr, the business model is quite elegant.” (see a GeoCities example at right)

[Update: Wilson also noted that another crucial difference between Tumblr and earlier community services is the story feed; in services like Tumblr or Twitter, the feed makes for a cleaner, more efficient user experience. See his comment below]

The two firms diverging trajectories can partly be explained by capital demands. These days, lower development costs mean Tumblr can serve millions of users but, unlike the days of GeoCities, it can wait years to figure out a money model.

But the Tumblr approach also reflects lessons learned from the Web 1.0 era. Wilson says one of these is that scale must come before monetization: if a company focuses on advertising too soon, chances are that it will build a faulty product that will never scale.

That’s not the only ad insight Wilson picked up from his Geocities days. Like a growing number of execs in the New York tech and media scene, Wilson is a true believer in native advertising.

“If you just slap up some generic ad format, people tune it out and it doesn’t perform,” he argues. “People don’t hate advertising. They hate bad advertising, interruptive ads or poorly targeted ads.”

Wilson thinks sites should follow Twitter’s lead and ensure ad content is the form of an atomic unit that mimics the native content – a tweet on Twitter, a video on YouTube and so on. For the advertiser, the formula is to develop great organic ad content and then pay the platform to promote it. (It should be pointed out that Wilson has stakes in both Twitter and Tumblr; still, the observations seem sound).

Such a strategy, however, poses a challenge for the traditional ad campaign where one piece of content often fits all. The good news, Wilson says, is that ad agencies are adopting by building ads for specific venues and then engaging and managing that content.

(Tumblr CEO about his “design first” philosophy at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference; see video and write up here).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Flash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

Community-writing site Wattpad says over 70 percent of time spent on the service comes from users on tablets or smartphones, and one of its most requested features is the ability to write and edit stories from mobile devices. So this week, the company is rolling out a “Create” functionality for Android tablets and phones. The updated app can be found in the Google Play store.

Wattpad, which is five years old and based in Toronto, has nearly 10 million monthly unique users. “This is the post-PC era,” Wattpad founder and CEO Allen Lau told me. “Users can write a chapter in 15 minutes while they’re waiting for a bus. They can write whenever they have the inspiration.” In fact, users have already been writing stories from their phones by navigating their mobile browsers to wattpad.com, “essentially hacking their way around the limitation.” Now they have an easier way.

Wattpad’s app is also available for iOS, but the company is rolling out its writing function on Android first because that is where most of its global users are. Fred Wilson, principal of Union Square Ventures (which led Wattpad’s first funding round in September 2011), recently took a look at Wattpad’s mobile usage stats and found that most of its North American users are on iOS, but Asian and European users skew toward Android. “Android is our top mobile platform, and we are going there first to learn,” Lau said.

“Cellphone novels” written via SMS are already popular in Japan, but Wattpad says it is the first company to let users publish long-form text from mobile to the Web. In beta tests, the company said “hundreds of stories” were written and published from mobile. Testers also jotted notes, made quick edits and fixed typos. ”The behavior we are seeing [in beta testing] is similar to what we saw in Japan ten years ago,” he said.

Wattpad raised $17.3 million last month in a round led by Khosla Ventures, in addition to its $3.5 million funding from Union Square.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

It’s fair to say that the site, which provides game-like online courses to teach people how to code, has had a blockbuster year so far. It’s spent 2012 seeing enormous growth, adding new marketplace features, and gaining a legion of fans, including New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But even though the site has seen a breathless rise to prominence, the money isn’t just being used to keep the servers spinning while demand grows: it’s got ambitions too.

Ahead of an on-stage interview with me at LeWeb London on Tuesday, co-founder Zach Sims told me that the new funds “give us the ability to go international” — something useful given that 50 percent of the company’s user base already comes from outside the U.S.

And in a post on the company’s blog, he explains his belief that the latest investors are well-placed to help it achieve that expansion.

