Many people worry that they missed the opportunity to participate in the Internet revolution. I have often heard that most of the opportunities are already taken and that the incumbents are set to win.

I could not disagree more. This reminds me of 1998 when people were dismissing Google because people were already using Alta Vista and Yahoo. We cannot fathom how much the Internet will be transformed by ever increasing processor power, storage and bandwidth. We are still at the very beginning of the Internet revolution and things are still evolving extremely rapidly.

If you take a look at the top 50 sites by attention in August 2001 versus August 2007, only 5 have increased their market share, with Google increasing the most. Many have completely fallen off the map and the most successful sites of the past few years did not even exist then: MySpace, Facebook, Youtube…

Moreover, the environment is continuing to shift. Two years ago, MySpace seemed to have the social networking category locked up. Facebook is now threatening that hold and now seems impregnable – but who knows, things evolve extremely rapidly on the Internet. In addition, the online advertising market is finally significant enough that advertising based business models are increasingly challenging paid models. The future is going to be interesting!

This is a great time to be a risk taking entrepreneur. Let’s take full advantage of it!