Consulting firm Spencer Stuart and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) released the results of a study on VC-backed company leadership today. The study includes data from interviews and from a survey of NVCA members on their attitudes regarding the CEOs who run their companies. Sponsor The survey is a follow-up to a similar one conducted in 2001 and points to some of the trends regarding VC backing over the past decade. In both the 2001 and 2010 studies, for example, VCs listed the strength of the management team as the most important factor when deciding whether or not to fund a company. The market sector, a proprietary product, and the business model trail in significance in that order, the study finds. Vision and fundraising skills are more important skills for CEOs today than they were a decade ago. While vision ranks fourth among important CEO skills in 2010, it was only seventh in the 2001 study. The study’s authors suggest that these results “reflect shifting priorities in an environment where both raising funds and the path to liquidity have become more challenging for VC-backed companies.” Other key findings from the study include: Venture capitalists favor proven venture-backed CEO talent. When seeking management in new industry sectors, 58% of survey respondents favored proven venture-backed CEOs from unrelated sectors over sector entrepreneurs with no CEO experience (31%) or industry leaders from large companies who lack experience in an entrepreneurial environment (11%). Investors are growing more confident in their ability to access executives. Only 4 in 10 venture professionals in 2001 agreed that their firms consistently recruit the best talent and remove low performers quickly. In 2010, 84 percent agreed that their firms recruit the best talent, 63 percent agreed that they consistently and thoroughly assess management teams, and 67 percent agreed that they quickly remove low-performing CEOs. “As they strive to build their next generation of game-changing companies, VCs are starting to take a more scientific approach to recruiting and assessing CEOs and directors,” said Spencer Stuart consultant and study contributor Ben Holzemer. “As they face mounting challenges, firms also have a tremendous opportunity to become more successful in selecting the innovative, entrepreneurial leaders who can guide the industry profitably into the future.” Discuss

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Social media is going to rule the Web until at least 2012 – according to a post by Justin Kistner , a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends . Kistner also claims that Facebook has become the king of social media. In a panel at a Portland event today called Lunch 2.0, Kistner said that the current era of the Web “is Facebook’s game to lose.” Data from Google Trends suggests that the term ‘web 2.0′ became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 ‘social media’ started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009. Sponsor If the above chart is to be believed, social media overtook web 2.0 in popularity at the end of 2009. I’m inclined to trust this data, as it matches other data sources we have reported on in ReadWriteWeb over the past couple of years – for example a Nielsen Online report from March 2009 stating that people spent more time in 2008 using social media than on personal email. The ‘news references’ chart (the secondary chart below the main one) is also interesting. It shows that over 2009 news media organizations used the term ‘social media’ far more than ‘web 2.0.’ Partly that’s because ‘web 2.0′ has always been an awkward term for anyone outside the tech world to understand (“You mean there were two Webs?”). But it undeniably also shows that the term ‘social media’ began to be bandied about in news media a lot in 2009. And not coincidentally, that’s when Facebook and Twitter became very popular in the mainstream. Nowadays, it’s hard to walk anywhere in a metropolitan center without seeing the logos of both Facebook and Twitter. Last week I was in New York and snapped a photo of a local eatery promoting its Twitter account at the counter. OK, this was New York. But I am seeing both Facebook and Twitter being increasingly used by a wide variety of businesses, online, on TV and in the real world. The rise of social media is impacting many industries, including news media itself. Kistner points to a Hitwise study which showed that Facebook is sending more traffic to news sites than Google. This isn’t necessarily true for all news sites (Google is still ReadWriteWeb’s biggest traffic source, for instance), but Facebook and Twitter have become significant drivers of traffic for most news organizations. I’m inclined to agree with Kistner that there is at least another year or two of growth in social media adoption, so 2012 sounds like a good bet for social media to peak. What do you think, will 2012 be the peak for social media? Or will the Social Media Era last for even longer than the Web 2.0 one lasted? Discuss

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Last week, Amazon Web Services announced its Import/Export service would be openly available, in order to facilitate the movement of data to and from the cloud. The catch: it appears as though the fastest way to transfer large amounts of data is by mailing a storage device to Amazon. As Amazon itself noted when they launched the Import/Export service, “it would take over 80 days to upload just 1TB of data over a T1 connection.” Sponsor Using the mail to move data in and out of the cloud seems like a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem: infinitely scalable cloud resources mean little when broadband capabilities make it difficult to get information in and out. What are your thoughts on Amazon’s solution to lengthy upload and download times? What do you think about mailing your data to the cloud? survey software Discuss

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When Apple purchased the cloud-based music streaming service Lala in December of 2009 and then announced a few months later that it was planning to shut it down, many hoped that this signaled Apple’s intentions to launch its own cloud-based version under the iTunes label. And so, a replacement for Lala was on many people’s wishlist for announcements they hoped to hear Steve Jobs make today at WWDC. But unfortunately , Jobs had no such news. Sponsor Lala was a favorite tool for many music fans as it had an unlimited music locker, the ability to purchase web-accessible-only music, and a social sharing element. The cloud is ideal for music storage, syncing, and sharing, and competition – with or without an Apple-based service – has been heating up recently. Many companies, including MP3tunes and Grooveshark , have sought to woo displaced Lala users with special deals. With no announcement from Apple today and with the popular European streaming service Spotify rumored to launch stateside in Q3, it seems like the market for a cloud-based music service is still wide open. So, following today’s lack of announcement from Apple, what are your plans to store and stream your music? Why do you think Apple had nothing to say about a cloud-based music service today? What are your thoughts on why Apple did not announce a cloud-based music service at WWDC? online survey Discuss

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At the CM Summit today, Mark Meeker from Morgan Stanley did another one of her trademark quickfire, but densely packed, presentations on Internet Trends. There were several new themes in her June update, including that there has been an “unusually high level of innovation” recently from big Web companies. She mentioned Apple, Google, Facebook and others. She also spent a fair amount of time on the impact of Apple’s iPhone and iPad products on the Internet ecosystem over the past couple of years, which she termed “Apple’s epic reinvention.” You can find Meeker’s slideshow on the Morgan Stanley website . Here are some highlights: Sponsor Discuss

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