Essentials • 16:22
KPCB's iFund(tm) is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. Come learn more about building a great company on the iPhone / iPod touch platform and meet the Kleiner Perkins partners managing the iFund. Bring your demos for Q and A.
Speaker: Matt Murphy
Unlisted on Apple Developer site
Transcript
This transcript was generated using Whisper, it has known transcription errors. We are working on an improved version.
Good morning. John Galunzi. I just want to kick this session off and tell you what's going to happen because it's a little bit of a non-standard session for us at WDC in a couple of ways and sort of lay the agenda for you so you know what to expect and then I'm going to kick it over to the KPCB folks.
So what we're going to do is kind of like a feedback forum except the KPCB folks are going to speak for about 10 minutes, just kick off, give you some information about the iFun and about who they are and how they can help you. And then we're going to turn it over to Q and A and you can get to the mics and ask questions that might be appropriate for the whole group to hear, the whole room to hear.
And then we're going to follow up immediately after that. We'll just basically put some KPCB folks through the room and you'll be able to meet with them. You can talk to them individually and show them what you've got and talk to them about your specific proposal or ideas or what have you. So just to reiterate, start off with a very quick presentation about the iFun and then we'll do some Q and A.
So prepare your questions based on what you hear and then we'll break out and you can meet with the folks from KPCB. So to kick that part off, let me introduce Matt Murphy who's a partner with Kleiner Perkins in managing the iFun. Matt, do you want to come on up? Hi, I'm Matt Murphy from Kleiner Perkins, Kauffman & Byers. I manage the iFun along with several of my partners who are here today who we'll introduce you to later.
First, I want to thank all of you for being here. I know that you have a lot of choices. It's a busy week and we really appreciate your time. And we're looking forward to the conversations we're going to have later to learn more about you and what you're working on. After spending a bit of time around here this week, it's clear that $100 million is a good start, but given all the enthusiasm and everything we see going on here, it's probably insufficient. But it's a starting point.
So, a little bit more about us. As John was saying, what we're going to do today is just a real quick overview of who we are, kind of some of the big themes that we think are important in mobile, how to work with the iFunnd, and then we'll break. So, us.
We've been in the business for over 30 years and we tend to have found some big opportunities around a new platform emerging. So, you go back to the PC era or the computing era, beginning of the computing era around Compaq and some microsystems. And unfortunately, we missed Apple, but that's a longer story.
And hopefully, being up here today, the iFunnd and working with all of you going forward will be a bit of redemption. As the Internet emerged, companies like Google, Netscape, Amazon, and we fully believe that in a few years as we look back on this chart here of icons of companies we've invested in, that as this emergence of the mobile Internet emerged, we're going to be able to do a lot more. And hopefully, as the emergence of the mobile Internet platform happens, that companies of equal magnitude will be built around the mobile Internet. You can see some quick statistics on number of IPOs, number of jobs we've helped create, revenues, et cetera.
This is our team. We call it the iTeam. This is the number of people within the firm who work at some level with the iFun. So we're putting a lot of people behind the effort. We think it's really important. We'll introduce some of those to you later. So powerful trends. Why are we so excited about the mobile Internet, about the iPhone, and about the iFun? If you look at to date, about 6 million units sold.
And going forward by the end of '09, who knows what it's going to be. But with a $199 price point, with all of you, all the developers, all of the applications that are coming, we're clearly about to hit an inflection point and the curve could be steeper than that. So exciting times.
Also, as all of you know, a terrific development environment is crucial for getting more applications onto mobile devices. And Apple's nailed that one and that's why we're all here this week. 3G. Unless you have 3G, you've got an experience that's still too slow for some of the things that we all want to do. 3G is now solved both in the new iPhone as well as becoming fairly ubiquitous around the world.
User awareness and early adoption-- the whole ecosystem is buzzing around new applications that are coming. A device like the iPhone-- we're seen people do different things with their mobile devices than they ever have before. And we're seeing a strong early adopter audience. I'm sure you know some of the statistics, but about 20% of people access the mobile internet on regular phones, 90 plus percent on the iPhone. It's a good platform to be on.
And one of the most broken things within the mobile ecosystem historically has been discovery and a distribution channel. It's been too hard to get your applications out to users-- too much friction working with the carriers, and a really broken discovery paradigm. About 70% of people only download an application within the first week of getting the phone. And we all know that this is clearly going to change with the App Store and having a good discovery experience.
