recently raised venture capital for the first time. DuckDuckGo raised a series A round from Union Square Ventures and a handful of awesome angel investors. Then in the middle of the process, we got picked as one of TIME's top 50 web sites for 2011 (annotated as D in the graph). I'm new at this. Background. Bad idea.

As I read this post in the WSJ about the changing nature of VC funding of consumer web companies , I thought that we may be looking at the symptoms and not the disease. As the WSJ notes, VC funding of consumer web and mobile companies is down 42% in this first nine months of 2012 (vs the first nine months of 2011). lot, actually.