At the heart of every entrepreneurial endeavor are three words: “What if we…”

Austin Caravan started when Launchrock co-founder Jameson Detweiler and Crosswalk founder Tom McLeod began to wonder if they could create a totally different space at South By Southwest. They loved the event. The loved the convergence, the revelry, and the maddening hustle of new companies being born. But like so many others, they believed that in the post-Twitter years, the event had lost the intimacy that had made it great in the first place.

They started to imagine a renegade side event that would be anchored in community. They would need a space. They would need content and programming. They would need atmosphere. They would need real people to bring the whole thing to life.

What happened next was an example of one of the most important phenomena of the modern era: semi-spontaneous mass collaboration. The social architecture of the Internet has enabled a type of collaboration in which new groups can rapidly form, and identify and aggregate disparate resources to accomplish tasks that previously would have taken extensive bureaucratic infrastructure to accomplish.

We see semi-spontaneous mass collaboration all around us, from the groups that form to enact change using online petition sites to the Occupy Wall Street movement to unconferences democratizing access to performed knowledge. While similar things did happen before the Internet, they required a totally different level of organizational rigor, time, and money to work. It was not collections of people mobilizing their varies skills, connections, spaces, and other assets to get things done, but individual organizations leveraging their financial means.

In the Internet world, semi-spontaneous mass collaboration happens when new groups (usually anchored by existing social bonds) form to respond to some catalyzing impetus. When Jameson and Tom put their idea for the Caravan into the ether, their community of friends quickly turned the “what if we” into a stream of “and then we coulds…”

Within a few days, working with friends at Social People, they had secured a space — a 20,000 square foot lumber mill less than a mile away from the heart of SXSWi events. Interestingly, instead of focusing on one event, the nebulous team wanted to focus on the big idea of building a better community and decided to use their space as a platform to allow other startups to host their own gatherings.

What emerged is a four-day convergence that shows off the full weird and wonderful energy of the startup community. Launchrock will be hosting a first-of-its-kind User-acquisition-a-thon. The parking lot of the lumber mill will be playing host to half a dozen RVs full of entrepreneurs who will be living, working, and hanging out in the space throughout. An indoor stage will provide a platform for musicians and film screenings.

Each evening entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, designers, artists, and musicians will be hosting discussions that get past the panel format and instead focus on real deep engagement. It will be the only place at SXSW where you can actually participate in a discussion about community with a founder of Reddit and a leader of Burning Man at the same time.

And then there are the hot tubs. And the art show. And shuttles bringing people back and forth from other events all day. And a farmers market. And, and, and…

The power of the new approach to organizing is that each of these “and then we coulds” came not from the minds of the folks who initiated the project, but the extended community of friends they brought into it.

From SXSW to TEDx to Burning Man to Summit Series, the rise of conference culture suggests that, if anything, the incredible connectivity of the Internet makes us thirst even more for real, offline experiences. Austin Caravan is one more example of how entrepreneurs are harnessing their communities to give life to that desire.

[Image Credit: Shutterstock] Ed. Note: I should mention that this photo is the backdrop of Austin Caravan’s website, and that no RVs (to my knowledge) are likely to be harmed at the event itself.

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.

He’s right, and that means it’s worth some serious mental cycles to figure out what type of company is going to be most fulfilling and exciting for you and your team to work on.

Startups have different origins. Some founders are on a quest: they see some problem — some inefficiency or injustice in the world and, for having identified it, simply can’t not try to solve it. Some founders are simply preternatural entrepreneurs: they like to tinker, build, and solve problems, but are fascinated by many different things. Some founders are both; they are natural problem solvers who find themselves, over time, addicted to solving a particular problem.

But what if there isn’t some huge problem staring you in the face? How do you go about figuring out what to build? Here are five strategies.