“A few weeks after we launched Code Year, we met Neil Rimer and Saul Klein of Index Ventures.  Saul told us, about the world he wanted for his kids – one where code was a foreign language as important as Chinese and English for people to learn.  Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins visited our office around the same time and painted a picture of a few industries that needed to be shaken up – education chief among them.”

“It became clear that we needed partners who both understood the importance of a global company… and the process of scaling a company far beyond the nine people we have grown to now.”

It’s actually the first investment from Index’s new €350 million early stage fund, but still, it’s only eight months since the business announced its last round of funding, a $2.5 million round from investors including Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Michael Arrington’s Crunchfund.

This time round Union Square is following up, with Index’s Saul Klein leading the round and KPCB’s Mary Meeker joining in too.

So what do they see in it?

Index’s Klein told me that he was excited by Codecademy for many reasons, but not least because “it’s not a content-needy educational publisher” but “a marketplace for students and teachers.”

He also pointed out that with a global depression, it made sense to back a company that gives people the chance to learn new skills and potentially find jobs that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access.

That seems a proposition that is not just popular with VCs but also a magnet for billionaire tycoons: not only did Bloomberg express his support for the site, but investors include Russian Yuri Milner (who adds to his previous investment) and Virgin founder Richard Branson.

Here’s my chat with Zach Simms at LeWeb:

Photograph of Codecademy founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Hack NY

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• GigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watch
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

“I think those (traditional media) industries will survive and thrive, they just need to move from a fairly monopolistic distribution system to a wide open distribution system,” Wilson said.

He said while there are some examples of good collaboration between technology companies and progressive content owners, in most cases media companies fear the unfamiliar. But he said history continues to show that new technology — whether it’s radio, the VCR or iTunes — brings in new revenue. He predicts music subscription services will have the same effect.

In a perfect world, Wilson said he’d like to see a system similar to a DNS registry in which content owners would register their content and make it available with rules in exchange for copyright enforcement. That’s the fair compensation for society already enforcing the rights of copyright holders, he said.

“If we have rules for TV, films, music, books, games we’d see an explosion of innovation. All sorts of services and business models could get created,” he said.

If the media companies don’t adapt, tech companies and entrepreneurs are showing an increasingly willingness to create their own content. Wilson pointed to the original programing YouTube is commissioning. He said that could be where the next big media hit is.

“Some of those entrepreneurs will create fantastic content that will be very popular and we will see that become very profitable businesses. Maybe the next big media companies will be built that way,” Wilson said.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

We are on the cusp of a big economic shift. I believe that the industrial era is coming to an end and Kickstarter just might be the most visible representation of that. When I look at Kickstarter, I see small businesses that have been funded by their customers. I see the acceleration of this shift away from the industrial manufacturing ideology to more of a maker economy. And I also see an idea so powerful that the company name has become a verb.

Take the Pebble Watch as an example. It was an idea that was rejected by institutional investors but embraced by actual buyers via Kickstarter. Without broadband-enabled connectivity and Kickstarter, this watch that has now raised upwards of $10 million from over 85,000 people would have not happened. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of these projects that upend the whole established manufacturing ecosystem.

Kickstarter has received $100 million in pledges over the last year and has had a number of projects exceed the million-dollar-pledge mark this year for the first time. And now, Kickstarter is up to 23,000 successfully funded projects and more than 2 million backers. To date, more than $230 million has been pledged to projects. Movies, music, city designs, watches, video games — Kickstarter has become an epicenter of creativity. It is funding everything from a pickle factory in Chicago that uses Bloody Mary marinade and wants to expand, to a live music-and-film series that would play in parks around Harlem.

With Kickstarter, creators list a project, a funding goal, a deadline and a way to reward backers who pledge money to the project. The project is only greenlit if it reaches its funding goal, though there is no limit to how much a project can raise. Kickstarter makes its money by taking a 5 percent fee from a successful project’s funding total. (The company has raised $10 million in venture backing from Union Square Ventures, Betaworks, Jack Dorsey, Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and many other angel investors.)

