Winblad: Let me tell you about my mother who is about as analog as you can find. She's 71 years old. The last mechanical device that she dealt with for information processing was a typewriter, and it was a manual typewriter. She's had no interest in computers. But I purchased a web TV for her and installed it. I set it up very quickly with the rest of my family -- -my sisters and my brother and my nieces and nephews all have e-mail accounts. They, at least, are somewhat digital.

I think my mom now spends about an hour to two hours on web TV. It was sort of crazy at first because we all kept getting 1-line e-mail from her. And finally I called her up and said, are you just a slow typist? What is really happening here? And she goes, well, how do you get to the second line? Of course, with a manual typewriter, you hit the bar. So for my mom, that concept of the return key was scary. What does return mean? Return to what? She was afraid to touch that key in case she would return somewhere that she didn't know she had been.

I think that there will be such a thing as seamless digital appliances. Perhaps not necessarily the network computer. But things like web TV, where the computer itself is hidden; it's on a server somewhere else. But my mother and others are able to just turn on their TV and press a button, and they're on the Internet. My mom has told all of her friends, age 70 and above, that they should be digital now. She is really characteristic of the unwashed masses.

What is happening is that everyone who can read now basically has computer access. Not everybody, but it is the exception versus the rule for someone going through junior high school not to have some sort of computer access somewhere, be it at the worst case in their public libraries, at the best case, in their bedrooms at home.

And the price of computing continues to fall. Moore's Law is a reality. Hopefully, we'll have the same thing happen with bandwidth. But, basically, people can share their conventional phone lines. They're paying $20 or less for "all you can eat" per month, which is a pretty low fee and a threshold that most people can handle. Most of these youngsters have their own web sites, let alone their own e-mail addresses. Electronic mail has been sort of the killer application that's really covered all ages .

In the software industry, we took this for granted because we've been sending e-mail to each other for decades. But did we say, hello, let's use this Internet thing and get the rest of the people involved? No, it was right there in front of our noses, and the killer app was right there in front of our noses. But we were just using it internally as if it was nerd-ware versus, you know, consumer-ware.

People are thinking entrepreneurially. They are already having their own little businesses on the web. It is really a pretty sophisticated lemonade stand kit. And with much more direct experience, pretty soon people will build their own commerce sites.

When I was a young girl, and living in Minnesota, the Barbie doll was big for the first time. I never was interested in the Barbies. But I realized most of the kids in my neighborhood couldn't afford those Barbie clothes. So I sewed Barbie clothes and made a ton of money selling these things pretty cheap. But if I had had the web or could have built my own Internet site, I probably would never have gone to college cause I would have been rich selling those Barbie doll clothes.

Sequeiros: My personal opinion is that California needs to better fund computers for the schools.

Winblad: California is probably the worst. I grew up in the state of Minnesota. The quality of school that I went to in a small town was as good as the best school here in California. It's not like you need expensive computers to have the Internet experience.

When I was in grade school, I read every book in the library. But I was limited on the things I could learn about by what our school had in that library. On the Internet, I'm not limited by that. Watching the children of my own relatives and friends as they write school book reports, and watching them go from one link to the next, where they find more and more information, amazes me. It is a much richer experience than I had reading every book in that school library.

Every day is a surprise in this industry. You wake up on Tuesday, it's an entirely different industry than it was on Monday. The pace of change, the rate of growth, the number of entrepreneurs who are just doing what they want to do and, all of a sudden, it's like the tooth fairy arrived. What's all this money under my pillow?! Very, very few people in the software industry joined this industry to be financially rewarded.

They joined it because they like what they're doing. If people did this just for money, half of the software industry would be retired. People are doing this because it's exciting.

The nice thing about the software industry is that many of the job openings are in start-up companies where, by taking a job that may not be the Vice President, you still are watching formations of companies.

The nice thing about Silicon Valley is that there's nowhere else where it's so visible how companies are created. In the daily papers, they're explaining why companies are successful, why they're failing. And the other great thing about being here is that there is no punishment for failure. Failure is considered just a fork in the road of a broader experience. The question is not how did you fail, but what did you learn?

Today, we are funding companies that have very, very young CEOs. Our job is to grow them into mature, experienced CEOs. Our CEOs range in age from about 26 to . . we have one CEO who is 50.

My biggest mistake was that I started my first company with sweat equity and $500 I could scrounge up from my brother. During the day, we did what I call "an unnatural act," which was to sell ourselves by the hour to do programming for other people so we could build our company at night.

That would not work in today's marketplace. By the time we would have gotten there today, our space would have been taken by someone else. Today, with capital so abundant, with people who are already experienced, I would have had an extraordinary competitive disadvantage if I did that again. I was very, very lucky that my timing allowed me to make a number of mistakes.