1. What do you care about?
Startups are intense, time consuming, energy consuming enterprises. Even when they go well, they drain you. For the vast majority of people, they don’t result in the glory and gold that it’s so easy to dream about at the outset. In that context, it’s essential to understand what you, as a founder, enjoy spending your time on. There simply has to be a wellspring of intrinsic motivation around either the process or the subject of your company. Gary Vaynerchuk put this well in a 2008 keynote: “Look yourself in the mirror, and ask yourself, “what do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?” Do that. I promise, you can monetize that shit. If you love Alf, do an Alf blog. You collect Smurfs? Smurf it up!”

2. Where on the problem vs. opportunity spectrum does it fall?
Startups tend to fall into one of two categories: solving a problem or trying to create a new opportunity. On one end of the extreme is a company like Expensify, which solves a gnarly problem – how to easily process expense reports – that existed long before the startup. On the other end is a company like Twitter, which didn’t solve a problem that people had identified, but instead took advantage of a peculiar technological and social moment to give people an opportunity they didn’t know they wanted, but once exposed to, became essential. Opportunity startups can be incredibly exciting. Like Twitter and Facebook, the systems that are most essential to our lives today often start off feeling somewhat like a novelty. On the flip side, opportunity startups are inherently riskier, because of the challenges in trying to guess at behavior shifts. These types of startups tend to require a higher burden of proof in terms of traction and team for investors than companies that are addressing a highly tangible problem.

3. How big is the opportunity?
While few entrepreneurs chose what to focus on based strictly on size of financial opportunity, big, fat markets are incredibly exciting and are a vector worth thinking about. Indeed, total addressable market size is one of the most essential factors in the flow of venture capital. For VCs with big funds, it is the companies that end up exiting for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that make the fund successful. For a company to have this sort of potential, the total market size of the companies they invest in needs to be the billions. And while it’s not always the case, the total scope of the financial potential can often be an indicator of the urgency or size of the problem being solved, as well.

4. How impactful is the project?
Financial upside isn’t the only measurement of the scale and scope of a startup. Startups are engines for solving problems, and many entrepreneurs gravitate towards building companies that make the world a better place. Software has still only scratched the surface of its potential to improve industries like health care (in the US and in the developing world), education, and financial services for the poor, making these incredibly interesting sectors for the impact-motivated entrepreneur.

5. How crowded is the field?
Photo sharing startup? Groupon or Airbnb clone? Next generation enterprise social collaboration suite? Some industries have an incredible plethora of startups vying for attention. There are some obvious downsides to building a startup in a crowded space: the difficulty of differentiation, potential conflicts from the funders you might want to bring in, the chance that, if they haven’t solved it yet, it’s harder than it seems. But there are upsides as well: lots of activity validates the size of the opportunity and more companies working on a problem creates an opportunity for learning that can help you succeed where others haven’t.

Ultimately, there is no right or wrong way to chose what you want to build. Every strategy for deciding has risks and opportunities. What’s for sure is that building a startup is an immense commitment of emotional and physical energy, and understanding what motivates you as a founder is essential to being successful.

[Image credit: Fork in the Railway via ShutterStock.]

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.

The last few years have shown the emergence of a new class of global power. This is the power of spontaneous, citizen-led, self-organized movements. From the campaigns that come together to influence shifts in business policy on Change.org to the digital support networks that find ways to aid on-the-ground Middle Eastern revolutionaries to the dystopian post-modern hacktivism of Anonymous, the global citizenry of the web is flexing its collective muscle to show that groups of people, unconstrained by the boundaries of physical location, can rapidly become self-organized armies.

In some cases, the Internet is just a tactical tool – simply enabling a better, more efficient, more targeted aggregation of sentiment that would still exist otherwise. But increasingly, the activism on the internet – most notably the protests against the SOPA and PIPA legislation – reflect not just the tactical opportunities, but also the distinct values of internet culture.

What’s interesting about this type of activism is that, for all its seriousness and profound ambition, it is in many ways related to a picture of a cat that wonders if it might have some cheeseburger.

