Private Equity
Foundation Capital's Rich Redelfs competed against Intel for years before he became a venture capitalist, most recently as the CEO of Atheros Communications, a Foundation portfolio company that makes wireless semiconductors. He thinks Intel's monopoly, along with the Microsoft-Intel duopoly, is finally eroding for good, and he's investing accordingly. The software of choice for servers isn't Windows anymore, he says -- it's the open-source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP) -- and when Intel processors aren't running Windows, they have to compete on performance like everybody else. The same goes for Intel in netbooks, which started out running Linux. More specialized processors that are not made by Intel are also going into PCs to handle digital cameras, audio and video, Redelfs explains, "and that hurts Intel because they'd rather have their processor running all the apps."
2 min read · 21 September 2009
One of the most interesting part of going to TechCrunch 50 this week, at least for me, was listening to seasoned investors ask tough questions of young, inexperienced entrepreneurs. “Mike (Arrington, of TechCrunch) said I was harsh,” Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham told TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy after his panel, sounding surprised. “What I want to know is, how does it all work? What’s the insides? “You have to ask a lot of questions, and people never seem to answer all of them. When you’re asking people a whole bunch of questions, you seem mean. I wasn’t sure whether we were supposed to act like we really meant it.”
4 min read · 19 September 2009
Two years after stepping down as the CEO of Adobe, Chizen tightened his relationship with Voyager and became a partner. He had his pick of VC firms, he said, but he thinks Voyager is best positioned for the new, shrinking world of venture capital. It makes small investments -- $1 million to $2 million initially, $10 million to $20 million total -- that don't require a $500 million IPO to get a return. "We're not going to be seeing many of those in the future," he said.
2 min read · 18 September 2009
Mohanjit Jolly -- who started his career as an aerospace engineer and ended up working at Garage.com -- moved his family to Bangalore two years ago to oversee DFJ's investments in India. He inherited around ten portfolio companies and has since added eight more. He's also hired three people. "It's very difficult to manage a growing portfolio halfway around the world remotely," he says. "DFJ realized that." U.S. investors have underestimated the cost of investing in India by about a factor of three, he explains, because they don't realize the challenges that Indian companies have.
2 min read · 18 September 2009
Obama's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, was at NASA Ames this week to lay out the government's plans for cloud computing. He's making some big changes, starting with the admission that the federal government wastes billions of dollars a year on information technology. Federal CIOs have been motivated to build data centers and acquire hardware and software to protect their turf, it seems -- the Department of Homeland Security alone has over 23 data centers, Kundra said. From 2000 to 2006, energy consumption by the federal government doubled, and uncoordinated purchases of hardware and software have caused cybersecurity problems because they give spies and hackers more entry points into government networks. Also interesting, though, is the number of venture-funded startups that are now offering social media software to all federal agencies over the government's new online store, apps.gov, which also opened this week.
2 min read · 18 September 2009
Despite the fact that Accel won TWO awards this week -- it got the top spot on Red Herring's Top 100 Global Venture Capitalists list and was elected to Dow Jones Private Equity Hall of Fame -- Accel's Jim Breyer did not sound upbeat today when he was interviewed about the economy from the PEA conference by CNBC. "I don't think things are nearly as optimistic as we've been led to believe at this conference," he told CNBC's Rebecca Jarvis. "I have a great fear that today there is very little of a small business and consumer-led recovery. Until we see a small business and consumer-led recovery, I would advise great caution for the time being."
2 min read · 17 September 2009
Capital is still tight in clean tech, but not everybody is having trouble getting it. Sources say PureSense -- which makes a wireless irrigation manager that lets farmers precisely manage how much water they deliver to individual plants (they can check results on their iPhones) -- is about to close a B round. Chief Operating Officer John Williamson said he can't provide any information on PureSense's funding activities. PureSense is an interesting company because it does more than just help farmers save water -- a big headache in drought-ridden California, where most of PureSense's customers are now. Crops that are watered properly also require less fertilizer and pesticides, which helps the environment, and they grow better.
2 min read · 17 September 2009
Capital is tight for clean tech, and it's not just because of the economy -- investors are also being asked to back some pretty long-term technologies, and not everyone wants to be first to assume the risk. Consider Potter Drilling, which has the potential to solve a very big problem. With enough financial backing, it could supply enough clean energy to equal 2800 times the current consumption of the U.S. -- if it can drill enough 10-kilometer-deep holes to extract the heat that's trapped in the rocks below the surface of the earth. Every town could have its own hole, says CEO Jared Potter -- and it's own little power plant. It's a tantalizing picture, but now, drilling a well that's only 30,000 feet (9.1 kilometers) deep costs over $200 million with today's technology. Asking investors to bet on a vision has been tough.
2 min read · 15 September 2009
Vinod Khosla just raised the biggest first-time funds of any venture capitalist since 1999 -- over $1 billion in two funds -- but he doesn't encourage his clean tech companies to get to market quickly. One of them, Stion, which builds solar voltaic thin-film modules, could be selling products right now, he said on-stage this morning at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference in Sausalito. Some of its competitors already are. But he told them to wait.
2 min read · 15 September 2009
Give Microsoft credit for getting itself on the same stage as Google at TechCrunch 50 with just a fraction of Google's users -- but both companies touted what appears to be demoware and are skilled marketing machines. Microsoft this morning introduced "visual search" -- the ability to use Bing to search through pictures of products in the travel, health, shopping and other categories. Want a digital camera? Scroll through an array of 1500 pictures, lined up like the racks of guns Keanu Reeves surveyed in the movie "The Matrix." Google this afternoon introduced Google fast flip --
2 min read · 15 September 2009
