Don't fear to start your business with a few bucks

Twitter is growing to scale - they can monetise that scale later through advertising. You can imagine a number of possible ways for monetisation of twitter later - its just kind of compelling for now. They will figure that out i'm sure.

Digg has the attention of hundreds and thousands of users which is when advertising becomes a great business model as you can target specific users as you can track what they have dugg and what they have contributed. Reddit likewise - attention.

DemoMyApp - which we're not concentrating on has no value at present but it a) solves a problem b) if pushed can aggregate the attention of those who wish to showcase apps and those who wish to find out about them. Only then will it have any value what so ever. There are proven advertising models around that early adopter audience including sponsorship/ ad sales to web hosting/investors/ etc. Its not exactly a megabuster - so we're not really focussing on it.

Is job items being pushed to scale? With so many job listings sites on the internet - why does a free one provide any value to anyone. Is it targetted? or is the software good? I'd argue to make it a business model you should charge people to create their own listings sites using the technology. I see value in the software not the site itself.

As for the comment about VC's investing in things which are not businesses - thats because you are confusing the role of investment. Investment is required in times of negative cashflow to augment the burn of building to scale. Sequioa understood that the traction shown by YouTube would mean that it would be cashflow negative for a while before building an audience which could be monetised for that attention. Doesn't mean its not a business - just needs capital to become one. Same can be said for RockYou, Slide, and whoever else. Its about scale then you can leverage scale as ad dollars shift away from traditional to social media.