It’s hard to find a man more bullish on social than Bing Gordon.
The Kleiner Perkins partner will be spearheading the firm’s new sFund and, like John Doerr, fully believes that the era of social is just beginning. Just how much will social balloon in the short term? Gordon sees exponential-like growth, expecting the social space to grow 10 to 25x in the next five years.
“We think that social is going to be so big, the social category, I think it could be, the category growth in social could grow 10 to 25 times in 5 years and every company that’s out there has venture upside no matter how big they are right now…We want the freedom to get the venture style returns… but do it with the most interesting people.”
Sounds like KPCB— and its rat pack of hot-shot web companies (Facebook, Amazon, Zynga, etc.)— will need a bigger boat.
On Thursday, we got a chance to catch up with Gordon after the sFund announcement at Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto. Over the course of our discussion, Gordon walked us through his thinking behind the fund, why Sandhill Road disagreed with his thesis and why their target investment range is 100 K to 100 million.
Interested in a slice of the $250 million pie? Gordon also told us the kind of conversation he’s looking for when he meets with entrepreneurs from the social field:
“What are you passionate about and how are you going to get to scale? When you’re on the social graph get to scale means take advantage of person-to-person pass along marketing…show us something where if your friends pictures are there it’s cooler and inventive. And then let’s get into discussion: social is still changing so fast, let’s learn together.”
See video above.
Bonus footage: As we learned on Thursday morning, the sFund’s first investment is a $5 million bet on CafeBots. There is not a lot of information available on this stealth startup, but it will apparently focus on the curation of the social layer, or FRM, friend relationship management. We talked to co-founder and CEO Yoav Shoham, to get a taste — or at least a vague idea — of what users can expect later this year when CafeBots goes live.
Bing Gordon joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2008. At KPCB, he leads on the sFund, the investment initiative to fund and build applications and services that deliver on the promise of the social web. The sFund, launched in late 2010 with strategic partners Amazon, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Co, has made 14 investments to date, including 4 seeds. Bing serves on the board of directors of sFund companies Lockerz, Cafebots and Klout; sFund...
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) is a well known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, due in large part to their past success. They were early investors in many significant companies, including Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Segway, and Sun Microsystems. The name of the firm comes from the four founding partners: Eugene Kleiner, Tom Perkins, Frank J. Caufield, and Brook Byers. In March 2008, KPCB announced the iFund, a $100M investment initiative focused on ideas...
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