One of the most important and persistent questions in philosophy is whether people share a common “human nature.” Is there something which connects us not on a cultural level but a human level? The question has resonated so strongly because of how much the answer impacts the way we consider and treat people different than us.

The great philosophers of ancient Greece such as Aristotle believed that there was a core human nature, while the modern era has been somewhat less kind to the idea that of external phenomena that have deterministic impact on our actions. Famous French existentialist Jean Paul-Sarte denied human nature out of hand, insisting that we are defined entirely by our actions.

Importantly, however, Sartre believed in the notion of a fundamental human condition. This condition was simply that, to quote Dickens, we are all “fellow travelers to the grave.” In a world in which the only inescapable fact is the fact of our impermanence, Sartre thought – if not for the sake of human nature but for the sake of this shared condition – being good to each other was probably a good way of being.

The experience of otherness versus shared culture and condition have a long history outside of philosophical discourse, as well.

Long before the invention of the notion of “human rights,” empires bound the political, economic, and military destinies of different peoples together under common banners. The history of empire – from the Romans to the Umayyads to the Mongols to the Ottomans and up into the modern era – suggests that these collectives are successful only when they allow for rich cultural, linguistic, and economic blending – they crumble and fall when they try to impose a dominant cultural by force.

Still, if successful empires required a tolerance of difference, it was not until the Enlightenment era that societies in the west began to appreciate the idea that diversity was not something to be tolerated, but embraced.

In the late 1800s – an era in which historian Seymour Drescher wrote that “freedom and not slavery was the peculiar institution” – a movement was born that arguably represented the first time in history that people organized on mass for a group of people different than themselves.

Between 1787-1807, Britain went from the greatest slave trading nation in the world to the first colonial power to ban the trade, and soon thereafter, the first global policeman against the trade. This radical shift was accomplished through the efforts of a rag tag band of revolutionaries – from Quakers who believed that, if God viewed all men as equal, it was unfathomable for men to hold each other as unequal, to the freed slaves who used the tools of the written word usually denied them to tell their story without interlocution, to the work-age men who saw in slavery the fear they felt of being press-ganged into naval service without choice. The common thread across these groups of abolitionists was their denial of the fundamental otherness of slaves, and their inclusion of them as humans experiencing a shared condition.

The next century saw a massive growth in consciousness not simply of the notion of human rights, but in the lived experience of cultural otherness. The mid-19th century saw a boon in the popularity of in travel narratives, and few were so popular as Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad,” (his best-selling book during his lifetime). In it, he wrote “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

In the mid-20th century, after two wars in which the world had been devastated beyond measure, an entirely new system of global institutions was designed to increase the surface area of contact between different cultures, intending to prevent the world from ever again falling into global conflict. Many of these institutions – such as the Peace Corps – were designed explicitly to put people into contact with living experiences completely different than their own.

As the Cold War ended, these sorts of experiences became significantly more available. For more than 20 years, college study abroad has been on the rise – an acceleration that has increased since September 11th. More and more, students are not just going abroad to drink in Australia, but are exploring fundamentally different cultural experiences. For Millennials, this offline exploration mirrors the rise of a digital mesh that is connecting the generation across national, cultural, and linguistic barriers.

The Internet is the closest thing to a global architecture of shared human experience that the world has ever seen. Through it, information travels across borders and boundaries of nation, race, language, culture, and religion in nanoseconds creating the greatest permutation of cultural blending in history in the process.

As the Internet has grown, its culture has evolved outside of the particular constraints of any one its multifarious constituencies. This culture involves values like openness, creativity and meritocracy. It involves celebrity such as Youtube sensations and musical performers that would otherwise never have been discovered. It involves an economy that shifts rapidly but is anchored in innovation. And it involves a whole range of quirks.

Memes are one of the most enduring and important artifacts of Internet culture. From “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” that exploded in the late 1990s to the I Can Has Cheezburger cat that launched millions of imitators, to a recent series of hilarious photos on the importance of grammar (see: the difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!”). These memes not only entertain, but actually propagate a culture that belongs to a community outside those we define in the analog world.

