Those of you who’ve visited the NextView website may have seen a Ethos section where we describe five tenets of how we approach things… Golazo, Authentic, Blank Canvas, Invited Guest, and Tribe.  I wanted to touch on ‘golazo’ as it’s my fault we use this strange verbiage, but also a critical element we look for in all the startups we invest in.

Golazo is a slang word in Spanish used to describe truly special goals scored in a soccer match.  Watch enough soccer on Telemundo or Univision and you’ll occasionally hear the commentators shout it at the top of their lungs, or just search on YouTube and you’ll get some examples.  There’s no literal translation of golazo into English, but the characteristics which distinguish a golazo from a run of the mill goal are that it’s amazing, colossal, and/or improbable in nature.

These are the same qualities we’re looking for in terms of ambition and potential scale of the startups we invest in.  As a seed-focused VC fund we invest comparatively small sums of capital at the very beginning of a startup’s life.  But everything we invest in has to have the potential to be a large, transformative business someday.  A company that in time can generate $100M+ in revenue and have an enterprise value measured in the hundreds of millions or more (what some VCs refer to as a “venture scale” outcome).  Simply put… startups that have golazo potential.

Obviously not every startup we invest in will become a golazo.  The potential for outsized investment return only comes with taking significant risk, especially when investing at the seed stage, so many of the companies we invest in will ultimately be unsuccessful.  Some may end up having more modest outcomes that product a decent return on investment, which we fully understand and are supportive of.  But for us that can’t be the goal at the outset and we try to be up front with entrepreneurs that we meet that we’re not the right investment partner if that’s what they’re looking for.

When we started NextView we wanted to describe our ethos in our own words.  Some of the elements we chose are less common concepts among VCs, but in two cases we have to tip our hats to other firms where we adopted an existing best practice.  One is striving to be an “invited guest” at the entrepreneur’s table, a notion that Greylock has both espoused and practiced for decades.  Also our ethos of golazo is conceptually similar to what Venrock describes as a “glimmer of greatness” that David picked up during his time there.

But as I said, we had to put NextView’s ethos in our own words.  I’m a complete nut about soccer… I played in my youth and have been an avid fan for many years.  I’ve been to a World Cup (South Korea 2002), gold medal Olympic soccer matches (men & women Beijing 2008), English Premier League, MLS, heck even AYSO.  Proof in point is my license plate:

So it always had to be golazo…

The interminable wait is over, and Facebook’s S-1 was filed yesterday afternoon.

I recently wrote a post noting that while the growth cycle of startups has clearly accelerated in the last 5 years, the number of truly monster new businesses (a company ultimately worth $75-100B) remains about the same… it’s a once in a decade sort of thing.  My partner Rob also wondered if Facebook is the next Yahoo!, or the next Google.  No matter what you think of Facebook’s future prospects, what Zuckerberg & Co. have built in 8 years is truly incredible.

Here’s my first look at Facebook viewed through the lens of their IPO filing.  I’ll focus for now on the business itself, there’s plenty of other info on the web if you care to understand the equity ownership or financing history of Facebook and frankly this has been fairly well known for awhile.

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Facebook, Inc.

Filing Date:  February 1, 2012

Founded:  Spring 2004, incorporated July 2004

Headquarters:  Palo Alto, CA

What They Do: Enable users to connect and share content with friends online

How They Do It: Operate a social network at Facebook.com, through Facebook’s mobile apps, and the Facebook Platform which lets other websites extend Facebook’s tools for authentication and social sharing

How They Make Money:  Facebook’s primary revenue stream is of course selling advertising on Facebook.com, which in total accounts for 85% of revenue.  The next chunk comes from Facebook’s platform, in essence “taxing” the revenues of app developers like Zynga, which represents 15% of revenue.

Financial Snapshot:

• 2011 Revenue: $3.71 billion
• 2011 YoY Revenue Growth: 88%
• 2011 Gross Profit Margin:  77%
• 2011 Net Income: $1.00 billion
• 2011 US Revenue = 56% of total, ROW = 44% of total

Notable Aspects of Facebook’s Business:

1) Facebook’s Revenue is “Cleaner” Than Google or Yahoo! – All of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from the Facebook.com website.  They don’t even run ads in the FB mobile apps.  This is different from companies like Google and Yahoo! who derive a meaningful chunk of their revenue from operating ad networks.  These companies report gross ad revenue but then subtract out “TAC” (Traffic Acquisition Costs) which is basically accounting-speak for the revenue share they pay to the partner sites where the ads actually appear.  Facebook’s ad revenue is pure… after the cost of running the site is factored in, the rest just drops straight to the bottom line.

