University of Virginia Venture Summit
Lecture Notes: Venture Panel Discussion “Windows on the Future” March 25, 2010
A discussion of opportunities in emerging technology areas from elite venture capitalists
Dolezalek’s Introductory Slides: “Innovations at a Crossroads” (slide set unavailable, however, see recent ARPA presentation for some of the slides)
- Is the US in decline? Are we in the British empire phase– fat, dumb, happy, protectionist?
- Myth: New jobs are neither created by big business or even small business. New Jobs come from New Business. Ergo, you keep the economy healthy by nurturing new business. Cites Jeffersonian values of diversity, liberty, innovation, etc.
- Author’s Note: Dolezalek (and Biddle, too) is clearly a champion of the free market and limited government involvment.
- (See slide 2 of ARPA presentation) We are transitioning from the “5th wave” (digital networks, biotech, software information systems) to the the “6th wave” (Solar, electrical transportation, smart grid infrastructure, etc)
- 1995-2000 IT boom technically occurred at the end of the 30 year cycle of the 5th wave. We are at the beginning of the next wave.
- (See slide 3 of ARPA presentation) Who will emerge? Transformative companies emerge from difficult gauntlet/funnel (Patent–>Company–>VC–>Mezzanine–>IPO–>1 industry leader– “winner takes most/70% market”).
- (See slide 4-5 of ARPA presentation) Similarities and Differences of IT and New Energy.
Question 1: Introduction. What is the state of your industry?
Biddle
- VC business is contracting. Hasn’t been profitable since 1997 (did he mean 2007?). In its heydey, ROI was 2:1 today you’re lucky to get 50 cents/dollar. Half will go out of business. Contraction will be good for remaining companies, profitability, transparency returns.
- Novak Biddle Venture Partners are investing in a diverse portfolio (mentions Blackboard, 2tor, WealthEngine)
Levinson
- US is shrinking as the rest of the world catches up (”US had the sandbox to itself”).
- Cites Israel and Singapore as two countries that have really emerged as VC powerhouses. Singapore is exploring 85-15 partnerships (with callout rights) with private VC. His company is heavily involved in this area.
Miller
Paull
- Works with universities in Health and Life Sciences field.
- Cites innovative partnerships with foundations (”nondilutive capital”) that help with risk mitigation. For example, Gates Foundation helps fund research in infectious disease vaccinations.
Question 2: Big government’s role
Dolezalek
- Recent government moves (eg, Sarbox) have been designed to reduce risk for US investors. In turn, does that endanger the reward? Is the environment less attractive for entrepreneurship and competition.
Biddle
- US still has fantastic infrastructure/culture for innovation. Reiterates that government should not impede entrepreneurs. Starting a company is an “unnatural act.” Don’t put up roadblocks (taxation, etc).
Levinson
- Government can play a positive role in fueling opportunity. Cites some SBIC examples.
- But let things fail, part of the process (creative destruction)
Paull
- Promote math and sciences K-12.
- Miller agrees the focus should be on early education as higher education is still world class. Notes the panel makeup (drama, astronomy, economics, and 2 architecture majors)
- Biddle: Don’t need a CS or EE to be technical.
Question 3: Most Exciting Areas
- Biddle: health care, personalized medicine
- Levinson: clean tech
- Miller: mobile technology
- Paull: health care IT ($2.2 trillion)
Audience Questions centered on Angel Investor Thoughts, Charity, China, Government Involvment
- Dolezalek:
- On Angel Investing: Good sign when the angel is a former successful startup CEO. “Quality adult supervision in early company life.”
- Biddle:
- On China: Contrarian view. Innovative core culture (coastal, Han) for sure, but what of the rest of the population?
- On Government’s Role: Be a cheerleader but get out of the way/don’t interfere. Government should not involved itself with direct investment (artificially keeps weak companies alive).
- Levinson:
- On Angel Investing: Family/friend angels are a red flag (unreasonable valuation). Must be a true partnership (ie board makeup)
- On Government’s Role: Have universities meet with people on the street (or farm). Create technology to solve real problems.
- Miller:
- On Doing Good: Zynga used game platform to raise money for Haiti.
- Paull:
- On Government’s Role: Create community/forum of trailblazer CEOs who meet with innovators (Cambridge Model). A listserve that shares intellectual property licensing available.
Additional Coverage
Last Year’s UVA Venture Summit
First things first. Here are links to the two primary charities coordinating the disaster relief in Haiti:
For obvious reasons, this search channel was hastily created. The Haiti channel was designed to search vetted news and local Haitian resources.
Primary Searches
To add the Haiti Search Channel to your Buttonall, Go to the Customization Screen and Scroll down to “Countries :: Haiti.” You may also want to download the Miami Channel (Cities :: Miami).
