Silicon Valley is Motown and the Web is a hit factory

The debate over whether or not Silicon Valley is in a bubble might not be the right question. Instead, we may want to ask whether the fundamental principles of tech investing are shifting, as technology becomes more of a consumer phenomenon.

For all the talk of the long tail, the big money is in sites and services that capture a large user base. So how does venture capital and angel investing change to support this model? And should it? Success in this realm isn’t like success in the old-school Silicon Valley world of building chips or enterprise software. The product still matters, but the audience isn’t the few technically or business-savvy experts at a large company that is evaluating your wares for a multimillion-dollar deal. Today it’s selling to the billion people on Facebook, hoping they will give you a click, a tweet or five minutes of their time to be monetized in the form of ads.