I can’t help myself at this time of year but to remind you that you probably haven’t registered for Glue yet and that you need to get on it. Glue is one of three conferences that Foundry helps facilitate with Eric Norlin (the others are Defrag and Blur, the latter of which is still in development but coming this summer). Glue is an in depth discussion about the web as a platform and the future in a world where most (all?) apps live in the cloud (either public or private). Once again, Eric has put together a fantastic agenda (you can see the full list of topics here). This year’s speakers include: Michael Barrett, CISO, PayPal Professor Eric Brewer, creator…
Archives / March, 2010
The new era of venture capital
You already know the about the state of the venture capital industry in 2009: venture investing down (32%), exits down (14%; slowest exit year for VC backed companies since 1995), fundraising down (56%), IPO’s almost non-existent (8 venture backed IPOs in 2009). It’s a bleak picture for the industry overall, even if there’s a group of us that continue to believe this is a great market in which to be investing (and it clearly is). These stats got me thinking about the future of the venture industry and I thought I’d offer up some thoughts on where we might be headed. First, let me frame the conversation by stating that I agree with Fred Wilson’s assumption that somewhere around $15Bn…
Join the search revolution! Introducing: Trada
While search marketing is already a huge business, more and more companies each day are discovering the advantages of advertising directly to customers through search engines. Companies like that they can directly measure the impact of their spending – from the clicks they are generating all the way through the products they are selling as a result of those site visits and that they can quickly and easily scale up their spending on what’s working in their search campaigns. With different ad groups, ad copy and landing pages, search marketers can customize their campaigns to fit their business needs. If there’s a downside to search, however, it’s that effectively managing search campaigns is extremely difficult. Even if you confine your…
New look, same me
I have to admit that I never really loved my old blog format (either of them, actually). I never got the colors right (way too much orange, strange brown) and it was far too cluttered looking. Thanks to the great guys over a Slice of Lime (and our IT guy Ross Carlson) I now have a great new look and feel for VC Adventure which I’m really excited about. You’ll notice a much better twitter feed (with a clever little bird “tweeting” what I have to say), a short bio on the front page, a significantly better main body look and a much easier ability to tweet, comment, etc. Welcome to 2010… One note – during the transition to this…
Sometimes simple is better
John Maggio, CEO of VCIR presenting company Clementine Art, used the following slide to present his company’s financial opportunity (after I told him in a practice session that his original slide was too complicated). Created by his 6-year old daughter, it was by far my favorite slide of the conference!