When I see Kickstarter  I don’t see a company. Instead, I see a social movement. I see people doing things for people. I think of Kickstarter as a reflection of me, which is why I engage with it. When Kickstarter turned three years old, Perry Chen, the startup’s 35-year-old co-creator, wrote a post about the company on his blog and that was enough of a reason for me to ping him and see if he wanted to sit down for an interview. We had met about three years earlier at a coffee shop near Union Square in Manhattan, but we clearly had a lot to catch up on.

So earlier this month, I sat down with Chen, (who in past life co-founded the Southfirst gallery in Brooklyn and worked as a musician/audio engineer in New Orleans,) in his offices on the Lower East Side for a marathon two-and-a-half-hour session. I have managed to boil it all down to about 3,500 words. It may seem long, but Kickstarter is that important of an idea. Why? Because just as we Google things and we tweet — we kickstart!

1. The story so far
2. Is Kickstarter a symbol of a society transforming?
3. And where does it go next.

An idea, Kickstarted

Om:  You and I met for the first time over three years ago, when Kickstarter was still a nebulous idea. Have the past three years surprised you?

Perry:   At its core, Kickstarter is a very simple idea. We believed that if we could just get it out there into the world, and get people to use it, that their success would beget more success, and more attention. With thousands and thousands of projects on the site at any one time, and over 20,000 successful projects — I think, in many ways, this is exactly what we hoped.

We knew if people embraced it, it would grow and be used in this way. But I don’t think we knew what success felt like.  We knew that the idea was big.  The visceral part of it is something that we’re only knowing by experiencing it, but I think from the perspective of just, “Is this what we thought it could do?” Certainly.

Om:  When you started this, did you ever think of it as a company or did you think of it as a social movement?

Perry:  It was an idea. It’s funny. I remember early on, people tried to associate us with ‘This is a social good thing that you’re doing,’ and I almost bristled. I was like, “What do you…?” because that’s not how I thought about it.

Now, I’m thrilled that our mission is a socially good mission, but that’s not where it came from. It just came from this feeling that there was this need for creative people to raise money for their projects.  And this was really an efficient way to do it. There were a lot of other beneficial effects, like the building of a community around an idea and the connection of people to an idea in a very, very different way than as consumers.

Om:  Had you been thinking about this idea for a long time?

Perry:  The original idea came to me in, I think it was late ’01 or early ’02. I wasn’t in the position where I wanted to start a company or, honestly, really knew how to do it, especially in the web space, because I didn’t come from the web. I was living in New Orleans and thinking about continuing to work on music.

I had the idea, and then I was like, “That’s a good idea. Now, back to my regularly scheduled life.” I did expect that, in six months or one year or two years, I was just going to turn on the TV or go on the web one day and somebody was going to send me a link and be like, “Oh, check this thing out,” and I would be like everybody else, “Oh, I had that idea.”

Om:  We all have different interpretations of Kickstarter, but what is the essence of Kickstarter in your mind?

Perry:  We would like it to be a fundamental tool for the liberation or the acceleration of our own creativity. I think that, when we’re younger ‑ whatever that means ‑ we have ideas all the time. We embrace our ideas. We say,  ‘Oh, I’m going to do this. I’m going to throw this event with a friend. I’m going to have this play, this movie, this thing.’

You have not yet been taught the realities of life, that, “You can’t do that because of this and that or the other thing.” Very often, that other thing is money. Over time, because of the constraints, with money being the biggest one (or the most common one) we start to squash down our ideas.

We don’t have to squash down our ideas because of the harsh realities of the real world. From a very emotional level, that’s the dream.

I think, we’re able to offer people the ability to overcome that one core roadblock — the funding — and then additionally allow people to build this community and nurture an audience around a project.

Om:  Twitter had its Oprah moment, and everything changed for them. You think the Pebble Watch is your Oprah moment?

Perry:  Maybe in technology and design. Listen, it has been great, and publicity has been great. But we were (responsible for) 12 percent of the films in Sundance in January 2012. I think we get a little myopic in our world.

