Success Quote by John Doerr

A venture capitalist calling his shot is never just prediction; its also an attempt to bend the market toward the future he wants to finance. When John Doerr says, "The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content", hes describing a technical shift, but hes really selling a new operating system for attention. The line works because it sounds democratic while quietly relocating power: away from editors and broadcasters, toward platforms that host the crowd and skim value from every post, photo, review, and rant.

The phrase "next wave" does a lot of rhetorical lifting. It implies inevitability and urgency, the language of surf and stampede, not policy or ethics. "User-generated content" is an antiseptic term, corporate-neutral, that avoids saying what the internet would actually be made of: amateur labor, personal data, social performance, and the raw material of identity. By naming it as content, Doerr frames self-expression as an extractable resource, something that can be indexed, monetized, and scaled.

Context matters here: this idea crystallized in the mid-2000s moment when blogs, YouTube, MySpace, and later Facebook proved that distribution had become cheap and creation had become social. Doerr, a key investor in the platforms era, is articulating the business logic behind Web 2.0: growth comes from turning users into both the audience and the workforce. The subtext isnt just optimism about participation; its a blueprint for the attention economy, where the most valuable product is whatever people will make for free, especially if they can be persuaded its for themselves.