Also if you haven’t read it Bill Gurley had an excellent post grading Facebook in the 10x Revenue multiple club, a continuation of his thoughts from before on this topic.

2) Facebook’s Growth is Robust But Lumpy – Facebook’s top-line growth is slowing, but it’s still incredibly high (88% from 2010 to 2011) especially when you consider it’s growing a multi-billion dollar revenue base.  This is what Facebook’s quarterly revenue looks like:

The Payments/Other business essentially had step function growth as Facebook phased in the 30% tax on apps.  The Advertising business is growing slower (69% YoY in 2011) than the whole company and if you dive in to the quarterly growth rates, you can see that it’s fairly lumpy.  Facebook admits as much that the ad business, which again accounts for the vast majority of revenues (85%), has seasonality in line with the media industry generally with a strong Q4 and weak Q1.  In fact Facebook’s ad revenue dropped in absolute terms slightly (about -3%) from Q4 2010 to Q1 2011.

Again, let me be perfectly clear… Facebook’s revenues are still growing very robustly, even the advertising business.  The overall growth in Payments clearly helps smooth out some of the ad revenue seasonality.  But it’ll be interesting to see how public market investors react when Facebook files an amended S-1 pre-IPO with Q1 2012 numbers, particularly if there’s similar Q1 slowdown in ad revenue.

3) Employee Stock Purchases Are a Near-Term ATM - Facebook has issued a combination of stock options and more recently restricted stock units (RSUs) as compensation to employees.  Obviously depending when an employee was granted equity, the exercise price they’d have to pay to actually purchase and own these shares outright could be quite high since Facebook’s company valuation grew rapidly.  As a result, the amount these employees pay the company for these exercises is non-trivial… in 2011 these common stock purchases generated about $1 billion in cash for Facebook.  To put that in perspective, Facebook’s overall operations (which are highly profitable) generated about $1.5 billion in cash profit last year.

Without knowing more details about the employee equity plans, it’s unclear how much more cash of this nature could come in during 2012 or 2013.  Plus Facebook has ample cash on hand today and will get a huge slug more from the IPO.

4) $600M Buys a Lot of Data Centers - It’s widely known that Facebook invests heavily in it’s technical infrastructure and operates it’s own data centers.  We didn’t know exactly how much that was but it turns out Facebook invested over $600M in data center infrastructure last year.  That’s the capex (e.g. new stuff they built or bought), the operating cost of staffing and running these things is on top of that (that’s baked into cost of revenue).

5) Zynga/Games Revenue Concentration - Other folks have already written about the fact that Zynga accounts for 12% of Facebook’s total revenue, which would be about $450M in 2011.  That’s actually a combination of Payments (the 30% share Facebook takes from app developer revenues) and advertising spend for ads Zynga buys on FB to acquire customers.  Back of the envelope, Zynga did just under $1B in revenue in 2011 so 30% of that is something like $330-340M.  So presumably they spent about $100M give or take on FB ads on top of that.

Facebook disclosed in the S-1 that games (as opposed to other kinds of apps) account for substantially all of the Payments revenue and Zynga accounts for most of that.

6) US Usage Slowing, OUS Still Accelerating - Facebook has a lot of users, and their users are on Facebook a lot… no shocker there.  The headline stats have been out in the public domain for awhile – >800M users, more than 50% log in daily, around 50% access on mobile devices at least some, etc.  If you want to dig in yourself there’s a bunch of charts in the S-1 starting on pg. 44 but I’ll give you the headline view because that’s probably why you’re reading this post.

US user base is still growing, but it’s clearly slowing as Facebook approaches saturation.  Facebook estimates they already have 60% of addressable US internet users.  Internationally Facebook’s user growth is still accelerating, but there are clear regional differences.  In fact penetration in Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela is estimated at >80% which is astonishing.  But places like Brazil and India are estimated at 20-30% and Japan and South Korea at <15%.  The big gaping whole is of course China where Facebook has “near 0% penetration”.

Note: None of this should be construed as investment advice to buy or sell any stock.

