If Sequoia or Benchmark announced, as firms, that they were no longer investing in web startups, that would be meaningful.
Randy Komisar saying that "Web 2.0" companies are a lose is different thing.
"One of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass. Meaning that unpleasant work pays. And more to the point here, vice versa. Work people like doesn't pay well, for reasons of supply and demand."
How many of those Web 2.0 startups are actually tackling unpleasant, hard, messy problems in your view?
Look at Loopt. Seems like a classic, frothy social app. And yet beneath it are very difficult technical problems and horribly tedious negotiations with carriers. Or Justin.TV. What could me more frivolous, right? And yet to get it to work they had to build their own CDN for live streaming. They spent 6 months working round the clock building infrastructure (including custom hardware) before they could even launch.
The problem however is that a good number of startups that call themselves web2.0 companies are building facebooks apps, Yet Another Social Network, or roll your own web app with Ruby on Rails in 15 minutes.
That's no different from Web 1.0. In 1998, people thought all they had to do was create a "portal" for some special interest, and it would be a company. Replace "portal" with "social network" and it's 2008.
http://www.kpcb.com/portfolio/portfolio.php?consumer
It seems they're not saying they're pulling up stakes but rather saying "we didn't feel like playing in this game, anyway."