Recently, this community has found itself threatened. The lobbies of old media actors and telecommunication providers have risen to try to reassert control over the way content is delivered and consumed, and for the first time, the distinct culture of the Internet has felt mortally threatened. The SOPA/PIPA protests of the past weeks were remarkable not just because of their spread and reach, but because it was the first time the internet rose up to defend itself and its unique way of life.

Indeed, in some ways, these protests represent the modern inverse of the British abolitionist movement. If the task of the abolitionists was to make people recognize slaves as participating in the same human condition as themselves, the task of those advocating to preserve the culture and values of the unregulated internet is to convince people that they are, themselves, an inextricable part of this culture.

This matters, deeply. Because for all of its challenges and contradictions – from predators to identity theives to its capacity to isolate opinions by allowing people to surround themselves solely with those they agree with – the shared condition of Internet culture is one in which people are free to collaborate and argue, express and remix ideas, and ultimately reinvent the world with every initiative and every startup. The constraints of their ability to participate are not race or gender or nation but simply connective access. In short, the internet represents the greatest opportunity to liberate people’s talent and capacity, regardless of their birth or background, that the world has ever known.

The new generation of Internet activism, where people are fighting for the Internet culture itself, is a recognition that that opportunity is worth fighting for.

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.

There are currently 30 million African migrants who have left their home countries to find work elsewhere. They support more than 300 million people in their home countries, remitting essential food and goods, and in aggregate represent more than $10b in annual economic activity. This is an economy without an infrastructure, however, relying on informal channels and bribes to function.

South African entrepreneur Suzana Moreira is working to change that. Her startup moWoza uses SMS to help African migrants order, pay for, and select a place for parcel pickup. Instead of having to actually ship a bag of maize, for example, they can simply order one near the person they’re buying it for.

Suzana and moWoza are part of a quiet revolution in social impact. While in Silicon Valley, the last half decade has been all about the rise of technologies where “social” refers to a reorganization of product design around shared experiences with friends, around the world, the same time period has seen a massive shift in the nature of “social impact” – companies and nonprofits dedicated to solving problems ranging from poverty to health to sanitation with market forces.

Like in Silicon Valley, innovation in the impact sector has been driven by an acceleration in the growth of new startups, and a significant uptick in the infrastructure of resources to support them. New funds have emerged to provide seed and growth capital for businesses with both financial and social metrics of success, and media both new and old has gotten ever more interested in the stories of social entrepreneurs. Importantly, working towards social impact has become embedded in the Millennial zeitgeist and is being inescapably woven into this generation’s definition of success.

In this landscape, one of the most important institutions to emerge is the Unreasonable Institute. Like a Y Combinator or TechStars for social innovators, the Unreasonable Institute runs a 6-week summer program in which entrepreneurs from around the world come to Boulder, CO to learn from mentors (disclosure: I was previously a mentor for the program) who are experts in both subject domain areas and business process and strategy. These mentors not only run sessions for the participants, but actually live with them in converted University of Colorado student housing.

The program was founded with a simple belief: that solving the world’s biggest problems was going to take the full resources and efforts of great entrepreneurs, and that the scale of the challenge was matched only by the scale of the opportunity – for both financial and social return.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the program is the way they figured out to give entrepreneurs from even the poorest places an equal shot at participation. Unlike YC-style programs where companies give up equity to participate, the Institute is structured as a nonprofit. To generate the revenue they need to operate and to increase company’s sense of buy-in to the program, they charge participants $10,000 each. But they don’t allow them to actually pay that money directly.

Instead, UI selects 50 finalists and puts them into a Battle Royale to test their entrepreneurial mettle. They have 50 days to raise the $10,000 from their communities and the public at large. In order to defeat the “rich uncle” problem and ensure that even developing world entrepreneurs have a shot, the amount that any one donor can give each week is capped, starting at $10 the first week and progressing slowly before finally becoming open in the last week to unlimited donations.

