Jason Ball's TechBytes

Venture's Back II

Last month I posted suggesting that Venture might be back... The post below from trueventures makes a strong case, that yes, indeed, Venture is back.

http://www.trueventures.com/blog/2009/12/02/venture-is-back-baby/

Also, I was at Noah earlier in the month; company after company spewed out fantastic stats:

Betfair- online betting, 6.5m trades per day, 5 bn pageviews per month, 2.5m registered users, 600k active users, £13bn annual deposits, £300m revenues- £150M UK; £150M international

Delticom - online tire sales (yes, tires) €200M Revenues, €53M gross profit, €15M Ebitda, €10M net profit

Zed- entertainment (http://www.business.zed.com/) Started off as mobile content player, expanded into everything - including tv $700M revenue;

Bigpoint - browser gaming; playstation 2 quality Free games, community based 1000 distribution partners TV partnerships with rev streams to broadcasters Virtual goods/currency- micro transactions Subscription = one price; virtual goods means variable pricing 95M registered users, 250k new registrations per day

Spotify- online music, 6m users (3m UK), 15k new registrations  per day 120 staff Avg engagement: 94 min per day; 

Stardoll- online "paper" dolls, 40m members, Avg age 13.8, 12m uniques/month

There were several billion dollars of revenue on stage that morning - representing some of Europe's more mature startups... with companies like these in VCs portfolios, and the exit market opening up-  it's easy to understand why venture's back.

Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series

Hussein Kanji has organized a venture capital and entrepreneurship lecture series starting in October, which will be held at London Business School. Current speakers announced are:

Robin Klein, The Accelerator Group, Thursday Oct 1
Stan Bowland, Icera, Thursday Nov 5
Stefan Glaenzer, Last.fm, Thursday Dec 3
Bernard Liautaud, Balderton, Thursday Feb 4
Jos White, MessageLabs, Thursday March 4
Herman Hauser, Amadeus, Thursday, May 6
Mike Hedger, KVS, Thursday June 3

Other speakers will be announced in the near future.

If you're interested in venture capital and entrepreneurship; then this is the series of speakers you need to get to...and it's FREE. It's a stellar lineup, and the price is right. Full details and bios available at the London Business School website or on Hussein's blog.

See you there.

Qualcomm Ventures - Business Plan Competition

Today we announced the Qualcomm Ventures Business Plan Competion. 

It's open to startups in the US, Europe, China and India. Semi-finalists from each region will win $100k, and then compete for a further $150k at the Qualcomm Ventures CEO Summit in November.

We're looking for companies that impact the wireless space in the following areas:

• Consumer/enterprise applications and services
• Communication devices
• Semiconductor and component technologies
• Mobile platforms
• Digital media and content
• Healthcare technologies and services
• CleanTech 

Additional details on the Qualcomm Ventures' QPrize competition and submission guidelines are available at www.qprize2009.com. Deadline for business plan submissions is July 31, 2009.

European Startups... Still alive and kicking

Just in case you thought innovation was dead (or maybe non-existent) in Europe, the guys over at Mashable have pulled together a short list of European startups. If you missed the The Next Web conference and are interested in monitoring the space, The Next Web is a great resource (with pretty swell twitter too).

Dropbox- how file sync should be

My beta invite for Dropbox (funded by Y Combinator) arrived this weekend - and my initial impression is very positive. I've migrated my home mac use to a client/server (MacBook Pro/iMac) set up- with my iMac doing most of the heavy lifting.

I've tried multiple back up services and even tried to use iDisk as a "dropbox", but it never worked like it should. I'm now sharing my "Current" folder between the two macs seamlessly- and can even get access via the web if needed. Essentially, Dropbox is what iDisk should be - seamless cross-platform file sharing, complemented by web access:

Apple should acquire these guys ASAP and switch out iDisk for Dropbox...and getting access to these files via my iPhone would make a nice addition to MobileMe too.

