The Live Web, Finally

One of the most significant impacts of Covid is that most everyone has realized how much more interesting the web is when it is live instead of dead. What I mean by that is that we like mixing it up with other people in the moment, as opposed to watching or reading something they said a while ago. Live captures our desire not to miss out, and reinforces our basic social nature.

I invest in the future of learning and work, specifically in companies who have pioneered live learning — Outschool, Lambda School, Juni Learning, GetSetup, Sora Schools, GalileoXP, Beanstalk and many more. Pre-covid these companies were doing well. Now, they are some of the fastest growing companies we’ve ever seen. I don’t think we are going to look back and see a blip and then a return to old behaviors. I think this is the beginning of the live web. To be clear, it’s not just learning where live is happening — twitch for gaming, many mental health services, and plain old Zoom for person to person are all on fire.

What I think we will see is that in every category, dead web companies will either need to transform to engage users live, or lose out to ones that figure out ways to do it. Because engagement is the most important thing in consumer Internet. And it’s pretty much impossible to beat live as a medium for engagement. Professional sports have known that for a long time. I think this will kick off a long boom in upgrading all of our experiences online to ones that are as exciting as being there in person.