Over the past three years, this strategy has produced classes of entrepreneurs that represent literally dozens of countries and income backgrounds. Importantly, the organization is not focused on charity – all of the participants are required to be for profit organizations.

The Finalist Marketplace is open for the next 33 days, and includes entrepreneurial projects ranging from the African migrant economy products above to technology that converts human waste sludge into carbon-neutral fuel to a leasing system that allows Ugandan motorcycle taxi drivers to buy their bikes and build business franchises.

Like their participants, the Unreasonable Institute has ambition to see that the revolution in social impact doesn’t remain quiet for long. Their vision is to build the Virgin of the 21st century – a set of affiliated “Unreasonable” brands from impact funders to media companies to locally-owned adventure travel and beyond.

The Unreasonables are one more indication that what makes Silicon Valley so exciting – the passion of entrepreneurs designing a different future – is a force not constrained by place or industry, but the provence of anyone who dares to go big.

[Photo: kiwanja]

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.

The news not only cements the firm’s place among the upper echelons of the Silicon Valley VC elite, but is one of the strongest indications yet of an ongoing transformation in the distribution of venture financing.

For entrepreneurial dreamers, venture capital is a near-mythical world that opens the door to Zuckerbergian success. For more seasoned entrepreneurs, VC is a resource that can be anything from a necessary evil to a valuable asset that brings with it expertise and connections, depending on who one is working with.

For the people and institutions that actually invest in venture capital firms, however, VC is something different: it is a high-risk, high-reward asset class that adds diversity to a complete financial portfolio.

Venture firms work by raising money from what are called “Limited Partners.” These LPs are usually high net worth individuals (often successful entrepreneurs in the past), corporate actors, university and foundation endowments, or pension funds. Particularly for endowments and pension funds, investment in venture capital is not driven by a romantic belief in the power of entrepreneurs, but a financial decision that is meant to put a small portion of the overall resources they manage in an asset class that could have significantly higher-than-market returns on the back of an explosive growth company like Facebook.

The past decade, however, has been a tough one for VC as an asset class. As the bubble burst and the artificial returns of late 1990s initial public offerings dissipated, the class has had a hard time keeping up with historical performance, and as those massive wins have fallen out of 10-year indexes, LPs have begun to notice.

Even as venture capital has rebounded on the hopes that the maturation of social technology platforms like Facebook, Groupon, Zynga, and LinkedIn will lead to big public market exits, LPs have begun to focus their assets on a smaller top tier of firms who are able to get into the best deals. What’s happening now is a consolidation of resources around both the demonstrably best performing firms, as well as the firms that have captured the Valley Zeitgeist.

This is actually two separate but related trends: first, the consolidation of resources around a smaller number of firms, and second, the importance of entrepreneurial mindshare in building a successful firm, particularly for those involved in early stage companies.

The need for entrepreneurial mindshare reflects the growing power of founders relative to funders. As the cost of starting a company has come down and as the resources for founders to become more sophisticated entrepreneurs – most notably the rise of venture accelerator programs – have increased, the best startups have become more choosey about the money they take.

Some of this choosiness is a mark of more sophisticated thinking, as startups look for firms that have an aligned vision, experience with their particular industry, and a reputation for friendliness to entrepreneurs. Some of it is a little less sophisticated, being driven by the trendiness of a particular firm at a given time. A huge part of the choosiness is based around a hard-to-prove but also hard-to-deny belief in the value of signaling and optics of investment from a high-brand-value firm.

Regardless of the reasons, it is undeniably true that there is a gravitational pull around certain firms that draws in entrepreneurs and which simply doesn’t exist for others. This is a powerful asset for firms, giving them a sort of proprietary dealflow that actually creates a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if a firm is perceived to be one of the best, and thus attracts the best entrepreneurs, it can actually become the best on the strength of its portfolio, regardless of the original veracity of its bestness.

