The next Google may not be the size of Google.
Instead, scores of successful small companies will define the next stage of the Web as the Internet goes mobile and connects billions of portable devices to a ubiquitous public network.
If you aim to build big businesses, you will fail, says Ram Shriram
“They will have 10 to 15 employees” and there will be a lot of them, says Ram Shriram, a Google board member and founder of the investment firm Sherpalo.
“If you try to aim to build big businesses out of this, you will fail,” he said Wednesday during an appearance at the Silicom Summit 2009 at Stanford University.
Shriram said the Internet is generating opportunities for small-scale applications, such as those that entrepreneurs have built for Apple’s iPhone. Smart phones and portable devices are starting to replace the PC as the consumer’s primary data communications device, he said.
The result is an opportunity for two or three people to toil, build and application and take home half a million dollars if they are successful.
“I think this emerging trend will create a lot of little companies,” he says.
And instead of relying on advertising as the main source of revenue, they will broaden the economic base of the Internet by charging for the applications or subscriptions.
“There will be some micro payment models that could work,” he says.