Something has clearly changed within the last 5-6 years in terms of the speed with which monster startups are created in the software and internet space.  As a result of a convergence of many factors (lean startup methodology, broadband & smartphone penetration, social web, cloud computing, etc), breakout startups are clearly getting scale faster than they used to.

There’s lot of anecdotal evidence for this:

• Seed stage investors (including NextView and many of our peers) are seeing more startups progress from seed to Series A stage in 6-9 months rather than 12-18
• Revenue ramp of Groupon and Zynga –> Kleiner famously said Zynga was the fastest growing company they’d ever invested in, no mean feat for the original backers of Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc, and Groupon might be the fastest ever startup to reach $1B in revenue
• Multi-billion dollar valuations for late stage startups like Dropbox, et al

There’s one school of thought that the paradigm has changed, and startups that achieve a market value of tens of billions or more will be more frequent than in decades past.

I’m not so sure that’s the case.  What if the new paradigm is simply that software and internet startups accelerate much faster than before, but terminal velocity so to speak remains the same?  It’s the difference between Google-scale outcomes being a once in a decade event or something that happens much more frequently.

The table above highlights some of the most significant VC-backed startups of the last 25 years.  I know Cisco’s really more of a hardware company than software, but I think it’s still relevant to this question.  You could throw companies like VMware in here too (~$38B mkt cap) but that was a spinout of EMC rather than a pure startup.  It’s also worth noting that in the last 5-10 years breakout startups have remained private much longer than in decades past, so more of the equity appreciation has been captured by private investors than public market investors.

In looking at the table, you see that startups reaching the rarefied air of a $75-100B+ market value (either as a private or public company) are extremely few and far between.  This list is hardly exhaustive, but I could only think of CSCO in the ’80s and AMZN in the ’90s and GOOG in the ’00s, and again none of them reached this value until years after IPO.

Facebook will pretty clearly achieve this here in this decade, and undoubtedly there will be more massive standalone companies that are built in the coming years and decades.  And to be clear, I take nothing away from the likes of Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Yandex, and other companies which have achieved multi-billion dollar values in recent years… it’s an incredible achievement.  I’m obviously biased but LinkedIn’s revenue growth is actually accelerating now (>100% year over year) so I think it’s market value will grow commensurately in the years ahead.  But one would be hard pressed to say that other than Facebook, there will clearly be a company out of this crop that will be worth $100B in the foreseeable future.

To me, the new paradigm is one in which companies can often start with less capital than and can grow at a markedly faster pace than before.  For everyone in the startup ecosystem this is a pretty incredible state of affairs.  But I think we must be cautious is letting ourselves believe that as a result, there will be another Google or Amazon every year.

I think there are tons of reasons to be a founding entrepreneur… some good, some bad, some ultimately inconsequential.  Being a startup founder isn’t for everyone ultimately, in fact it probably isn’t for most people.  My old boss Reid Hoffman used to say founding a company is like throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

But drawing from my own experience as an entrepreneur and the thousands of entrepreneurs I’ve had the good fortune to meet as a VC, here are some of the unifying reasons I’ve seen in nearly all (in no particular order).

1) Creating an Organization from the Ground Up - Picking co-founders and then later hiring other great folks is always tough, but founding entrepreneurs get to choose their colleagues and together create an organization and culture of their own.

2) The Pyramid Scheme of Startup Equity - Just like multi-level marketing schemes, in startups it pays to get in on the ground floor.  Not everyone has the skillset and experience to be a founder, and many of those that do may not have the risk tolerance.  But founding entrepreneurs typically own an order of magnitude more equity than early hires (who themselves will have disproportionate ownership relative to later hires).

3) Disrupt/Fix That Which is Broken - Obviously disruption and innovation go hand in hand with vision (#7 below).  Nearly all founders though are seeking to fix a market or industry that’s broken, and occasionally create whole new industries in the process.

4) Force Multiplier - For some founders, their startup is the best construct for them to magnify whatever impact they might have had as an individual or as part of  another organization.  It’s possible to disrupt industries or touch millions of customers even within a big company… just look at Apple, Amazon, and others.  But for any individual or small group of founders, the ability to multiply that impact by way of a new startup provides its own unique rewards.

5) That Inner Control Freak - Founders always have to balance their own perspective with that of their various constituents (employees, investors, customers, strategic partners, etc), and the best ones manage to do so in an even-handed manner.  But for many being able to exert greater control over their own destiny is a compelling factor in deciding to become an entrepreneur.

