Today temperatures were supposed to hit 90 degrees fahrenheit (32 degrees centigrade), so I was extremely unhappy to get into long pants, shirt and jacket this morning... But I had to - although dress code here in the Valley is a lot less stuffy than in Philadelphia (God, I still remember the dress code), I was to go to 2 big SandHill Rd investors and didn't want to be inpolite...
My first meeting in the morning turned out to be also potentially most interesting... I met one of the prominent tech lawyer Mark Radcliff, Partner with DLA Piper - and as it turned out, next to extensive experience in startups and venture capital, he also understands European business and next to others works for a family office based out of Germany which also invests in venture capital funds... So I told him about Credo Ventures and we agreed to follow up... :-) Mark was also the first person who said that he didn't have any doubts about technical skills, technology savvyness and creativity, but he had serious doubts about the business abilities of Czech entrepreneurs - and he expressed his concerns whether or not there is a market for early stage venture capital at all... Very interesting, and we'd better be prepared to answer this...
My next VC to meet was recommended to me by Phil Wickham, another Kauffman Fellow and the only thing I knew about him was that he is focused on investing in IP-based ventures... A bit out of my focus, but networking still counts, was my thinking... But the meeting turned out to be a very interesting one - Vlad Dabija, Managing Partner of IgniteIP is a very interesting VC... Originally Romanian computer engineer, Vlad came to Silicon Valley some 15 years ago, worked as an engineer, then venture partner with CMEA and then started his own software company which raised venture capital, to be finally (unsuccessfully = for not a lot of money) sold to Google - and their code was actually a base for the Chrome, so a bit of wow for Vlad... After his GreenBorder experience he went through the Kaufmann Fellows Program and decided to start a new venture firm, but actually a very different firm from the ones on Sandhill Rd; Vlad decided that he would invest in technology and IP, with the aim to sell it again as technology and IP... No investments of $ 10m with the aim to build and sell the company for $ 100m+, but simply find a good IP, invest $ 1 or 2m and then facilitate its sale or licensing... No need to care about building the company, marketing, sales, infrastructure, awareness, customer care, ... ... Pretty sweet model... I think I will be in touch with Vlad, and there actually might be opportunities for cooperation as most of scientists and innovators in the Czech Rep really cannot build the company, but sometimes the technologies they built might be worth trying to sell... Totally different model than the traditional VC, but interesting for sure...
Finally, I went back to Sandhill Rd to meet with Sujay Jaswa, Senior Associate with NEA, one of top early stage VC firms which actually is not very well known, although they made some very nice investments and they currently manage over $ 11 billion... With Sujay we had a very good discussion about trends in the industry, impact of the crisis and hot startups... :-)
And my next stop was Stanford... I was speaking there...
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