There are many interesting ways that firms are amplifying these signals. Social media has become a channel for radically differentiating oneself through intelligent thoughts and personality. Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, Paul Graham from Y Combinator, and Ben Horowitz – who starts every blog post with a hip hop lyric – are a few of the investors who have taken to heart Jay-Z’s proclamation that “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” and used writing to dramatically amplify their presence.

Boldness of vision is also extraordinarily attractive for companies. Call it what you will, Andreeseen Horowitz’ early Skype deal showed the entire Valley that they were here to play. And no one has put so much emphasis on differentiating through vision as Founder’s Fund, who published a manifesto last year called “What Happened To The Future?” and whose website proudly declares “We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters.” Founders Fund recently closed a $625m fund.

The moment we live in, then, is one in which pressure from the bottom – the desire of entrepreneurs to be associated with the firms that they, rightly or wrongly, believe to be the “best” – and from the top – the desire of LPs to be invested only in the small handful of top tier firms that will produce the lion’s share of the asset class’ returns – is centralizing resources in the hands of a much smaller number of investors.

How permanent this shift is, of course, impossible to know. But in the near term, what it portends is the rise of the megafund – a notion that is not so much about the pure size of assets under management but the power of a small handful of investors to capture the entire industry’s attention and leverage that position to the ends of proprietary dealflow and lavish LP desire.

Indeed, what is most remarkable about Andreessen Horowitz’s latest raise is not simply it’s size but the fact that it took only 3 weeks to raise. The paperwork took twice as long.

Here comes the fund, do do do do, the mega fund. It’s alright.

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.

You’re an aspiring entrepreneur. You’ve been working on your idea for a few months and released your first product which, however gnarly, is proving that you’re not crazy and there may be a there there.

Now that the core of your team is established, your early product is humming along, and that all important validating user response is coming in, you’re out on the fundraising trail. You’ve read all the articles, got warm intros from your other entrepreneur friends, and are finally sitting across the table from an investor you’re hoping to work with.

So far, it’s going well.You’ve established some rapport by swapping Burning Man stories (this is Silicon Valley, after all), and they’re digging your high product concept. They think the first version is pretty neat (although of course they have ideas for how it can evolve), and they like the revenue potential.

But then, it comes. The question about that thing that you’ve been hoping to avoid. It’s that one metric that scares the crap out of you. The metric that makes you wonder what you’re doing wrong. The metric that makes you question the fundamental viability of your idea. The metric, in other words, that you would give anything not to talk about.

Every early stage company has this metric. In fact, most have a bunch of them. As an early stage investor sitting with startups day after day, the question isn’t so much whether the company you’re listening to pitch has one of these big ugly warts, but how they choose to address it.

Here’s what we love to see. We love it when an entrepreneur gives us the big idea, validates that idea with the real, quantitative evidence they’ve been able to garner so far, and then lays out a roadmap for what’s next that absolutely owns whatever big problems they’re experiencing.

Great big funnel of visitors but low conversion to registered users? Here’s the plan. Tons of engagement from super users but not a ton of people coming in the door. Here’s the plan.

Early investors are, at a fundamental level, making a bet on two things. The first is your vision of the future. The second is your ability to make that future come to life.

Inspiring confidence around that second dimension is not just about demonstrating all the success you’ve had, but about being sophisticated in your identification of weaknesses and savvy in your strategy for remedying them.

Too many early entrepreneurs try to sweep their biggest challenges under the rug, for fear of losing investor interest. The best recognize that it is their ability to overcome those challenges that makes them so appealing to investors in the first place.

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.

At the press conference – their first major event since the passing of Steve Jobs – Apple announced a suite of products that directly declared their intent to compete and win in the next generation education space. With their new textbooks initiatives, they’re hoping to do to the multi-billion dollar print textbook market what they did to music – push all the content creators into the digital realm and own the central distribution channel for their materials. With their iBooks Author Tool, they’re building an authoring infrastructure for the next generation of “texts” that could replace the textbooks of today.