6) The Time is Right - Sometimes this is external, i.e. waiting until fundamental technology or prevailing market forces make it possible for an entrepreneur to launch the startup that’s been germinating in their head for years.  But more often it’s when the founders feel that the right set of personal circumstances exist (professional experience, developments in their private lives, etc), in conjunction with all the other reasons to become a founder.

7) A Vision That Keeps You & Your Co-Founders Up at Night - Most founders I see have a vision for their product or company that they simply can’t resist… their startup doesn’t just compel them to take the leap, it’s nearly irrepressible.  People literally can’t sleep or experience dreams about their startup vision.  Ironically once founders start building that vision, a whole other set of stuff starts to keep them up at night.

Even the best entrepreneurs often hear “no” from potential investors.  I’ve blogged before how this remains one of the hardest parts of my job.  Yet a clear and quick “no” is often the best response other than an enthusiastic “yes”.

But there’s a difference between “no” and “not yet”.  And “not yet” responses can depend both on the investor and the entprereneurs.

When a startup doesn’t match the stage where a particular investor focuses, founders may get a response along the lines of “This is interesting to us, but come back once you get from X phase to Y phase”.  That could be from seed stage to a larger Series A financing need, or to progress from pre-product to post-revenue.  Good investors try to be clear in terms of what they look for in terms of progress and milestones of the startups they invest in.

Occasionally though, a “not yet” response simply stems from the inevitable staging of conversations that happens in any startup’s fundraising process.  As I’ve stated before, I’m a big believer in being deliberate and explicit in startup fundraising.  But at NextView we try to be as deeply engaged in the entrepreneurial community in a variety of different ways (mentorship, accelerators, demo events, etc).  As a result, we frequently spend time with entrepreneurs before they’ve started fundraising or while they’re still contemplating various pathways for funding their businesses.

So just as we strive to be clear and candid with entrepreneurs we meet, hopefully entrepreneurs do the same with us.  If you hear a “not yet” from NextView it’s probably because we’re uncertain if you’re simply seeking feedback and advice versus running an actual fundraising process, or we’re still in the process of educating ourselves about a particular space.  And inevitably even the best entrepreneurs refine and improve their pitch as they progress through the fundraising process.

We do our best to provide a polite but quick “no” to startups we’re unlikely to ever invest in.  So when we say “not yet” this isn’t code for “we’re going to hang around the hoop and see what happens with your round” we which frankly think is lame.  In fact we’re not very influenced by how a startup is received by other investors, as we’re comfortable investing in seed stage startups as either lead investor or as a participant with other investors.  Similarly for any startup we say “not yet” to, we actively seek to help in whatever ways we’re able in order to earn the right to have a look when the startup’s fundraising is in full swing.

Today one of our portfolio companies, GrabCAD, announced it’s Series A funding led by Matrix.  NextView originally invested in the company’s seed round in the spring of 2011 and we again participated in this latest round along with Atlas Venture.

I haven’t blogged about GrabCAD much here at AgileVC in the past, but we’re excited to be invesetors in the company.  Founders Hardi Meybaum and Indrek Narusk originally started building the company in their native Estonia before moving to Boston to join the hub of SaaS / CAD software companies located here.  It’s really been a pleasure for me to work with these guys.

In addition to compelling founders, we were drawn to the company by their vision for a professional community for mechanical engineers and designers.  LinkedIn is an amazing horizontal platform and continues to serve a broad range of professionals.  But some professional groups often have special characteristics that can best be served via a distinct community with SaaS products that extend deeper into their daily worklives.  You’ve seen this with companies like StackOverflow and Github in software engineering or Behance in visual design. GrabCAD is similarly changing the game for mechanical disciplines.

GrabCAD continues to grow like a weed with over 70,000 mechanical engineers who have downloaded CAD models from the community over 1.2 million times.  All of us at NextView are psyched to support the company into it’s next phases of growth along with the rest of the investor syndicate.

One of the hardest things for me as a VC remains telling entrepreneurs I like and respect that we’re passing on their investment round.  I often tell these entrepreneurs that I genuinely hope they prove us wrong, and are wildly successful with their startup.

