At the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks back I heard John Doerr say something that made me pause. While on stage, he said that Zynga was the fastest growing and most profitable business Kleiner Perkins had ever funded. I’d heard him make the same claim during the press blitz for the sFund, but this time it struck me. Here was a firm that has backed some of the truly great companies of our time- Amazon, Google, Sun, Genentech and this little 3 year old company that makes games on Facebook is their biggest hit to date. 

I was reminded of that pause while reading the transcript of Andrew Mason’s appearance on Charlie Rose last week. It was a wide ranging interview but there was a reoccurring theme that echoed of Doerr’s comments just weeks ago. See if you can spot the theme from the following quotes:

We’re not the first.  Maybe we’ve done it a little bit faster, but that’s largely a side effect of the world in which we live where there are these social media channels like Facebook and Twitter that allow ideas to propagate much faster.

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That’s the social graph that exists through tools like Facebook and Twitter, and it just allows companies to grow at a rate that is unprecedented.

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Facebook and Twitter are ways for people to spread the word on these things that never existed before and they make it easy for companies like us to exist.

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And I think when people call us the fastest growing company ever, I think of us as like the N-Sync of websites, like we have had good tunes, but we’re not The Beatles.  It’s not like we’re the best thing ever.  But our success and the amount of money we’ve made is largely because of the environment that we’re growing companies in. So I think that we’ll continue to see more companies like us who make us — who put us to shame a couple years from now with their rate of growth.

Did you see it? Subtle right? There’s a reason that Kleiner Perkins has backed their fastest growing company ever and Groupon has become the fastest growing company in history in the same 2 year period. Network effects are changing everything and shrinking the gap between early adopters and the mainstream market.

Remember Chatroulette? From the time I’d heard of it to the time it was getting airtime on CNN was less than 2 weeks. Dinner conversations with my friends in other fields used to revolve around sports or kids. Now they want to talk about how they’re using Square credit card readers in their medical offices and which iPhone photo apps they’re trying out. My mom isn’t calling me to ask how to program the clock on her VCR she’s calling from her iTouch to see if she’s gotten Skype to work properly. In lowering the bar for instant spread of information, these networks have trained new generations of users in how to spread it.

This isn’t intended to be an ode to Facebook or Twitter; rather its a challenge. If two of the fastest growing companies in the last two years can be built around silly games and coupons why not something more meaningful. What industries can leverage the same network effects that Zynga and Groupon did to do something really cool? If they’re the Backstreet Boys and N-Syncs of this new generation of companies, who will be the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead or the Sex Pistols?

I don’t think there has ever been a more exciting time to build a business. And, I think the most exciting businesses we will see built in any industries over the next decade will be the ones who leverage network effects. Note, I’m not caveating that statement with “consumer internet companies”. I believe that the companies who understand and leverage network effects can do so in any field be it healthcare, government, enterprise applications or cleantech. And, that the companies who will thrive in those and any other fields will be the ones who have network effects as an essential part of their DNA.