Archive | February, 2004

Why I blog as a VC?

Feb 23, 2004
in Venture Capital

Recently, a number of people asked me why I blog as a VC. Isn’t privacy a good thing for VCs? Don’t you want to keep the good ideas to yourself? For the past couple of years, I had my own personal blog which I mainly used as a bookmarking tool so I could retrieve interesting [...]

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Demo reflections

Feb 18, 2004
in Venture Capital

I try to limit the number of conferences that I attend every year to a handful. Besides Esther Dyson’s PC Forum, there are few others that I like to attend regularly. However, I have to say that Chris Shipley’s Demo was a great show. Read more about it on Ventureblog. Being on the east coast, [...]

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Demo Day 2-@Home/Collaboration

Feb 17, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

The morning is off to a great start with a few home networking/digital media boxes for consumers. The battle for the home is in full swing between MSFT’s vision of the PC as the gateway to the home and companies like Akimbo, BravoBrava!, and Molino Networks bringing full digital media management to the set top [...]

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Demo Day 1 Recap

Feb 16, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

Day 1 is about over and after having sat through a number of interesting pitches, it is funny to hear the PR folks saying that many of the journalists are more interested in consumer/web-oriented companies than the enterprise-related businesses. Has the pendulum swung back to the consumer and web? It seems to me that home [...]

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Demo 2004

Feb 16, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

I am at Demo 2004, and it is great to feel the positive buzz in the room. There are lots of VCs and press in attendance, and it is clear that entrepreneurship is alive and kicking. In fact, it never went away as a number of companies that presented in the morning have been around [...]

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Want to be your own long distance player?

Feb 11, 2004
in VOIP

Ted Shelton has a great post about the economics of VOIP. According to Ted it does not take a lot of money to get your own long distance company up and running, say $8k of capital equipment costs not including the variable cost of running T1 lines, etc. If I can now take open source [...]

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Tapping the Chinese marketplace

Feb 10, 2004
in Economy, Entrepreneurship

While tapping the growth of the Chinese market sounds like a good idea, a fellow VC who just got back from a trip to Beijing and Shanghai says he completely understands why his companies are not getting any real traction in that market. Besides the highly politicized nature of business, there is a pervasive “catch [...]

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Building your business around customers

Feb 5, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

Fred Wilson has a great post about building a “customer-obsessed company” as opposed to a “technology-obsessed company.” This is good advice and reminds me of a number of companies built during the bubble period which were technology companies in search of a problem to solve. For early stage companies building their business, some of Fred’s [...]

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The VC/entrepreneur relationship

Feb 2, 2004
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Many of you have heard the analogy that the VC due diligence process is like dating and getting the investment is akin to being married. For all of you in relationships, you also understand that honest and open communication is one of the keys to success. Similarly, the VC and entrepreneur relationship should be built [...]

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