I recently was having one of these conversations with an entrepreneur I’ve known for a couple years.  I looked at this founder’s prior startup, which ultimately had a successful exit, and then was happy to connect with him again as he launches a new project.  My partners and I would be thrilled to support this founder in general, but we don’t have enough conviction about the market opportunity he and his co-founders are pursuing to proceed with an investment.  I think he stands an excellent chance of having a successful fundraise and continuing to build the startup, but we’re simply not the right fit as an investor.

I wished this entrepreneur well and said I hope he proves our skepticism wrong and builds a massively successful company.  In a friendly way, this person then asked me “Wouldn’t you be bummed if that did happen?”  And the honest answer is “not at all.”

Our job as VCs is to source, select, and win the best investment opportunities.  In NextView’s case that’s seed stage internet and software companies.  All VCs make decisions by drawing on the data we have at hand, information gleaned through our diligence process, and our own experience and judgement.  It’s impossible for anyone to predict the future with perfect clarity… if we were onmiscient we’d never lose money in any investment and invest only in the grand slam opportunities.  And we all know that doesn’t happen all the time, even for the best VCs.

So we can’t be right all of the time.  We hope that impact of the times we’re right significantly outweighs the losses from times we’re wrong.  But what we can do is seek to make good decisions, and be very intentional about how we make those decisions.  You look back at investments you made that went bad or opportunities you passed on that did spectacularly.  If one can still say that based on the information you had at the time and your own good judgement as a partnership you made the right decision, then you’re doing your job as a VC firm.  

I’ve always respected Bessemer for publishing their “Anti-Portfolio” on their website.  It’s only one half of the decision ledger… understandably they don’t shout from the rooftops the stuff they did invest in but later blew up.  And of course in some ways it’s a toungue-in-cheek way to show off the firm’s great dealflow over the years.  But if you can look back and still be comfortable with your decision making, even if you missed some great outcomes, your firm’s process must be working pretty well.

My partners and I at NextView know we’ll be wrong a decent chunk of the time, especially as seed stage investors.  It’s still early to judge all our outcomes at this point, but we do work hard to make good decisions and continuously evaluate our broader process for selecting among a large number of investment opportunities.  So in addition to sleeping reasonably well at night, I will continue to wish entrepreneurs we don’t invest in the best of luck in proving us wrong.

NextView’s most recent investment was announced last week, and we’re excited to be investors in Objective Logistics.

Objective Logistics is taking a pretty sexy approach to a less than sexy, yet massive problem… namely how do you optimize the scheduling of service industry workforces.  Objective Logistics has created a game layer on top of very sophisticated scheduling algorithms which increase revenue, save time, and improve customer and staff satisfaction.  Part lives in the cloud and part is embedded in point of sale (POS) software systems.  The company is starting the revolution in the restaurant industry (there are roughly 1 million in the US), but this same opportunity exists in retail, hospitality, and possibly even healthcare.

Objective Logistics just closed a $1.5M seed round from NextView, Atlas Venture, and Google Ventures, and angel investors.  There’re lots of reasons why we’re pleased to be involved, from the market opportunity and product and beyond, but of course team is central for all startup investments.

While raising a new round of funding is a big accomplishment, as many others have pointed out it gives you a shot on goal… it’s not the ultimate victory.  Objective Logistics co-founders Philip Beauregard and Matt Grace sent out this illustration immediately after the round was announced which I think keeps this in perspective nicely.

OBJL has made it to base camp so we can eventually take a shot at summitting… but we’re not yet breathing the rarefied air at the top.  This team knows the really hard work lies ahead and remains totally focused on that.  We’re psyched to help in whatever small ways we can.

One of the themes that we’ve been most interested in at NextView over the last 12+ months has been the impact of consumer web trends on business software.  

I’m not the first person to describe this trend, and my prior background has been primarily as a consumer web guy more than in B2B companies.  But I’ve seen an acceleration of the impact consumer web trends are having on business software, and believe strongly that it will provide a thread of innovation for SaaS companies for the next 5+ years.  The classic delineations of web products for business and consumer (“enterprise” direct selling, on premise vs cloud, etc) are only getting blurrier.

There’s a couple different forces I see at work:

1) Selling & Customer Acquisition - In the last 5 years, the biggest force in business software was the impact of the cloud as an infrastructure layer and product/service delivery mechanism.  But in the next 5 years the web and mobile app stores will increasingly be a force in selling and customer acquisition for busines software.  People have been selling software over the web for awhile and indirect selling via screensharing and webinar, etc isn’t new.  But as social media continues to pervade businesses large and small, and purchase decisions increasingly happen at the user level (see #2) we will see dramatically more customer acquisition happen via the web.  The lessons learned from consumer Web 2.0 companies on user acquisition are increasingly being applied to SaaS companies.    

