Looking for an Experienced Venture Capitalist to Build the Online Data Locker
June 28, 2010
Dear readers,
Some of you know I was at the SemTech conference in San Francisco last week, where a lot of things came together for me. I gave a keynote and hosted a panel session on the personal data locker (see my book for more on this topic), and it was, i think, a watershed moment for the future of the web and the way we use it. This short note explains how I plan to accelerate the emergence of the open web and the personal data locker by raising a venture fund to address the opportunity that has recently opened up.
We all know that the practice of visiting web sites, logging in, and collecting usernames and passwords broke years ago, and that some day we’ll do things differently. At the moment, Facebook wants you to log in using your Facebook credentials, but those of us working in the online identity movement and semantic web know something bigger is bound to emerge. We now have the pieces of the puzzle to create a place, or at least a framework, where you can have your identity, your credentials for using sites and services, and your personal data all in one place online, regardless of how you access it. Some of the pieces of this puzzle:
- The i-card foundation
- OpenID
- Open Identity Exchange
- XAuth
- Higgins
- FOAF
- Identity Commons
- DataPortability.org
- The Open Web Foundation
You may also know I’ve been thinking about raising a venture fund. My goal is to build a fund around the “personal data locker” concept I describe in chapter 8 of my book and start related companies to build out the necessary infrastructure and services. This will be the very last time you transfer your contact information, because your contacts will stay in one place and never move again. But for that to be true, your phone, your email system, and all your contact-related tasks (like finding and making new friends, participating in social networks, etc.) will need to use your single contact list for everything. Likewise, your calendar will be in the center of your universe and communicate with all the other calendars you want it to. Your bookmarks, your personal data, your photos, tickets, passes, keys, and all your other personal information will live here in your personal data locker (see my book for more). It sounds Utopian, but the building blocks really are falling into place now, and not a moment too soon – I don’t think anyone wants to build another profile or join another social network.
This fund has a few precedents:
- Kleiner Perkins’ Java Fund
- Kleiner Perkins’ iPhone Fund
- Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Venture partners
- Bay Partner’s Facebook AppFactory
- Betaworks Twitter fund
The only problem with my dream is that a) I don’t have a track record as an investor (my angel investments were mostly in 2000-2002, and others haven’t found liquidity yet) and b) it’s an extremely difficult funding environment, to say the least. However, I’ve recently been able to solve the second problem. Without giving away too much, I believe I can fairly easily raise the $100M+ I’m looking for if I can just find a credible west-coast partner. This fund will need a west-coast office, and I’ll have to go back and forth often. I don’t want to spill everything in this message, but suffice to say I’ve already had a few conversations with strategic funding sources and they are very, very interested. It is much more downhill fundraising than uphill. I have visibility to around $40M right now and hope to have some of those key starter conversations with potential companies in the next several weeks.
The key to success here is people. I now have access to the people who can help make this happen: people at Google, Facebook, and other companies that can help integrate all these ideas into a buildable framework consumers will adopt and other companies will want to connect to.
The final person I need is a west-coast partner. If I can find someone who’s an experienced VC looking for his/her next thing, reads my book, likes the premise, and wants to join me, I believe the fundraising will go quickly. I’m reaching out to you to ask you to forward this to friends and colleagues, mention something to your followers, and ask people to help me network to find a good partner who wants to join me. I’m happy to discuss the details with anyone but would rather not make them public. Please forward this toward people you know in the west-coast VC community and ask people to pass it on.
If you want to refer to this note in a tweet or blog post, please use one of the following URLs:
If you don’t have my book, I hope you’ll read it.
And if you want to track my progress, please follow me on Twitter:
@PullNews
@_dsiegel
Thank you,
David Siegel
