Speaking of venture capital funding numbers. It’s apparently clean technology funding week here in Southern California. Just in the last couple of days: Sapphire Energy – $50M for its technology for generating petroleum from algae PowerGenix scores $30M for its battery technology SolarReserve pulled in a huge, $140M round for its utility-scale solar power plants [...]
Matt Ridenour has a problem. He thinks that there is a venture capital crisis in Southern California — namely, that there are not enough local, early stage investors helping fund early (Series A) companies, those that need more than $500K but less than $10M in funding. Talking with Matt and Andy Wilson, his partner from [...]
Mike Speiser, a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures, has a good post from this weekend doing the math behind ad-supported businesses. Worth a read — his argument, that at a $1 CPM, you would need to be the fourth ranked site globally to make $100M in revenues–something that is very, very difficult to do. [...]
These are dour times — just look at the continuing carnage on Wall Street — with a lot of question marks in the air and some visceral fear in the markets. However, it appears to me that much of the high tech industry — and particularly, startups — is in rampant denial about how an [...]
Omid Rahmat, former publisher of Tom’s Guide Publishing, has just added a new article to our Insights & Opinions section, entitle Don’t look for first mover advantage. Rahmat takes a slightly contrarian view of “innovation” and gives some business advice to entrepreneurs. Microsoft didn’t invent the OS, Google didn’t invent search, Facebook didn’t make social [...]
I was chatting with a local venture capitalist Friday, and we were talking about how there is a big imbalance in the “supply” and “demand” sides of the venture business. The “supply” side–new companies who venture capitalists are investing in–seems to be doing fairly well, with new businesses being created and funded. However, the “demand” [...]
It’s a big week for venture capital focused technology conferences, and Southern California startups — and we’re not done yet. Tomorrow is VentureNet in Costa Mesa, the Technology Council of Southern California’s annual venture pitching event, which promises to be an interesting local take on the venture capital conference. VentureNet is put on by a [...]
Howard Anderson, a venture capitalist at Battery Ventures and a professor at MIT, has an interesting post on GigaOM about 5 Reasons To Move Your Startup Out of Silicon Valley. Anderson doesn’t mention Southern California–maybe because we keep beating New England in venture funding, or because his first point–that cities where the weather sucks are [...]
Hi all–I have a few tickets to VentureNet–the venture capital conference being held Friday in Costa Mesa. The event is almost entirely sold out. If you’re an early stage entrepreneur who’d like to see how the companies pitch the VCs at this event, let me know–or, if you missed paying $3000 + whatever for a [...]
It may be obvious to everyone else, but I’ve suddenly realized that social media and blogging is much more closely linked with evangelism than with personal expression. While blogging started out really as a way to communicate and express personal thoughts and ideas, it seems to me that blogging’s current incarnation is much closer to [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
