Post-Facebook IPO: What VCs Are Looking For In The Next Great Social Network

Editor’s note: Joe Medved, a partner at SoftBank Capital, focuses on early-stage consumer and enterprise mobile, social marketing, gaming, and commerce investments. He serves on the boards of BestVendor, CrowdTwist, Jump Ramp Games and Thumb. SoftBank Capital’s other investments include BuzzFeed, Buddy Media, The Huffington Post and Omgpop. You can follow Joe on Twitter @joevc or read his blog at www.joemedved.com. As recent doubts have been cast upon Facebook in response to its stock market dip, it’s interesting to take a step back and look at the company from a different perspective. Despite the precipitous fall of Facebook’s stock price post-IPO, the company continues to grow at a rapid pace globally and sees high retention of new users, with over half of monthly active users coming back daily. In October 2012, Facebook announced hitting 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs), meaning 1 in every 7 people on the planet log into Facebook monthly. The company’s leadership in engagement ...

appdata bestvendor buddy buzzfeed cinemagram crowdtwist dominance engagement facebook fred wilson huffington instagram investment ipo joe leadership mark suster maus medved omgpop paul graham post-facebook post-ipo retention service socialcam softbank twitter vcs viddy weakness web