Above the Crowd

While I attempted to bury this issue last week , this Sunday, Thomas Friedman again used his pulpit in the New York Times Opinion section to beg for a VC Bailout.  Last week he merely suggested that the government invest along side venture firms.  This week, he went even further astray and suggested that the government “Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way.”  As a practicing venture […]

[Note: Update to this post, posted 2/22/09] A few weeks back, a friend mentioned an idea he had heard suggesting that the government consider entering the VC (venture capital) business as part of the overall stimulus plan.  Specifically, the argument was made for the government to provide excess venture capital funding to the green sector.  At first, I assumed this was just one individual’s idea, but the noise level has risen to the point where it is reasonable to assume there is a group pushing or lobbying for this outcome.  Last week, Thomas Friedman jumped on the bandwagon in a New York Times article titled Open Door Bailout .  Friedman […]

Yesterday I met with a cool company named  Slide Rocket  that has a very slick product.  Based on Adobe Flex , SlideRocket has built a web based PowerPoint alternative that some equate more to Apple’s Keynote (plus it has collaboration built in).  One reviewer even said : “The entire interface is, dare I say it, gorgeous. It’s slick, smooth, gentle on the eyes, and all Flash based so everything works as soon as you want it to. If anything, it actually seems to work better than PowerPoint offline.”   Clayton Christensen’s big “aha” in Innovator’s Dilemma is that eventually a product will become over-featured and as a result feature growth will […]

Prominent finance publications like the WSJ and the Motley Fool along with  several bloggers have recently taken shots at Google with respect to their decision to re-price a boat-load of employee stock options.  Just to review the details, in their last earnings call google management stated that they would offer all employees with options that have strike prices above the current price the ability to trade in those options for new ones with a lower strike price.  This affects about 3% of the shares outstanding, and resulted in a one time charge of almost half a billion dollars.  The journalist that take issue with this suggest that shareholders […]

Over three years ago, I wrote a post titled, “ Do VCs Help in Building a Technology Platform? “.  The premise (as you can go see), was that VCs who once primarily invested in companies built on Microsoft’s platform, had almost universal switched to the open source LAMP stack as their technology platform of choice.  This activity obviously helps reinforce the chosen platform, as the more apps built on top of it, the more universal solutions that are then available for that platform.   I wanted to offer two updates that relate to this theory/proposition.     First, Microsoft recently announced that startups can get three years of free software and service .  From my point of view, this thoroughly supports the theory that where startups are […]