Editor's Note: The New VCs

During the past few years, when business pundits or analysts felt compelled to put recent industry developments into perspective, they frequently reminded us that we were experiencing something akin to the Industrial Revolution — that chapter from our history when machines and production techniques transformed our social and economic structure.
It was within this search for context that one of the more freewheeling fantasies of today's consulting set was born.
"If only I were alive back then, I'd have made a killing," is the familiar boast, which seems to be based on the assumption that all any aspiring 19th-century industrialist had to do was pick a nascent industry, apply even the most abbreviated techniques of mass production, and voil