And finally, the most exciting thing to us and the premise of the iFun is that developers are coming to mobile in droves that they never were before. And I think part of that is all the things we just talked about and other trends about what's going on on the iPhone. And if there's any indication of that, the fact that this event is sold out, that all of you are here, it's an exciting time to be an entrepreneur in mobile.
So areas of interest... what are we looking at? Real-time social networking, mobile advertising. I'm not going to read through all these, but you can kind of see... there's probably not a lot of surprises here. These are kind of the big categories as we see them. Gaming--we've seen a lot of different gaming demos, et cetera, and it's a terrific device for that.
But I think what we're mainly looking for is new applications that take advantage of a mobile experience and think about all the capabilities within the iPhone to deliver something that users haven't had available to them before. And then the last one is just totally cool new things. I think we're going to be surprised, both in conversations with all of you and once the App Store launches, about the kinds of applications that we see emerge, the new use cases that we can't really predict until we see it out there.
So what are some of the big ideas? We call it augmented reality and there's an example in our portfolio. The first iFun company called Whirl. The company's Pelago and the product is Whirl. But there's this notion that you've always got this always on personal location aware device. It knows who you are, where you are, it can learn your personal profile, the kinds of things you're interested in. It's got a quasi social network in it which is your phone book. So how do you take all that information that's always with your device and interact with the physical world? Get smarter about the world going on around you through the use of this device.
Real time social gaming, interacting with people as you play games, and it could be anything from a simple poker game to a virtual world where you're interacting with other people's characters and so forth. Mobile identity management is basically how do you -- you've got all this information on the mobile Internet.
How do you basically have a common identity that allows you to access a lot of information? Your life stream, the information you care about in the moment instead of having to go through 20 different accounts or try and figure out what information you care about or not. Micro payments, I think we're going to see micro payments, but we're also going to see virtual currency, virtual goods, and things like that.
Hyper local discovery, so now again going back to the personalization of the device, the location awareness of the device, I think we're going to have a huge opportunity to hyper target people both in terms of their interests and as well as in terms of advertising and promotion and things like that.
And the last two are kind of a catchall, personalization and location enablement. Those are going to be things that are built into many, many applications. I think the most important thing is that the devices themselves aren't applications. It's the fact that the device now has those things and those can be provided in a lot of different applications to create new experiences as well as the accelerometer which you see in the icon there.
Why the iFund? Well, as you see in the picture here, it's all about the hugs. We give good hugs. There's been a longstanding relationship between Kleiner Perkins and Apple. And the formation of the iFund was a long time in coming around. And we launched it with the launch of the SDK in early March. And there's some real alignment around what we were trying to achieve. Kind of from our standpoint, capital and company building expertise from the Apple standpoint.
Having a partner who could deliver those things. And for them to deliver their strategic, technical, and marketing support to some of the best and brightest entrepreneurs and the best and most interesting companies that we all see. So there's a lot of kind of, it fit our mutual goals pretty well.
We believe by being part of the iFund that we can help you in an advantaged way to be successful in the iPhone and iPod Touch ecosystem. And there's, of course, collaboration with Apple. And with other iPhone companies. And a lot of good press and PR, I think, around being an iFund company.
So what have we seen so far? Just some quick statistics on that. We've had about over 2,000 proposals received so far and we're through about 90%. So hopefully you have all seen that. We're sticking to our two-week turnaround time and we're engaged with about 100 so far. And just to put this number in perspective, this is about a factor of 20 more plans than we would have seen in kind of this three-month period prior to launching the iFun. So I think it's clearly been successful for us and I think successful for entrepreneurs in terms of connecting with a venture firm and a fund that's really bullish and interested in the mobile area.
Just this is a little bit hard to read. Well, actually, I think you can read it pretty well. But this is a distribution of plans. About 85% of plans we received so far are consumer-facing. That's probably not a surprise. And the distribution within that is actually fairly clustered, somewhere between 4% and 10% if you look at the different categories, like social networking or games or multimedia, content sharing, things like that. There wasn't any category that was over-indexed. We got a good distribution of plans, which was encouraging to us that people have a wide range, variety of ideas and are trying to innovate across a lot of different sectors.