Om:  So there are many Oprah moments.

Perry:  If you remember the Double Fine project, that was massive. [Laughs]

Top

Does Kickstarter personify a society re-making itself?

Om:  What is your take on the emergence of this Internet-enabled creator/maker ecosystem?

Perry:  I feel like we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history. People have been creating art for tens of thousands of years. Artists have always been hustlers, too.

In general, artists have always been extremely creative people both in art and in talking to audiences, and in hustling to get the things that they want done, to get their ideas out of their brains and expressed.

A lot of the things that you’re seeing on the web now, from YouTube to Twitter, and what we’re doing, are really just the tools so that creative people can get their things done and connect with other people. They don’t create the creativity. They don’t  change the way creative people are.

Om:  So in a way we are going back to the old way of doing things, where instead of having rich patrons we have a lot of every-person patrons.

Perry:  There was this concept of subscription artist — a lot of 18th-century books were written this way.

Mozart, Beethoven had to raise money this way.  They would go out to subscribers and those subscribers would put in money and they would get a copy of the book with their name inscribed inside of it or a copy of the concerto, or a first look at the concert.

Yes, there’s a history of this in art, besides the patronage of the Medici or the church. There was this concept of the audience. Obviously, they didn’t have the web, the scalability of the web. The ability to do that is incredible.

Om: Given the traction Kickstarter has received,  I wonder if something bigger is going on at a societal level?

Perry:  We’re reaching this bursting point of creativity. People are embracing their own creativity more and more. It’s now OK to be an accountant during the day, but at night you’re a writer or you’re a painter or you’re a DJ. We don’t have to be one thing anymore.

Om: Does it have something to do with our ability to learn and create easily, thanks to the Internet?

Perry: It’s getting cheaper to make things. It’s getting cheaper, or free, to learn how to do things. It’s getting cheaper to distribute things and share them with people and get yourself out of that creative vacuum. Even if some kid out there in the middle of nowhere creates something, she can share it on the web with people, and get that feedback so she doesn’t feel like: “I’m just doing this and nobody can tell me what’s going on.”

You can do a lot of art and creative projects in digital form. To make an album now, it probably costs 10 times less  than it did 20 years ago. Even film being crazy expensive, is still coming down in cost.  And now, hopefully, we’re helping build the pieces that help the funding of it and building the community around that as well. That is an explosion point.

Om:  For awhile, I have had this theory that we, as a society, are coming to the end of the mass production, industrial phase of the human race. Instead, we have entered an Internet‑enabled phase, where the economy is not about being the biggest, but being able to do few things well, and then finding an aggregate audience for what seem to be small ideas and niches. A perfect example would be the Pebble Watch.

Perry:  Pebble Watch… not so small anymore.

Om:  In the grand scheme of things, it’s not really a big product. But it’s, like, $10 million.  What do you think about that?

Perry:  It shows a relatively obvious point: that not all the big ideas come down the mountain on a stone tablet by a major corporation. There are really creative people out there that are doing things on their own.

In terms of the small‑batch, artisanal market for everything, I think without a doubt we see it.  People want to know where their stuff comes from. I think people buy products, but they also buy experiences. People value experiences more than they value products.

When you buy local food, you’re buying both a story and a good. Also, you’re saying something about yourself and what you care about. I think that’s what you’re seeing more and more in the things that people are looking for. Often, the stuff costs a premium, and I think people are willing to pay it. It’s worth it to them.

Om:  Right now, big media companies make products, which we consume. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Facebook or Disney. They are all vying for our attention. Now, here is Kickstarter with, let’s say, 3,000 films today and about 5,000 music albums. Suddenly content that is not controlled by big media is now competing for our attention with the big-media productions.

Perry:  Yeah, any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way. People are watching films that were made on Kickstarter and playing games that were made on Kickstarter. I think the big media companies are going to continue to have things that they’re going to keep making for the mass audiences, but we hope we’re eating away at the bad stuff.

