After 6 straight 16-hour days, limited to that only because I didn’t attend the after-Midnight parties, I’m glad to wrap up a great experience at SXSWi.  There will be several more posts to follow on events at this conference, but today I am focusing on the presentation by Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn and a Greylock Partner.  He was the EVP of PayPal when it was sold to Ebay, and he is a bona fide Super Angel.

His talk covered two distinct topics, Web 3.0 and Entrepreneurship.  He led off with: “The future is sooner and stranger than we think.”

Mr. Hoffman’s ontology of the three epochs of the web is something like this:

Web 1.0 – Get excited by a 2400 baud modem, do a search, find some data, enjoy a bit of interactivity.

Web 2.0 – Find the web more deeply embedded in everyday life with real identities and relationships, social networks, mobile access, and a global conversation, all generating data.

Web 3.0 – Capitalize on the massive amount of data created by and about users and incorporating such technologies as video, location, and mobile.

He gave some interesting examples of the potential uses of 3.0 data.  Do you want your personal finance software to look at your spending patterns and deliver coupons for categories where you seem to be overpaying?  Do you want your driving habits monitored and cataloged by your smart phone?

He touched briefly on government’s role in all this data, both as a creator and user.  He professed to be less worried about Orwellian dangers than about a Brave New World individual revolt against such a Utopian future. 

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Moving on to his second topic, here are his 10 rules of entrepreneurship:

1. Seek disruptive change, replace $10 of revenue with $1, e.g. Skype.

2. Aim big, it’s the same work for small as big, so do something that affects an entire industry.

3. Build your network at all levels in order to build your company – board, founders, partners, vendors, employees, customers.

4. Plan for both good and bad luck; be ready to take advantage of the good and to keep the bad from putting you out of business.

5. Be flexible in your persistence; don’t be afraid to adapt.

6. Launch your business or product early enough that you are embarrassed; time is important, and you need to be the first to engage your intended market.

7. Aim high but don't drink your own Kool Aid, stay paranoid so you can cope with the unexpected.

8. A great product is important, but a great idea for distribution is more important.  (Amen to that!)

9. Attend to the culture of your company from the very beginning; at the current pace of change you need people who adapt and learn quickly more so than those who have decades of experience.  (I sure am an adaptable fast learner.)

10. The aforementioned rules are not laws of nature; every venture is an experiment.

So there you have it, two talks in one!