2) Users Drive Enterprise Tech Adoption – Historically centralized IT departments drove adoption of technology within businesses large and small, but today user-level adoption is the norm.  Whether tablets and smartphones via the BYOD movement or SaaS tools like Yammer, Salesforce, and others (most of which started bottom up at the user or workgroup level, not enterprise-wide from top down), regular users are driving new software purchases.  This is one component of why companies like RIMM are having a tough time of late.

3) UI/UX Matters in B2B - For decades, B2B application developers could skimp on innovating in the presentation layer.  This was in part because purchase decisions were driven by other factors, but also because until comparatively recently most end users didn’t use software and digital media that much in their personal lives.  Now that end users spend as much of their personal time with software (in the form of social networks, tablet/smartphone apps, streaming media, etc) as they do with business software they’ve become much more discriminating buyers. B2B software can no longer just get away with crappy UI… it has to at least match the ease of use and aesthetics of all the consumer web products users love.  

We’ve invested in a bunch of B2B software companies at NextView and I’m thrilled to see them steal pages out of the playbooks of successful consumer web companies.  GrabCAD has used search optimization to drive the bulk of it’s user acquisition, very similar to the way Yelp and others did.  InsightSquared is tackling business intelligence software (hardly a sexy market) with an incredibly sexy product that incorporates Facebook style timelines and other features.  RentJuice is doing much the same in real estate software.  And as B2B selling is increasingly done over the web, SalesCrunch is becoming one of the arms dealers to sales forces everywhere.  I hate indulging in wanton portfolio self-promotion, but my partners & I are incredibly excited about these companies and will undoubtedly continue to make more investments in this vein.  

At present the consumer web is the tail wagging the enterprise dog, in that you see business software companies copying consumer companies’ marketing strategies, product features, etc.  I think this will continue for a few years at least.  But hopefully B2B software companies will innovate in some interesting ways that will bleed into consumer-facing products.  

Steve Jobs’s passing reminded me of one of his sayings, that we’ve now entered a “post PC era” of computing. What he and others have meant is of course that the desktop computer is losing its preeimance as the primary computing platform with the rise of smartphones and tablets at one end and cloud computing (in all its forms) at the other.

It’s ironic because in a way, the era of “personal computing” has only just arrived.  What we refer to as the PC era (the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000′s) was not just the desktop phase era but more accurately a desktop corporate computing era.  The bulk of spending on PC-related computing (desktop computers, software, networking gear, etc) in the ’80s and ’90s was made by businesses large and small.  The monster companies that were built during this era had consumer facing brands but made most of their money selling to businesses… Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Compaq, et al.  Even companies that primarily sold server side products (Oracle, EMC) were able to do so because there was a desktop computer in every corporate cubicle, manufacturing station, and retail point of sale.

Even in the consumer space, desktop computers were typically a “home computer” shared by all occupants until very recently.  In the ’80s a home computer was the preserve of wealthy and upper middle class families. The ’90s saw broader adoption by the middle class but even in 1995 only 28% of US households had a computer (US Census / Pegasus Research).  It was only in 2000 that a majority of of US homes had a computer.

Thanks to Moore’s law and efforts by various corporate (e.g. Comcast’s Internet Essentials program), education, and non-profit initiatives a broad swath of the American public now has a broadband connected computer at home. Multi-computer homes are the norm in the middle class.  And of course smartphones and tablets are now fulling the promise of a computer in every pocket.  

It’s not just the installed base of hardware… it’s also a mindset shift that’s just now becoming pervasive.  I’ve been fortunate to have had my own computer for a couple decades now and a smartphone for over 5 years. But only now is it commonplace to see regular (e.g. non startup/VC types) folks decorate their laptop with stickers, personalize their smartphones with covers/wallpaper/ringtones, and generally consider one or more computing devices a highly personal item that’s a ubiquitous part of their life.  

The era of personal computing has finally arrived.  The second order impacts to the entire technology industry are in their early innings… not just the complete digitization of consumer media, but also the “consumerization” of business software, the BYOD movement in corporate IT, the evolution of the computer/human interface.  

To Steve Jobs and the other innovators, we can only say thanks.