Bad stuff gets made in the system. You get sequels. You get safe things. You get people with new ideas that don’t get funded. You get constrained funding so that one out of every thousand people can get a shot. You have systems that are based on who you know. That’s what we want to break apart. Good ideas can bubble up without these gatekeepers saying yes.

Om:  Right. I think the question or the point I was trying to make was that with the friction in the creative process going away, it’s getting harder to get people’s attention. I think Kickstarter is that platform of creativity.  I think the emotional appeal of a platform is what works. I think the old-media entities still have not figured out that part of the game plan.  I see Kickstarter as coming from left field, just like Twitter siphoned attention away from established media forms and in the process became a medium of its own.

Perry:  Well then, don’t give it away. Don’t, please. [laughs] We almost had them, and then you had to give them a heads-up, and the Murdochs are going to read this.

Om:  Do you really think of it as your company? Do you think of yourself as essentially the caretaker for the movement?

Perry:  It’s a lot of things. I definitely do think of Kickstarter as my baby. I’ve worked long and hard on it. I take a lot of pride in it. But I also certainly know it’s bigger than me. It’s the baby of the rest of the team, of course, and the project creators and the community. I think even before it became big, there was this moment where I just felt like I was the shepherd of the idea, not just the company but of the concept.

Regardless of company, this idea of funding projects in this way on the web is just here now.  We’re confident that we’re going to keep doing it right, but that’s secondary to the fact that the idea is now just in the world.

Top

What’s next for Kickstarter?

Om:  How many types of categories are on Kickstarter right now?

Perry:  [Laughs] There are 13.  I’m going to forget a few, but it’s film, music, art, photography, theater, design, technology, food and a few others.

We take a very liberal or what I think is a more modern view of what a creative project is. I mean, for us, a lot of food projects are definitely creative projects.  A lot of technology, maker/hacker projects are definitely creative projects. Video game projects are, for us, definitely creative projects.

Om: Are you adding new categories?

Perry:  We’re also looking at not just constraining but also expanding a little bit into urban design and things like bike lanes and bike racks and community gardens.  A lot of cities have approached us, talking to us about projects in that space. And we’re just having conversations — we don’t want to do anything too quickly.

We want to see how we can bring those projects in and bring them in in a way that fits Kickstarter — so they’re creative projects, with rewards and the right structure.  And even science, I mean, science is something that we’ve been talking about for awhile.

There’s already been science projects on the site that fit into other categories for some reason. But it’s really fascinating to us. Science is a hyper‑creative field, and there are a lot of things in science that we feel qualify as creative projects.

Om:  I’m addicted to Kickstarter. And the biggest challenge I have is finding the projects.

Perry:  We’re working on kind of the next generation of discovery and ways that we can help you find the projects you want faster.  Because the growth has been so great, we’ve shifted a lot of focus to other areas. And discovery hasn’t gotten as much love as we would have liked.

Om:  We have tablets and phones. Going beyond the obvious browser, do you think Kickstarter evolves and changes to keep up with that?

Perry:  We don’t have an iOS app. We don’t have a very mobile‑friendly version.  We don’t have an iPad app.  That’s all stuff we’re thinking about and we’re working on. I think it’s a battle between getting a lot of stuff done and staying small. I think we’re very committed to staying small.  We’re 37 and I know it’s not a lot of people when you talk about the web. But it’s a lot of people.

If we take a little bit longer to get stuff done, that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll work harder, but we don’t want to be hundreds of people. We want to keep the team small. We want everybody to know everybody else. We want to grow the company culture in that way.

Om:   As a platform, what are the things you think that you will need to provide for this thing to keep going? For example, security, fraud prevention, all those things.

Perry:  We believe in not just the audience to find the things that they want to fund, but also in the audience to help us police the site, help us see when things are going off. I don’t think in terms of a trust and safety perspective that the solution for us is to build a big team of people who investigate the validity of people’s claims. Like “Who are these people?”

