Archive | January, 2008

Greenplum closes on $27million round of financing

Jan 22, 2008
in Entrepreneurship, Open Source, Venture Capital

Congratulations to Bill, Scott and team on our new $27mm round of funding led by Meritech and including Sun Microsystems and SAP Ventures.  You guys have been pushing the envelope since I have known you and delivering some spectacular results to boot.  It is nice to see our team and product get validated with a [...]

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Show me the love and I'll show you the money

Jan 17, 2008
in Entrepreneurship

I got a call before the holidays from a prospective customer that I introduced to one of my portfolio companies.  He said he loved our product, saw it fitting in perfectly into their platform, but that we were not responsive enough to their needs.  I was able to get a second chance for our team [...]

Read full story • Comments { 3 }

Freelance web designer needed!

Jan 16, 2008
in Web/Tech

I am helping a friend who has the most popular books on baby naming bring it all online. Our development on the backend is close to complete, and we are looking for a great web designer who can create a few templates and themes for us. This is a database driven site and the homepage [...]

Read full story • Comments { 7 }

Google giveth…and Google taketh away…

Jan 16, 2008
in Entrepreneurship

Here is another example of one of my portfolio companies’ mantras: Google giveth and Google taketh away (see my post from April for more on this).  Who knows the real reason why Google shut off Adsense for Incredimail (Nasdaq: MAIL) but look at what happened to the stock in one day—a 40% drop.  I am [...]

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Newsgator – going about enterprise sales the right way

Jan 10, 2008
in Entrepreneurship

I was catching up on my feed reader this morning and noticed my friend Jeff Nolan’s post (also see Brad Feld) on Newsgator and FeedDemon RSS clients now being free.  I know that Jeff joined Newsgator  because of his belief in the enterprise, and I applaud the company’s new strategy.  As I have written before, [...]

Read full story • Comments { 2 }

The KISS Method and innovation

Jan 9, 2008
in Entrepreneurship

I had a great conversation wtih a friend of mine yesterday about the latest release of his product. He had mentioned that one of my clips from the Economist (see below) on Evan Williams from Blogger and Twitter fame spurred some lively debate at his company. The key thought from Evan is rather than worry [...]

Read full story • Comments { 3 }

Openness and social networking

Jan 9, 2008
in Web/Tech

As you know, I am a huge believer in open standards and that open standards (over time) will usually prevail over proprietary, closed networks.  And my one wish from a social networking perspective was to really be able to manage all of my relationships from various networks and my interests from one meta-application.  In June [...]

Read full story • Comments { 0 }

Changing leadership is never easy

Jan 1, 2008
in Entrepreneurship

I have been a Ravens fan for quite awhile, and I am glad they finally made this move.  Being an avid sports fan and former DI lacrosse player, I have always tried to take lessons from the sports world into the business world.  This is yet another example that reminds me of working with startups.  [...]

Read full story • Comments { 4 }