In open source, you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed.

My biggest mentor has been the Benchmark partnership. We have six partners and a flat structure, and everyone is paid the exact same paycheck. It's a team model versus an individual model.

We actually tried to invest in Twitter in April 2007, right when it launched. At the time, the company was wary of having a classic, tier-one traditional venture firm involved.

What Google did in Web 1.0 was take a feature, which was search, and built an entire business around that utility. In Web 2.0, Twitter took a feature, which is sharing, and built a utility that allowed people to do that on a massive scale.