We’re trying to move away from gatekeepers. I think you create a safer system, instead, by continuing to build tools to have the audience be out there and help us spot things. We’re going to keep doing a better and better job of that as we go on. We’ve got over 20,000 data points right now of successful projects. That’s really informing our thinking with the new things that we’re working on developing.

Om:  With the JOBS Act, there is a lot of talk about Kickstarter being used for crowd funding of startups, etc. What do you make of all that talk?

Perry:  Some people have made assumptions about what we would do. We’re not interested in that model.

We’re going to keep funding creative projects in the way we currently do it. We’re not gearing up for the equity wave if it comes. The real disruption is doing it without equity. The real disruption is when you break down the funding of a project into all these little bits.

When people are giving $5, $20, $50 — people don’t need to receive a return on their investment.  People are giving relatively affordable amounts of money and they decide how much they give.

So many ideas, in general, in the world are not about and are not going to make money. Those things need a model. That’s the world we come from. That’s what we wanted to support.

Om:  Where do you see Kickstarter going over the next three to five years?

Perry:  The past three months have been a whirlwind. We had never had a million‑dollar project before and then Double Fine was about three months ago. Now, we’ve had many million‑dollar projects and multi‑million‑dollar projects. But we honestly don’t really care if we have million‑dollar projects. We’re just interested in projects.

That said, those large projects draw attention. They draw new people to the site and they’re rallying points for people to find out more about the site. So we’re more known, more out there.

Om: Is that important?

Perry:  You start from being something that works really well and is cool. That’s what makes people want to use it. Then you ride that for a little bit, knock on wood. Then at some point this magical thing happens where you become a utility. You’re like Wikipedia. You’re like CraigsList. That’s really where we want to take this. We want people to understand very simply how Kickstarter works and how they can use it. It’s just a utility out there on the web.

Top

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

The service launched in December with a dashboard that allowed people to track their own conversations from Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Contacts and through commenting platforms Disqus and Facebook. Now, with a new engagement discovery dashboard, users can follow their friends’ conversations. They can follow their existing contacts on Twitter, Facebook and Google or they can search Engagio’s 400,000 user profiles and follow one person across all the platforms they use with a single click.

While Engagio launched with a Gmail-like interface, it’s now becoming available inside Gmail as an extension for Chrome, allowing people to see their conversations in an email folder. Some current Engagio users already get notified of comments through their Gmail account, but they can now get a filtered view of all their conversations across different platforms and a simple way to reply to any comments without leaving Gmail. Users can also compose an update or Tweet from Gmail that will appear on their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts.

Engagio is throwing in some other improvements like the ability for a user to register an unlimited number of accounts on one platform. Previously, a user was only allowed to register one account from Facebook or Twitter. This should help community and brand managers who want to follow the conversations around multiple accounts.

William Mougayar, the founder and CEO of Engagio said that what’s increasingly valuable or interesting to people isn’t so much the flood of information on social channels, but the chance to interact with a smaller number of people. He said existing tools don’t do a good enough job organizing and preserving these conversations, which can quickly get lost in the stream. And now, with the engagement discovery dashboard, users can get even more value from the conversations of others.

“It’s a stream of conversations of those that you follow,” said Mougayar. “Someone told me it reminds them of them of Friend Feed but of conversations only.”

I think it can be little voyeuristic, keeping tabs of all the conversations of people I want to follow. But that’s the nature of many of these platforms. They’re already public; Engagio just captures it all together in a single place. I still wonder if Engagio could become part of a larger product or if it could evolve into a Hootsuite or TweetDeck competitor. But Mougayar said that’s not his intention. He believes there’s plenty of opportunity in just concentrating on discussions and leaving the rest to others.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Randy Robertson

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them

The money will help continue Behance’s momentum as it tries to attract more creative professionals looking to showcase their work. The site highlights more than 2 million creative projects covering categories such as photography, graphic design, animation, fashion, interior design and others. That’s up from 1 million projects just eight months ago. Visitors have viewed the projects more than 1 billion times and “appreciated” them more than 22 million times.  Behance gets more than 30,000 projects a week and uses a curation team to narrow its selections. And more than 10,000 personal websites have been created using Behance’s ProSite portfolio builder tool.

