Archive | May, 2004

It’s tough being a CEO

May 23, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

Jerry Colonna has an insightful post on what it’s like to be a CEO of a venture-backed company. Having worked with Jerry on a board before, I find his advice quite practical and thoughtful. One takeaway from his post is about being overcommunicative with your board meaning that VCs do not like surprises. I totally [...]

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Stock option expensing

May 20, 2004
in Investing/Markets

Jeff Nolan has a good overview of stock option expensing, and why we should get involved. While I agree for the need for complete transparency of stock options, I also do not believe that expensing all options at the grant date will get us closer to true economic reality. In addition, I believe the unfair [...]

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Don’t overhype your company

May 19, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

It is on the newswire today-Cometa Networks, the wi-fi service provider backed by IBM, AT&T, and Intel, is shutting down. There is much analysis out there discussing the merits of the business and what went wrong. In a recent News.com piece, analysts discuss how Cometa did not build critical mass quickly enough to make the [...]

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Portfolio company promotion-collaboration service

May 17, 2004
in Web/Tech

As you all know, part of a VC’s job is to promote their portfolio companies. And yes, even though Expertcity is no longer a portfolio company since it was bought by Citrix, I would like all of you to know about the new collaboration service that the company is launching, GoToMeeting, which will be FREE [...]

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Insights from a recent CIO meeting

May 13, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

This month seems to be my month for CIO meetings. Part of a VC’s job besides helping management with strategy and hiring people is to help with customer introductions and strategic partnerships. In this tough market, my partners and I have been doing our best to help along these fronts. While being in New York [...]

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The increased cost of offshore development in India

May 11, 2004
in Globalization

In our weekly partner’s meeting yesterday, we ended up in a discussion about the progression of offshore development in a variety of portfolio companies. In the end, the companies that were doing the best job with development were the ones that had their own operations offshore. While a couple of our companies chose to use [...]

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What needs to be done to make us more secure

May 7, 2004
in Security

I was in a meeting with an executive at a large financial services company today discussing some of his technology problems and how my portfolio companies could address them. One of the big issues he mentioned was spam and stopping worms. Even though his company has spent real dollars in those areas, they are still [...]

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Transitioning from a service business to a product-driven company

May 5, 2004
in Entrepreneurship

It has been awhile since my last post as I have been busy with board meetings. In addition, I met a number of interesting companies, a couple of which were service businesses in the process of transitioning their models to become product-driven software companies. It is a familiar formula to many out there. More often [...]

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