One of my partners, Bob Smith, describes the current state of development of the Internet as something akin to a toaster.  You don’t necessarily need to know how a toaster works to get toast.  It just comes out – brown, light, wheat, rye – your biggest challenge is to figure out how to make sure the buttered side doesn’t fall on your carpet.

 While it may be counter intuitive to think about the experience of using a computer as having the simplicity of a toaster – anyone who has seen the “blue screen of death” would beg to differ. But, stop and think for a moment about how you use your computer these days – my guess is that more and more you are using your Internet browser to access sophisticated services.  Do you stop to think about how Google works?  Spend much time thinking about what made that YouTube video viewable on your laptop?  What about Ebay – know how their seller approval rankings are done?

Sitting here starting a blog is a very interesting experience, something that I am sure many of you have shared at one time or another.  There are quite literally millions of things to write about.  And, yet there is the “who cares” aspect – if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it fall?  So, with that – timber!

If you are an initial reader of this blog, then you probably know that I and a group of experienced business people decided around a year and half ago to start Amplifier Venture Partners (www.amplifierventures.com).  We started the fund because we believed that the DC Metroplex could use a source of institutional seed capital that provided entrepreneur focused “hands on” assistance. That doesn’t mean we thought that there weren’t already some great funds operating in town (we do, and work with many of them), but we saw a niche for us, to provide something additive to the community and the venture ecosystem.