Miami Media
National Media
UK Media
Local Media in Haiti (Kreyòl/French)
ButtonALL is an extremely powerful shopping sales research tool. No joke:
(reprints from last year)
Had a pleasant day trip to DC on Saturday for the Third Annual BarCamp DC (Schedule | Twitter | #barcampdc).
Location: MLK Library. Ah, in the heart of DC. A wonderful diversity of townies, international tourists, homeless, and, of course, geeks. My kind of town. I sat in on the following sessions. My notes and commentary:
Scout n Lunch
I missed the whole topic creation confab. Yeah, bummed because that’s where you really meet people and stuff. Weekend sleep is more important, I suppose.
- Spent the first hour just floating from session to session getting the lay of the land of the rooms and format. The environment was collegial and the panel spam was being kept to a minimum.
- Second hour: I think the camp was serving free lunch (courtesy of the sponsors) but, hell, Chinatown was right around the corner. Yes, played some hooky to pay homage to Tony Cheng’s restaurant. Cheng’s is a classic 70s Old School throwback (I could see a spectacular John Woo Triad shootout scene here). The food is nothing overly spectacular (had the tofu-beef and pork dumplings…dim sum station was out this day, too) but, boy, they load your plate. Good value and I come here as habit/tradition. I digress…
Session 1: Lean Start-up
So the first real session I went to was Lean Start-up with Kevin Dewalt (Twitter). Kevin runs the DC LeanStartupCircle Meetup and is an enthusiastic student of Eric Reese (StartupLessonsLearned.com) and Steve Blank (Wikipedia):
- He started the session by asking the provocative question of why so many startups fail (he humbly included himself in this camp with two “failed” startups under his belt). Even though the US is considered the gold standard for start-ups, the vast majority of them fail.
- Introduced the concept of “Lean Startup”. From what I was able to understand, this is a methodology that attempts to apply the Scientific Method to Innovation with a heavy emphasis on hypothesis testing. Based on this testing, you continue to iterate until the final product or market emerges.
- EARLY dry testing of whether a market exists in the first place is crucial. Use tools like Google or Facebook ads to see if there is any real demand for your product. This step is crucial and may save you much wasted time and money. Why go “all in” and build something that nobody wants. These ideas mirror Blank’s “Get out of the building” and “Customer Discovery” theories. For the VCs these days, tech itself is much less important than real customers.
- An audience member was touting Mechanical Turks as low cost beta testers. Also, personally vouched for the whole “exclusive beta” marketing strategy (”shh, don’t tell others” technique). Twitter with its lists and Google with the wave invites is doing this masterfully, btw.
- There was some Zen talk about how you approach things without understanding the problem AND solution. I didn’t get that. I still don’t get it. Then again, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Session 2: How to lead a small business to success
The best way to describe this session is IT Jerry Maguire starring Peter Corbett (Twitter | Blog: Advercation) of iStrategyLabs. This was one of those classic “How I Did It” talks:
- Basically, went through in detail, how he went from being laid-off from an agency to forming his own successful interactive company (iSL) and developing a nice client list (ie, Geico) in a remarkably short time.
- Pro Tip: An audience member asked how one changes the stance of customers only wanting you (and no one else in the firm) doing the work. Peter, as the recognized face of the company, gets this all the time. Essentially, on day one, introduce the person doing the work for the client and set clear expectations. Create a comfort level and ensure the client has an immediate direct line to you, the principal, for feedback.
- On developing tribes/networks/collaborator relationships: (1) Give, give, give…rarely ask. I’ve heard Robert Scoble share the same advice. (2) Get out and build your personal brand and community. He did this by building the TwinTech parties, others have created user groups, etc.
- On a side bar, he used a lot of relationship metaphors for business (”Having never seen the bride naked until after the arranged marriage”…basically, test drive with some potential collaborators on a small project to see whether a long term partnership ought to be forged. Can we work together?). In the end, business is relationships.
- Uber Secret Pro Tip: “People want to buy, not be sold.” This maxim is the foundation of Peter’s “trade secret” method of closing sales. He sheepishly shared that strategy to the audience, and well, I’m not going to share it here. You should have been there.
Session 3: Freelancers lessons learned
The topic of this session had to with freelancing (or creating startups) when you are working a full time “real job”:
- This one was sort of a mishmash, I think, primarily, because there aren’t too many universal maxims when it comes to this topic. Every situation is different, and you could see that play out as the various panelists had opposing opinions (some said to disclose with your employer, others said “what you do in your spare time is your business.”).
- Nice anecdote of when you go to a networking event, someone hands you their card…then 8 seconds later (”are you cool?”) you get handed their other card.
- There were some obvious no-brainers: don’t work on stuff that directly competes with your employer/client, don’t work on outside projects on company computers, etc.
- Funniest moment was when one of the audience members revealed himself as an IRS taxman (we knew something was up when, earlier, he effused praise for the Agency). I gotta wonder if that then stifled the openness of the rest of the discussion especially around tax issues.