So keys to iPhone success. I want to talk a little bit about what's the iPhone looking for as you approach us and how to think about that. I mentioned this before, but think about a new mobile use case. Don't just kind of replicate something that was on the web and port it over and say Amazon worked on the web, therefore I'm going to create Amazon for the web. Amazon can, sorry, for the mobile internet.
Amazon can create the Amazon for the mobile internet. What's going to be different about a shopping experience or so forth that's going to tie in some of the unique aspects of the iPhone or location and things like that. Those are the things to think about, a new behavior and use case. And that goes to the second point on the do's, which is leverage the iPhone's unique capabilities, the address book, the accelerometer, GPS. Deliver a killer user experience. Really focus on a great user experience.
From the get-go, keeping something simple, making the user understand why they're using it. That first 20 minutes of the day, that's a 20-second and then five-minute experience is critical for being successful. And demo a prototype that will stand out. So far in the iPhone, I think we see a lot of plans that are ideas that seem like wouldn't this be great if somebody built it and if this worked and users loved it. Come up with something a little bit more crisp than that that's a prototype that shows how you've conceptualized your ideas and illustrated your ideas and why that's a big deal.
On the don't side, probably things that aren't a good fit for the iPhone are niche applications. We've seen a lot of narrow applications like a great new golf app or a surf report app or things like that. Those are too narrow, too niche. It's kind of from going back to the first slide.
What we're really looking for is kind of those foundational set of applications on the mobile Internet just like we did in the Internet and the computing wave before that. Don't underestimate the importance of team. I think in other things we often see one person and maybe doesn't have the right set of either technical competence or maybe doesn't have the right set of skills or maybe doesn't have the right set of business competence or business competence to kind of build the idea they're pursuing. So think about how to build a really great team that covers the main aspects of what would be necessary to deliver this application and this experience. And finally, don't submit an early raw idea that's undifferentiated.
Early and raw is actually better than undifferentiated. I think we see a lot of things where we'll see 50 restaurant finder applications or something like that in the iFund. And so think about what you're building that somehow is differentiated and can stand the test of time relative to other competitors or people out there in this big world, mobile world that's everywhere as we know. So how are you going to be different and how's that going to stand the test of time? Okay, summarizing here, three ways to work with the iFun.
First, submit a proposal to the iFun. You can do that either off of the Apple developer website. There's a link to this page or off our home page, www.kpcb.com. You'll find this page. So go there and there's a standard form that tells you how to submit an application.
Next, if you're not thinking about starting a company, think about joining an iFun company. And we're here with my recruiting partner, Jordan Ormont, who we'll introduce you to in a minute. Here's his email address. Send him your resume. There's a lot of companies, both that we funded and that we're working on or incubating.
And of course, as you can all imagine, the biggest shortage is of great people. So we'd like to see your resumes. And here's some of the companies in the portfolio right now. iFun portfolio, Pelago with their product Whirl, and a company called iControl. And there's some stealth companies that if you connect with us, we can introduce you to them.
And finally, if you're starting an incubation project, there's some areas that we're interested in: mobile advertising, commerce, payments, and healthcare, where we've got some active explorations underway. And we'd love to hear your ideas or potentially include you in those. And you can email to my partner, Chi-Hua Chen.
All right, so I introduced our I team, and here are the people today that are with us, and maybe it'd be best if you guys... Actually, we will come up at the end after the Q&A, and I can introduce each of you. But real quick, Trey Vassallo has spent a good part of the last 10 years in mobile.
She was a company called Good Technology, which was a RIM competitor acquired by Motorola. Bing Gordon, who just recently joined us, he was CMO of Creative Arts, so anything consumer-facing, entertainment, games, et cetera, he's your man, and he's much broader than that as well. Ellen Pao, deep software experience background out of Tell Me and BEA.
Chiwa Chen, great consumer-facing experience, kind of understands virality, customer acquisition, all those kind of things, longtime Internet, both entrepreneur and venture capitalist. And then finally, I mentioned Jordan Ormont, who's our recruiting partner. So they'll come up on stage after the Q&A, and then what we'll do after the Q&A is we'll kind of break, pick them up into different places around the room, and we'll be, we want to discuss your, see your prototypes, your demos, and spend up to five minutes with anyone who's interested to do that today.