But even a wide-eyed optimist like Doerr, who puts billion-dollar net worth where his mouth is, may be underestimating the seismic shifts going on under our feet.

Let’s recap: During the PC era in the 1980s Doerr and his firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers were early investors in Compaq Computer and Sun Microsystems. During the internet era of the ’90s they helped lead deals in Netscape, Symantec, Amazon, Intuit and Google.

With two new funds Doerr has raised nearly half a billion dollars to invest in the exploding mobile software and social media businesses. In May he said KPCB was doubling its $100 million mobile software fund because it had already run out of money. Last week he announced a $250 million social media fund and said that thanks to Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook what is happening now in the Valley is nothing short of a “third wave” of computing.

Doerr is hooked on how touch screens and social networks accelerate use of the internet — and it’s easy to see how he gets there.

We in the United States already spend nearly as much time online as we do watching TV and those lines are merging so fast they are going to cross in a matter of months. Mobile search traffic at Google is up 50 percent in just the first six months of this year. And while a third of Facebook’s 500 million users access their accounts from a mobile device today, expect that number to double in the next two years as smartphone sales double. By 2012 more smart phones will be sold every year than laptop and desktop computers combined, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker.

But for once I don’t think even Doerr has grasped how big a deal this is. This isn’t just about a new software revolution. There is a massive reexamination underway of how technology, media and communications intersect.

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Authors: Fred Vogelstein

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