Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers called the press to Facebook headquarters earlier today to launch sFund, a $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Facebook, Amazon, and Zynga are major partners with Comcast, Liberty Media, and Allen & Company committing to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners.
“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites. There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.” — KPCB partner John Doerr
Bing Gordon, KPCB partner, former chief creative officer, longtime executive at Electronic Arts, and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga will lead sFund. Gordon believes that “social is just getting started” and there are “vast” opportunities ahead. He goes on to say that “every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy,” which seems to echo the thoughts of many social media professionals (not just the “gurus” on Twitter).
An important piece of the puzzle is in the Amazon Web Services. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, points out that social apps grow in a unique way. Things start slowly, but the viral nature of these apps causes unexpected spikes. We saw this when Twitter really began to take off. Bezos believes that the “variable cost nature” of AWS is the perfect solution to the problem.
Over the past year, there has been unprecedented innovation in social applications. KPCB’s latest social ventures show the breadth of the social opportunity, from seed stage to scale-up, and enterprise to entertainment, including:
- Cafébots – The first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs. KPCB led a Series A funding for the company founded by a team of Stanford PhDs.
- Flipboard – The world’s first social magazine, delivering a beautiful, personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.
- Jive – Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users. KPCB led a growth stage funding round in July.
- Lockerz – A new social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.
While everyone seems to be on the same page that social is the future, there is some disagreement about how we can get there. During the meeting, Zuckerberg and others stressed that social is not something you can add later. They say that the successful social applications will be those built from the ground up as social, while those who try add it as a layer on top will fail. I know of at least one huge tech company who may disagree with that assessment.
via KPCB News, TechCrunch