"Last contribution of the USA to the world was the Internet"

These are words of Joaquin Alvarado, Director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet INGI. He was rather provocative in his speech saying that “We are an old country with crumbling medical systems”. He argued that telephone, energy and education should be available to everybody in the US by law but often are not. On the other hand piracy is a great issue in the media space and the government cannot do anything about that.

He mentioned two examples of successful governmental regulation of infrastructure, namely the interstate highways and the Public Broadcasting System PBS proposed by the Carnegie Commission. So why not the next generation Internet? That reminded me on the succesfull SURFnet model we have in the Netherlands intended for Internet network facilities between the Universities. In the eighties it took a long time to convince the two ministers (Andriessen and Deetman) of the necessity and the funding needed. Nowadays we enjoy the advantages of this organization and the Internet facilities it hosts.

Joaquin thinks that the next generation of Internet must provide services for highly demanding social communities (consumers at home) and at the universities.

Dave McClure of 500 Hats showed us his model of five (5) AARRR stages a webpage visitor (say user) is going through:
• Acquisition; Users come to the site via various channels
• Activation; User enjoy the first visit, “happy” experience
• Retention; Users come back, visit site multiple times
• Referral; Users like product enough to refer others
• Revenue; Users conduct some monetization behavior

Dave argues that every startup company must be aware of its own metrics for these stages in order to operate the company and make conversions to the web application. His experiences look similar to those of Paul Graham. Focus on the customers and nearly daily builds are essential ingredients. See his interesting essay “How to be Silicon Valley” .