Wii Sports Resort: MotionPlus

Normally, I don't post anything portfolio related, but one of our companies, InvenSense, is launching some very cool technology inside the upcoming Wii Sports Resort. The best part is the Jet Ski demo at 2:24.... 

 

European VC takes a nose dive

Don't say you weren't warned: It's back.... VC Doom and Gloom.

According to Venture Source and the NYT, European Venture has hit it's lowest point since 2000. Investment dollars declined by 35% to $1.3 billion and companies receiving investment were down by 42% to 167.

The upshot is that early stage investing isn't dead:

“Venture capitalists are being very selective about the companies they back but they’re by no means abandoning the European market. In the first six months of the year, 44% of venture deals in Europe were seed or first rounds—we haven’t seen this level of early-stage interest since the first half of 2001."

Which is great, b/c these companies can grow up during the downturn and hopefully come out swinging when times are better. For portfolio companies that are long in the tooth though...Fred is rumored to be lurking in his Vadar mask.

First-time Entrepreneurs?

Library House's newsletter yesterday (free registration req'd) highlighted an article by David Storey in the FT- making the case that there is no correlation between an experienced entrepreneur/management team and a company's success.

Storey summarises this belief [that failure is accepted in the US, and that it is a source of learning] to dismantle it, arguing that knowledge gained from a failed business makes little difference to future business success, due to the unpredictability of starting a business. ‘The best analogy is with a lottery,’ Storey writes, ‘it is not possible to learn to win a lottery.’

Storey points to research in the UK and Germany which indicates that experienced founders are no more or less likely to succeed in starting a new business than novices. It goes against one of the basic tenants of venture capital investing – focusing on the experience of the management team

At first, I thought that was the stupidest thing I had read in a very long time.

However, after giving it some more thought, I actually agree:

I'm not too worried about entrepreneurs being young or old; experienced or novice. I *am* worried about very large markets where an investment can be the leader (or at least one of the top 3). I'm also worried about great products and real, unmet needs...

An entrepreneur's experience? I've never lost any sleep over that one.

Can i haz VC?

A great post over on Under the Radar on VC slang:

VC vocab for those of you who are about to venture into, well, venture...and for those of you who could use the refresher:

Star: A portfolio company that generates 5-10x ROI upon exit

Walking Dead/Zombie: A portfolio company that can only generate an ROI, equal to the amount of money invested into it.

Dog: A portfolio company that has no chance of returning any money to its investors.

Kennel Capital: A portfolio of dogs

Dogcatcher: A VC whose portfolio is kennel capital

ArchAngel: A serial Angel investor who has, to date, invested in a number of starts. (See Jeff Clavier)

Blowfish: An early-stage (often pre-revenue) stratup entrepreneur who claims that his company makes better chips than Intel, better software than Microsoft and who knows more about customers and their needs than Dell.

Conservative Estimate: Overly optimistic financial forecasts that inexperienced first-time entrepreneurs generate using Excel.

And our personal favorite.....

Putting Lipstick on a Pig: When an entrepreneur tries to create a positive spin on a negative event (ex. Our management team leaving us at this time affords us an opportunity to retool our entire business focus and go-to-market plans). It can also be used to describe a bad product that is re-launched with new dressed-up front-end or the process in which a VC will over spin a portfolio company's stort to facilitate a high exit.

And just in case you missed Max's excellent post on VC wear (that still has me laughing), you can browse some more originals like the one to the left over at Venture Capital Wear.

Now you can talk like a VC and dress like a VC. (YMMV.)

iSurprise with Kleiner's iFund

Wow, who would have thought Steve's "One more thing" would be a $100 million fund dedicated to iPhone apps. (It's not everyday that I can blog about Apple AND Venture Capital in the same post...)

The only part that threw me was it's Kleiner Perkins and not Sequoia. Unless my history is wrong, Sequoia backed Apple, not KPCB- so why aren't they running the iFund? Accel are running the Facebook Fund. If you back the original, surely you back the ecosystem too?

That aside, I'm really excited that Kleiner are putting some muscle behind development for the platform.