This is one of my favorite French sayings - the more things change, the more they stay the same.
We had a great meeting yesterday with the entire leadership team of one of the companies from our portfolio. There was a broad ranging discussion from trademark issues to strategy to business develoment. Throughout, there were two schools of thought present - that on the web everything is different versus only some things being different. I subscribe to the latter view.
Take business development for example. Caterina Fake coined the Biz Dev 2.0 term for publishing APIs and letting others just start using them, then reach out to those who do. I believe that is a great approach and has worked incredibly well for many companies in our portfolio, with Twitter being the best case in point. But it does not mean that the old form of business development has gone out the window entirely. If you only go the passive API route you are likely to leave some potentially huge opportunities untapped. Not everyone will be aware of your service or API or what they could do with it or why it would benefit them. While you are small and just getting going you may not want to bother with that, but as you grow it would be a mistake not to. Even google which is often seen as the apotheosis of API-based self service has a formidable traditional biz dev team.
