Editor's note: This is an Op-Ed piece by Mike Hirshland, a General Partner with Polaris Venture Partners in Boston.]
The All Things Digital Conference -- aka "D6" –- last week in Carlsbad, CA was true to form. It's one of the better events of the year. Host columnists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg were characteristically snarky and grumpy (respectively), and both the speaker and attendee list were platinum level.
While the real value was, as always, in the hallways, the conference sessions themselves had points both high and low. Rupert Murdoch took the gold medal as the best speaker, with Barry Diller a not too distant silver. Unlike some of the other rising and falling internet stars and corporate types, both Murdoch and Diller are old-line media moguls who built real, sustained business empires from scratch, and it shows. No BS, no talking points from PR handlers. Not afraid to say what they think, they have balls, they have gravitas, and it shows. Jerry Yang and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes were totally lame and tied for last place. Facebook kid-CEO Mark Zuckerberg was kind of endearing in his youth and earnestness. Gates and Ballmer were, well, pretty standard Gates and Ballmer.
All the fun really was the schmooze-fest in the hallways. What makes D one of the very few "must attend" events for me is that it has a great mix of people: early stage entrepreneur/angel types like Loic LeMeur (Seesmic), Mark Pincus (Tribe, Zynga), Mike Jones (Userplane), Peter Pham (Photobucket, Billshrink) and Gregg Spiridellis (Jibjab); new and old media dealmakers like Wade Davis (Viacom), Mike Marquez, (CBS) Peter Levinsohn (Fox), Steve Wadsworth (Disney) and Megan Smith (Google), bloggers Rafat Ali, Om Malik, Mike Arrington and Matt Marshall, VCs like David Sze and David Hornik. For a geographically challenged deal guy like me, the value in having all these under one roof for a couple days is huge. (I tried selling one of these guys my portfolio for $5 billion, but he didn't think it was quite the bargain I did. Maybe next year.)
While I neither met the next great startup to fund nor heard any brilliant insight that I will take away with me, there was at least one discussion that really has me thinking. Swisher made the standard quip that all of the currently popular Facebook apps seem so childish and trivial; where are the grown-up apps that have real value and become for Facebook what Word, Excel and Powerpoint became for Windows? While the true answer probably is that those apps don't yet exist (I tend to agree that today's hit FB apps are pretty trivial), Zuckerberg's response included the germ of what I think is a pretty profound insight: we tend to think of killer apps as single monolithic applications that gazillions of people use, like Excel, email or search. On a socially networked web, though, we are also going to see lots of smaller mini-apps that standing alone have less usage and less utility, but in the aggregate have tons of usage and utility.
I don't think the idea is fully formed yet, but I do think Zuckerberg is onto something.
Scott Duke Harris's story in the San Jose Mercury News.
Mike Hirshland (pictured) blogs as VCMike.