For many years, the company was happy to eschew funding but with the recent growth, it saw an opportunity to take Behance to another level. CEO and co-founder Scott Belsky wrote in a blog post that the team is looking at building more products that can serve creators. Albert Wenger, a partner at USV, wrote that Behance will be enhancing its Prosite offering and developing more tools to support collaboration among creatives and between creatives and their clients.

“We have an exciting product pipeline we want to make happen,” Belsky wrote. “So, for the first time, we debated the option of continuing to bootstrap vs. raising funds. Ultimately, the team wanted to kick things up a notch: We want the resources to do our life’s greatest work in serving the creative community.”

Online channels are proving to be a great way for people to find talent through services like Stack Exchange, Github or Kickstarter. There’s still a lot of opportunity in helping people connect to jobs and organize with other people in their industry. Since its first redesign in March, Behance has seen searches for creators on the site jump by 70 percent.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• The 2013 task management tools market
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Well, not so much. I looked at the list and found that Fred Wilson, who is one of the most-successful venture capitalists of the post-social era, is listed at #20. Wilson is a general partner at Union Square Ventures, a firm he co-founded, and his investments include Twitter, Etsy, Tumblr and Kickstarter.

He invested in most of these companies during the early stage of their start-up life and long before they became household names and were successes. When investors put money in at this early stage, the returns they get from hit companies are much higher. His return on investment on those dollars is much, much higher than say someone who invested in Twitter at, say, a $3.7 billion valuation. I don’t know, say, John Doerr, for example, who is ranked at the #12 spot.

“Everyone in the industry knows USV is the top VC, so any ‘top list’ like Forbes that doesn’t include them is a joke,” tweeted Chris Dixon, an entrepreneur and partner at the Founder Collective. David Lee, who works with Ron Conway at SV Angel, added, “It’s like putting Andrew Luck at #20 in an NFL mock draft.” Bijan Sabet, who incidentally is #57 on the list and has invested in Twitter and Tumblr, added, ”Also list doesn’t take into account cost basis or ownership.”

The point is not to defend or talk-up Fred Wilson — he can do that himself on his blog, and frankly he doesn’t need to. The reason for bringing him up is that the list’s methodology is just weird and, well, ambiguous at best.

Do Forbes and its partners take take into account how much money was invested in Skype and how much of it was actually returned to the limited partners at Andreessen Horowitz? And how do they explain that Mary Meeker is on the list at #42 (ahead of say, Sabet), even though she has been in the business for — wait for the drum roll – 17 months. And well, if we are going to include Meeker on the list, then why not Brad Feld from The Foundry Group, who was an early investor in Zynga, one of the hot investments?

To be clear, I am not commenting on individuals, but more on the Forbes methodology:

For the Midas List, we created our data-based rankings again this year with TrueBridge Capital Partners, a venture capital-focused fund of funds. Also advising us on our final ranking was an expert panel made up of secret sources, including professionals from a premier global investment consulting firm and a leading foundation’s investment office.

The aim of the Midas List ranking is to identify the venture capitalists who are providing the best returns for their investors, while helping create the most valuable and impactful technology and life science companies. To assess performance, we looked at all venture-backed initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions valued at more than $200 million over the last five years, since 2007.

When I worked at Forbes.com, I got to know a lot of people who worked on Forbes’ lists. There was a dedicated team that worked around the year and dug up little-known facts and details before assembling the final tally of America’s Richest or the Billionaires’ list. The effort that went into those lists was so comprehensive that you could take it to the bank. The  methodology for the Midas List, based  on Forbes’ own description above, is nowhere close to having that rigor. So, if Forbes is serious about this list, it needs to devote resources to it.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• GigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watch