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I recently read the article “17 Enterprise Startups to Bet Your Career On”  http://read.bi/IIvpkh in Business Insider.    As a longtime enterprise investor, I was happy to see more attention being paid to this major area of venture, but a little disappointed in one dimension of the article.  For the last couple of years we’ve been paying an increasingly large share of attention to the  enterprise and companies who sell to them....

I should write more often. I like doing it. It helps me crystalize my thoughts both about the venture and startup industry and the subject matter that permeates each work day. When I first started at RRE one of the insights I had (now pretty obvious) was that effective communication with a readership was actually a critically important bits of connective tissue that have been developed in connection with the opening up of the venture capital industry. Long before I invested for a living I was...

  Yesterday a couple of my colleagues and I met with a senior executive at one of the world’s biggest media companies to talk about what we’re seeing in the world and a few of our companies. As part of the general level setting she asked how we were seeing the development of the “second screen” as a media consumption device. And after pausing for a beat to make sure the answer wasn’t going to be obnoxious, I responded that of course we think...

  You know how, like, pretty much everyone, like makes fun of teenage girls for like, always talking like this?  Have you noticed that people in tech do almost the exact same thing, but with a different linguistic crutch? Consider the following made-up exchange: A: So you know, right, there’s no way that Google can catch us. They just don’t get product, right? B: Yep! Think about Google Wave, right? Over the past year or so I’ve noticed...

  Today startups live in a world of “haves and have nots".  The current capital efficient reality of company formation (dramatically reduced cost structures enabled by cloud infrastructure, free open source software and dramatically more efficent development environments), startups will typically raise between $700k and $1.5mm in a seed round to prove out the concept.  This is most often done at a single digit valuation (between $3mm and $8mm)....