The answer is: it depends.
The level of adoption required to make a given investor comfortable varies from company to company and investor to investor. There are, however, some guidelines based upon the type of customer that the company is targeting.
I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example of an industry cluster.)
I don't have an MBA, but I have earned my SIlicon Valley MBA. Let me explain. When I was a few years out of college, I considered going back to get an MBA. I liked working in the valley and knew that I wanted to spend my career in tech and ultimately around startups - at that point I had only worked for Apple. So I asked around to a lot of people I knew well and respected. People who I thought had been successful in their careers and whose path I wanted to learn from. Many of them had MBAs and some did not. I wanted to hear their perspectives on the value of a traditional MBA.
oDesk is the marketplace for online workteams, with the best business model for both employers and contractors. Our unique approach guarantees to employers that an hour billed is an hour worked, while guaranteeing to contractors that an hour worked is an hour paid.
Don't miss part I or part II of this interview with Nexage CEO. Let's jump right back in:
Andrew: I totally agree with you that this industry is changing very rapidly, even in the online advertising sector. Can you talk about some of the changes you're seeing and how you are responding?
Ernie: Sure. If you look at things in the mobile world, it's similar to what was happening online in the late 1990's when there were no standards and multiple browsers, kind of like the wild wild west. Compare that to the mobile world right now and it makes that seem like a pretty calm sea. The reason for that is the fragmentation of platforms on the handset side and no standardization across platforms. There are even different browsers from platform to platform and publishers have a real challenge managing that complexity. Part of what we bring to the publishers in value is removing significant layers of that complexity by managing those layers.
Probably too much ink is spilled over VC funded companies. It’s curious… given that these companies represent such a small minority of the entrepreneurial activity in this country. Perhaps it’s because the stories of ambitious entrepreneurs pitching their dream to mysterious VC’s make for good, sexy fodder.
If you look at how much money has been raised by venture firms, including the seed and super seed categories, versus how much money has been returned in the past ten years, the ratio is not good. At some point the investors who fund the venture capital asset class will not be able to keep funding it.
The asset class needs to focus on liquidity. M&A continues to be the one bright spot and although I have not seen the data, I suspect M&A activity around venture backed companies in the past ten years has not shrunk and may have actually increased (if you take out the bubble years of 98-2000).
This post was originally published in a shorter (more sensible) format in the Wall Street Journal online. If you’re short on time click on the WSJ link and read the 990 word version there. Otherwise, grab a cup ‘o coffee …
Clicking on any graph below will take you to that article.
I hit the like button on pages all the time. I like your picture. I like the fact you had fun on your vacation. It doesn’t mean I want to get into a long involved conversation or see all your vacation pictures.
I like the jeans you are selling on your website . I like them because I already own a pair. I am not giving you permission to contact me and try to sell me something or to suggest to my friends that they should buy them because I like them.
Marketo is a revenue cycle management company that is transforming how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work-and work together-to accelerate predictable revenue. Marketo's solutions provide explosive revenue growth throughout the revenue cycle from the earliest stages of demand generation and lead management to deal close and continued customer loyalty.
My two daughters are now in college and have put their toes in the working-world with summer jobs. As they’ve grown older, they’ve heard their parent’s advice about women in the workforce.
This post is not advice nor is it a recommendation of what you should do. It’s simply my interpretation of what I observed watching my daughters grow up. Our circumstances were unique, times have changed, and your conclusions and opinions will most certainly differ.
Every major software or web company I’ve ever been involved in has had a catastrophic outage of some sort. I view it as a rite of passage – when this happens when your company is young and no one notices, it gives you a chance to get better. But eventually you’ll have one when you are big enough for people to notice. How you handle it and what you learn from speaks volumes about your future.
Cooliris has created a portfolio of free and easy-to-use products that provide consistent content experiences across different screens. The company offers a unique value proposition to consumers, website owners, content providers, and advertisers. Cooliris for the desktop is a browser add-on that is the fastest and most stunning way to browse, search, and discover Web and desktop media, using the immersive and cinematic Cooliris 3D Wall.
And as a lover of music, I’m happily paying my share for music. I pay for it in many ways right now - Rhapsody, Pandora premium, Spotify, Amazon and iTunes. In the world of music, DRM is dead.
I happily pay for music although I can get it for free through the wide range of free torrents or invite-only torrent aggregators.
When you want to look up information on publicly traded companies, it helps to know the ticker symbol. Microsft's ticker is MSFT, Google's ticker is GOOG, Apple's ticker is AAPL. Every publicly traded company has a ticker.
But private companies don't have tickers. And as more and more private companies are attaining status and drawing the attention of mainstream media and the investment community, it is time for that to change.
Yesterday Stocktwits and Second Market proposed a set of tickers for popular privately held companies. The proposed list of tickers is here.
Well, I’ve learned a lot about how a bill becomes a law on my journey to try to turn the Startup Visa idea into a law. And yes – it’s a lot like how I learned about it on Schoolhouse Rock about 35 years ago.
It’s been a little less than a year since I wrote the post on 9/10/09 titled The Founders Visa Movement. This evolved into the Startup Visa initiative, resulted in a bill in the House (HR 4259 sponsored by Polis (D-CO)) and a bill in the Senate (S. 3029 co-sponsored by Kerry (D-MA) and Lugar (R-IN)). We’ve made steady progress building support and have numerous endorsements, including most recently the American Bar Association and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. In addition, the co-sponsors for the various bills are starting to appear: for example, Udall (D-CO) recently signed on to co-sponsor S. 3029, Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Owens (D-NY), and Wu (D-OR) have co-sponsored HR 4259. I’m also aware of a few more that are about to announce.
AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its fourth annual GoingGreen Silicon Valley Top 100 Private Companies competition. We are looking for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in green technology. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
I was scratching my head after the most recent Summit at Stanford for a theme. It was a great conference, marked for many by the preponderance of companies that originated in other countries. There was a dinner for the winners one night, and I don't think it an exaggeration to say that half the people in the room were immigrants or from Europe, Asia, and Central and South America as well as Australia and New Zealand. The CEO pitches were remarkable in the number of companies that are pushing toward profitability and actually discussing next steps—including IPOs!
Fluffy Spider Technologies has been developing embedded software since 1995. A pioneer in the industry, FST has a background in real-time systems, defense, and telecommunications. Between 1995 and 2000, FST translated this fundamental knowledge into producing outstanding solutions for some of Australia's leading process monitoring and control installations (BHP), defense subcontractors (GEC), and later within the emerging mobile telecommunications industry (Vodafone, Optus, and Telstra).
Netflix, the US DVD rental video streaming business is out cutting $1bn deals with movie studios for streaming rights and Hulu is contemplating an IPO – both developments which suggest the premium video streaming business is starting to reach maturity. The music streaming business, by contrast, is still finding its way, and is characterised by conflict between the record labels and streaming service providers, none of whom are cutting $1bn deals or preparing to IPO.