Whether they’re successful or not, Apple has given the education technology space a megadose of energy and attention. At first glance, education has had a strange relationship with technology. More than 8% of the US GDP is tied up in education – including K12, higher education, and continuing and professional ed – yet historically, less than a single percent of venture capital financing has gone towards education startups.

There are a variety of historical reasons for this disparity – a mollases-esque sales cycle to public school districts, high barriers to entry and entrenched actors in the college software purchasing space, confused revenue channels and more. But over the last few years, the forces that shaped the consumer internet are beginning to find their way into the education space – new distribution channels that hop over traditional sales model and allow companies to get directly to end users, ubiquitous access to internet enabled mobile devices, adaptive, game-style learning approaches that resonate with young learners used to bite-sized consumptive and creative experience, and network effects which are enabling massive benefits within the context of social learning platforms.

VCs are responding. Greylock, Benchmark, and the Founders Fund have all made major investments in education platforms in the last few months. The activity in the seed space has been ferocious, with a significant uptick in the number of education companies participating in programs like Y Combinator and 500 Startups. Vinod Khosla has been writing about the changes in education, and even internet soothsayer-of-the-moment Marc Andreessen has been talking about it.

What’s happening in education is not unique however, but reflective of a larger trend.

Last year, Andreessen published a seminal essay “Why Software Is Eating The World” in the Wall Street Journal. The thesis of the piece was that any industry the internet hadn’t fundamentally remade yet, it would. And, TechCrunch added, jobs would follow.  In 2012, we’ll see a major shift in investor and entrepreneurial activity towards industries where that promise has not yet been fully realized.

Education is a space in which the forces have aligned for software to begin truly eating and disrupting the industry, but it’s not just education that is feeling the inevitability of technology-wrought creative disruption.

Last week, Pando Daily Editor-In-Chief Sarah Lacy wrote an update about the state of the enterprise software market. For as long as there has been an internet, it seems, enterprise software has been the consumer internet’s less cool (if often better paid) older sibling, but in the last few years, story after story has heralded the coming “consumerization” of the enterprise. Startups like Box.net and Yammer have promised to out Salesforce Salesforce and liberate employees and departments from the tyrannical rule of IT departments and legacy software once and for all.

Unfortunately, change happens slowly and the nut of Lacy’s piece was that the media hype has created an expectation about the coming changes that if not wrong in the magnitude of the opportunity, are off in the timing. One interesting question for 2012, however, is that as IT departments adopt the iPad en masse, does a totally different form factor and software delivery channel tip the scales towards a more rapid consumerization of enterprise?

With a headed presidential election season, 2012 also promises some interesting developments in the political and civic participation. The last few years have seen the emergence of social action platforms that, for the first time, are actually demonstrating regularized efficacy harnessing digital participation for social good.

Change.org (a company I was a freelance writer for between 2008 and 2010) has become a force, regularly winning campaigns ranging from turning over localized breed specific legislation that outlaw pit bulls to garnering more than 200,000 signatures from around the world to force the South African Ministry of Justice to address “corrective rape” for the first time. And when it comes to political campaigns, for all the hype about Obama’s 2008 social media strategy, political software has only begun to scratch the surface of what big data analysis could do for campaigning.

In music, 2012 promises to be the first time that platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud achieve the sort of scale that enables startup ecosystems to grow around them. Likewise, the massive health industry – the formal sector of which is still a technological dinosaur and the informal sector of which still hasn’t seen a single dominant platform for personal health management – has an ever growing ecosystem of startups and vertical funds and incubator programs.

There is even some interesting movement in the Pet space, with startups like DogVacay – an Airbnb for dogs emerging to take on a space that has been historically underserved by web startups.

The second half of the Aughts will be remembered as the era which birthed the architecture of the social internet. The early Teens are shaping up to be the time in which entrepreneurs took advantage of that architecture to remake every industry – big and small – that touches our daily lives.

