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I interviewed Josh Elman, Partner Greylock Partners @GLAZED Conference. Josh worked for Linkedin, facebook & Twitter & now hes on the venture side he’s interested in companies that have very small connections & bring people together that can have similar impacts on the world. He looks for things like large networks, new social platforms, or marketplace platforms that really change the way that people build things & connect to each other. He spoke about his journey to be a venture capitalist. He always loved joining with founders who had huge ideas which he thought could be a lot bigger for the world & help them realize that. He likes to become a key part of teams of 4, 5 or 6 companies & help them grow to similar scale. He sees it more as joining a team rather than investing. ‘It’s really lucky to be able to build things that you think will have an impact on the future!” He spoke about the changes in the venture industry: “We’re in a really amazing period right now where it’s cheaper & easier to get a company started & going & seeing if an idea will work, to see if customers & users will be attracted to something new. We’re in this great age of experimentation & the experimentation is already starting to happen in hardware & is already starting to catch up to what you can do in software. Its incredible & it has changed the financing structure. It’s faster & easier to find money to get these businesses off the ground from a whole bunch of different vehicles & people than ever before. But you can’t forget that it still takes years & years of hard work building a business. The business of venture capital as people who pool money & are then able to go invest in other companies to help them get that scale isn’t really changing to help build companies for the long long haul. Even though at this early stage of experimenting getting ideas off the ground we are seeing radical shifts!
