You want to know why mobile is huge. Google shelled out $750M for a 3 year old mobile web ad startup. Here is an interview of Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob. He has very interesting prespectives on startups, fundraising and mobile space.
One interesting titbit is that Sequoia gave him a term sheet in less than 24 hours after meeting him. He is just one guy with a loptop. Sequoia saw soemething in him that made them move so quickly. Now they are getting a huge payoff. That’s why they are Sequoia. They bet on markets and take risks on team and technology. That seems to work well for them.
“I had to do the pitch [to Sequoia] like four or five times,” he tells Scoble, “because it has to be a unanimous decision. Every partner has to see it, and every partner has to vote yes otherwise they won’t do it….The overall market opportunity is extremely substantial. And they tend to be market investors, so they’re whole theory is that if the market is spectacular, even a sub-optimal product with a sub-optimal team will do fantastically well. Not that, hopefully, we are either.”