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.

Around the web, sites from Google to Reddit to Wikipedia are turning off core services to dramatize and protest legislation working its way through the Senate and House that would give the government heretofore unheard of authority to deny access to and censor the internet in the name of fighting piracy.

The legislation has come about through intense lobbying by the content owners whose business models are most threatened, not just by piracy, but by the massively disruptive forces of a social internet which pushes control of distribution and price away from studios and towards networks.

The startup world has responded with a vigor previously unseen in public policy debates. The implications of these bills and the precedents they set, the startup ecosystem argues, aren’t just less piracy, but a fundamental undermining of the freedom, openness, and bedrock meritocracy that allows a couple kids in an apartment to build a service that takes down a billion-dollar incumbent. This potentiality is at the very core of the promise of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, so it is no surprise that the chorus against the legislation is reaching fever pitch.

Still, it is profoundly exciting to see entrepreneurs step up to fight for what they believe in the political arena. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion, for example, has been tenacious in rallying people to the cause. In New York, protests are being held in front of the offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Those of us who live in San Francisco or NYC or work in the tech industry woke up to Facebook feeds dominated by Stop SOPA photos and shares of protest action from around the web.

It is easy to look at all of this evidence – not to mention the Obama Administration’s withdrawal of support from SOPA yesterday – and feel invincible. And yet…

This is not a battle of today, or the next month, or even the next year. Questions of privacy and regulation of internet business are going to shape the coming decades, and the way policy is shaped will have a powerful deterministic impact not just on our ability to create startups but the fundamental nature of the 21st century economy.

Although the SOPA/PIPA debate is anchored around questions of freedom on the internet, there are meaningful intellectual connections to the Occupy Wall Street that shaped the cultural, political, and media zeitgeist of the past several months. Cutting through the noise and hollering, the core feeling that lay underneath OWS was that the fairness of the distribution of power was fundamentally off. The problem was not just that financiers were powerful, but that their power was shaping the economy in a way that had essentially unwound the promise of the American Dream that people who worked hard could improve their economic destiny.

The problem with OWS was that feelings and sentiments, however noble, do not on their own translate into addressable units of change. By calling for an end to all sorts of things, OWS struggled for a clarity of message that could become focused, winnable action goals, and had a difficult time channeling all of the energy it kicked up. Contrast this with extraordinary success of the Arab Spring, particularly in Egypt, where the singular focus was removing President Mubarak from power at any cost.

Although not about finance, per se, the protests against SOPA/PIPA are also about the future of the American Dream, and the promise that people with great ideas can build important companies and institutions without the interference of a government on the dole of the existing actors. Its great opportunity is that by having tangible, specific legislation to combat, it can start from a set of focused, winnable goals, and build the movement on the back of those successes.

In the long run, victory in this battle is not just about prying Chuck Schumer out of the pocket of the media lobbies, but about convincing the average person – who doesn’t even know an internet entrepreneur, much less is one themselves – that an unfettered, unrestricted internet is an essential and unqualified right of modern life.

Like all social action campaigns, the greatest success of today’s protest would be if it can successfully transition from a moment of aligned action to a movement of shared sentiment. This involves educating people who don’t have a professional stake in these issues, or who simply haven’t taken or had the time to understand them. It involves reaching out to people who think fighting piracy is important, but share some of our concerns. It involves the hard, grunting, thankless work of building power before it’s needed.

Today was a portentous day: the day the internet drew a line in the sand. Tomorrow, the question is entirely who else we can get to cross that line and join us.

Nathaniel Whittemore

Nathaniel Whittemore is a Principal at LearnCapital where he invests in the next generation of education technology companies. Previously, he was the founding editor of the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org, and founded the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University to design programs for students interested in social change. He writes regularly about startups, venture capital and impact for publications like Fast Company, Inc, and GOOD, and lives in San Francisco, CA with his deaf rescue pit bull, Isis.