I also find the fund sizes interesting. The median fund size from this sample is 137.5 and the mean is 151.2. This is one piece of evidence that may suggest a right sizing of the VC market is necessary and, furthermore, a right sizing of individual funds themselves is needed.

I still feel that, with few exceptions, VC itself doesn't scale. Of course the incentive for VCs is to raise more money than needed so they can take in larger fees. That, in turn, puts further distance between the desires of LPs and GPs.

I am reminded of Warren Buffett's idea that the investors should only make money if their investments do well (I believe his first "fund" was structured that way). Clearly the VC business, on average, has moved away from that idea and needs to come back to it.

Andrew Keen's argument that innovation will lead to a more unequal distribution of resources is not compelling at all. As a parallel, let's look at medical technology and knowledge improvements over time. If we look at life expectancy (and GDP/person) over the last 200 years we can see that all countries moved up and to the right. Check out a fantastic visualization of the data here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPt8ElTQMIg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPt8ElTQMIg . Of course some countries do have much longer life expectancies than others (US is roughly in the 70s while Africa is roughly in the 40s) but all countries experienced a lift due to medical advances and that lift increases over time.

What we have seen through history is that innovations are "subsidized" by elites in the early days since they can afford the large price tag. Over time as the innovations become less costly to produce they diffuse through the population enriching everyone in some way.

Another good example would be cars: today most people in the US own cars but 100 years ago most of the car owners were very wealthy elites. If we use Keen's thought process back 100 years ago we'd assume there would be car owning elites today that would oppress the people who don't own cars. Of course, we don't observe that phenomenon today.

Keen simply doesn't take his thought process to "equilibrium" (or factor in competitive forces) nor does he take into account the decreasing price of innovations over time that promote the diffusion of said innovations into the populous at large.

Thanks for posting about this David! Frank and I are really excited to be bringing TECH cocktail to Boulder. There is a lot going on in Boulder and we hope we can help in our own little way to get the town recognized for all the great technology it produces.

On another note I should mention that this event will be very special in that it is also a pilot event to test a partnership we're working on with the DEMO conference.

The DEMO folks are helping us with logistics and finding sponsors which they have a lot of experience with. This really helps take some of the burden off of Frank and I since TC is still a two man part-time show.

Looking forward to seeing the best of Boulder tech on March 6!

Good point John. The closed ecosystem is definitely a big negative (and is why I haven't plopped down the dough for a Kindle yet).

I hope things will get better over time with the kindle and devices like it in terms of a more open ecosystem though. This is just the first shot at something like this. It is like web content was before the movement to free up content and open up the walls.

Big content producers (in this case book publishers) have to get comfortable with the idea first and then we can push them to what's right. In fact, since Amazon has so much power in the book sales ecosystem they can push to create a more open ecosystem and the publishers should listen (one would hope).

Generally though I think I would like the device as a way to manage all of my books and an easier way to travel with them even though it is a bit restrictive.

Its really a decent (maybe even good) book reader with a lot of other ill conceived features. Its not perfect but it is interesting and it should shake things up one way or another.

I like this system a lot and I know I will get a lot of value out of it. My only issue now is formatting.

When you click on the comment list from a post of the main page and that post doesn't currently have any comments the user is brought to the permalink page (of course). The formatting then messes up a bit so that the user is left at the bottom of the page past the comments which would frustrate me if I wanted to comment.

The formatting is also a tad off on the posts with comments (comment box is too long, etc.). Any ideas guys?

Once I get the formatting fixed I know I will love this thing.