Where we focus our energy

We want to build great products that change the world (even if it's just for your world). Our main challenge is that today there are so many areas of innovation and so many opportunities to choose from that focus can be a problem. Where do we spend our energy? Who do we work with? What kind of products do we build?

To help answer this, we look carefully at three things:

1. What people do (early adopter behavior)
2. What problems remain unsolved (ripe for disruption)
3. What problems are we well positioned to solve (what we know) and where is our passion

We've already seen some big shifts in behavior over the past five years. Think about:

• Twitter and social interactions (shorter, faster, one-to-many)
• Foursquare and increased usage of geo-location enabled apps
• Shifts in media consumption from single player mode (watching TV alone) to multi-player mode (sharing media with friends in real-time and hammering away on your mobile while watching TV)
• Facebook and Groupon - sharing as the accelerator of growth

We also know that software is one of the key disruptive drivers of change in the world and, since web/mobile software is our passion, we pay close attention to technology innovation from hardware to software.

To sharpen our focus, we have identified a few key “investment” areas for Fabric:

• Mobile use: Consumer behavior is framed by rapid smart phone adoption and use of location aware social applications. Mobile is the most important touch point and we think: mobile first.
• Geo-location drives disruption in marketing and advertising worldwide. We see big growth and innovation opportunities in areas such as ad tech and big data. Advertising and marketing is super wasteful. More disruption in this area is inevitable.
• Social and the social graph has become a common layer for everything we do cross web and mobile. Now that sharing is the new media, open networks and API’s becomes the chosen path for fast growth and disruption.
• Personal data management and trust: We’ll see more open platforms and open networks grow through transparency. For these companies, trust is the key ingredient for communication and transaction. This is the intersection of identity, social, community, and transaction.
• Collaboration and crowd-sourcing enables new products, new markets, and new value creation. It is still early, very early, and we think crowd and collaborative models will infiltrate our work life in amazing ways.

Today, we think that the big challenges and the big opportunities remain in economy (jobs), health, and education.

This is why we're looking to work on projects that:

• Help people find jobs or make money in new and creative ways
• Help people make money by building platforms and networks for producing/selling
• Build better systems for trust between individuals and networks
• Reduce the cost of education or make it more available or more efficient
• Improves individuals health or reduce cost of healthcare

We are looking for passionate people who are building products on these macros. Despite the economic problems world-wide, we believe the opportunities to build amazing products - to make a difference - are actually expanding. It's not 1999. It's 2011. The good news? You have 10 more years of massive disruption coming your way. Are you going to be part of the past or the future?

Tags: distruption, focus, Future, investment