I interviewed Trae Vassallo, Partner Kleiner Perkins @GLAZED. (Apologies for the bad sound – it got quite noisy in the room.) Trae is really passionate about the emerging world of digital devices “The Natural Evolution of Mobile: We can now take the power of the internet & not just deliver it to a mobile device but we can deliver it to a customized hardware package that might be our door lock? It might be our thermostat or the glasses I’m wearing on my head? That paradigm shift from to the things in our life that we interact with is really exciting!” Trae is a parent with 3 children, she has a busy career & she’s a technology geek. So what she is doing is taking all the technology that is now coming & is deployable in the home & really try & live it & experience it! “We are in a unique period of time where there is no IT service for the home so if you’re going to deploy technology in the home it’s got to be great.” Anywhere that it makes her life easier as regards technology she uses it. A great example is one of the apps that she is using allows her to track & know where her kids are. She also spoke about the changes in the venture industry. Certain infrastructure & tools are so readily available to anyone. One of the ways she is differentiating herself as a venture capitalist is by offering her expertise & experience to startups. “Every industry has to adjust & change with the times. If you think about how the industry operated even 4 years ago – it was who knew who & telephone calls but now everything is out there on the internet. Yes venture capital has to change & grow. That doesn’t mean it is any less valuable. I think it just means that how people operate is very different.”
Robert D Pavey, Partner Morgenthaler Ventures #smartmoneysv
I interviewed Robert D Pavey, Partner Morgenthaler Ventures@NVCA Venturescape. He spoke about his domain experience wireless & smartphones. They want to find waves before everybody else finds them & then find ways to help entrepreneurs build young businesses in those companies. 2 billion cell phones will be delivered in 2013. 300 million of them will be 4G phones and in much of the world this is the only computer that most people have & that means people are moving towards smartphones. These phones are needing to handle multiple frequencies, to cover multiple cellular bands and GPS and Bluetooth and this is basically changing the way that we live. Morgenthaler is focused on Information Technology in general. The firm has been going for about 45 years and has evolved into multiple firms. ”Entrepreneurs are not always the easiest people to work with but we respect them still. To survive some of them are pushy, some of them are aggressive, some of them are overly optimistic but they are very interesting and exciting “animals”. If you understand them & accept them for what they are, then you can help them!” He spoke about how he perceives the changes in the venture industry. ”In amongst all the changes that have occurred in the industry over the years, there has been 1 common denominator that nobody talks about & that is that the venture industry finances about 1k companies a year (that’s the whole industry)!” ”In the US economy there are about 700k businesses formed every year & about 10% raise angel money & about 1/700th of them raise venture money. The industry is a very small fraction of the financial market but it is very important because it creates companies like Google & Cisco who end up being the job creators & the engines of growth.” “There’s a lot of cash both upstream & downstream & our job is to find among those of the 70k that angels finance 1k that can grow to be significant businesses. If we’re lucky we can get it right 1 out of 10 times? And fortunately we get well paid most of the time by that 10% that do work out.” He sees the hurdles mainly from the government changes. Of 1k companies backed by VC each year less than 100 will go public. ”We need an occasional outsize success to make our industry work, and the challenges of being a young public company in the US these days make our job a lot harder!”