5 PM Session
My mind, much like my stomach after Cheng’s, was pretty full at this point. I was spent, man. Exit.
I learned a lot of stuff. I hope I contributed some points as well (at least, this post will be a small contribution to the community). I love the unconference free-form dialogue concept and will be back. Great job by the organizers, sponsors, and the grande dame MLK Library!
More Recaps
*4 Twitter references…5….in this post. Who do I send the Lincoln to?
ButtonALL was recently featured in Eleftherotypia…if your Greek is rusty that would be the Athens Free Press, one the largest newspapers in the country.
I honestly haven’t been this excited about a press clipping since we made Indian MTV.
Tried Babelfishing our excerpt (right under the section that highlighted the Cannes Film Festival’s website. Good company)….I think they’re saying nice stuff:
On line has the knownest search engines. Second the more basic e-encyclopaedias and e-dictionaries. Third [diasimotera] sites social networking. And last [istotopoys] online markets. Exists also the vertical right column with red [tetragonakia]: they are [istotopoi] alternative briefing and search. All these together now link forces in order to they give whenever him you want valid answers in your any question. You you write what you want to find in the Web and or leave the all machines together to remove the snake from the hole or select that from “[koympakia]” considers that will help you more in your search. As if you keep e-[tilekontrol] that is to say. And best: can add yours “[koympakia]” strengthening still more your [diadiktyako] “toy”. You it will become essential!
Ah yes, Charlottesville. The mighty big small town. Always on some kind of Top 10 Livable Cities list. Home of The University (our chief engineer/founder is a proud graduate). Cultural/Media per-capita capital of the world (How does a town of 45,000 sustain two high quality alt-weeklies?). Home of some amazing blogs, too (though the iconic Cvillain–think small town Gawker–sadly closed its doors recently due to legal headaches). Yes, I’m gushing as I <3 Cville.
For the Charlottesville search engines, we chose the following:
The daily paper serving Charlottesville is the Daily Progress. We could not use its search string but have incorporated it into the Cville ALL search engine. This search engine searches within the following locally-relevant resources (again, marvel at the concentration of quality local media for a town this size):
To add the Charlotteville Search Engine Channel to your ButtonALL, enter the customization screen and drop down on Cities :: Charlotteville.
East of Richmond (ButtonALL’s hometown), there lies a tunnel and some traffic. Before and beyond that tunnel is the “757.” The birthplace of our country began in the Hampton Roads section of Virginia. For the Hampton Roads search channel, we chose the two main newspapers servicing that region. Here are the five buttons:
The Hampton Roads ALL Search Engine only indexes local websites, hence, when you enter a key word, your search results will be locally relevant.
In addition to the websites listed above, here are the rest of the websites we index:
To add the Hampton Roads Search Engine Channels to your ButtonALL, enter the customization screen and drop down on Cities :: Hampton Roads.
The latest city search engine comes to us from Western Pennsylvannia. The five search engines chosen were as follows:
*Unfortunately, we could not work with the strings for the Post-Gazette or City Paper to create individual buttons; however, the “PITT ALL” search engine indexes both of these periodicals as well as:
The “City ALL” search engines have been very popular with local residents who are looking for just local resources. Give it a test drive. Type “best sandwich” in the search field, for example, and you’re bound to get some results talking about Primanti’s…MMMM, I could go for one of those right now.
To add the Pittsburgh Search Engine Channels to your ButtonALL, enter the customization screen and drop down on Cities :: Pittsburgh
The growth of Twitter is documented, some kind of amazing. My goodness, it even made the cover of Time Magazine (of course, who reads print magazines anymore when you can craft a well-designed Twitter feed?).
Growing concurrently at an equally hyper rate are the various Twitter Apps. It has gotten so big, so fast in fact that we actually had to create another “Twitter Search” channel just to accommodate all the new players.
ButtonALL gives you access to all of these wonderful Twitter search tools from one place, one page. We think it’ll make a fantastic time-saving, research tool to track specific trends making their way through the cultural zeitgeist.
Here is a summary of ButtonALL’s two Twitter channels:
Twitter Channel 1
- Twitter (Wikipedia | Twitter | Crunchbase) Makes sense to start with this one. Twitter’s search engine DNA comes from Summize, a Virginia-based company! that Twitter acquired last year.
- CrowdEye (Twitter | Crunchbase) Real-time social search engine that aggregates results in various list and visual summarizations (frequencies, link popularity, tags popularity, etc).
- Topsy (Twitter | Crunchbase) A search engine that weighs search results by Twitter linking activity (quantity and quality of referral). RT = Relevance.
- Scoopler (Wikipedia | Twitter | Crunchbase) A “real-time search engine” that indexes a number of social media sources like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. Great for searching breaking stories as they happen.
- BackTweets (Twitter | Crunchbase) This is a nice tool to track URLs by searching for tweets containing that particular link. Observe how the Twitter community is re-tweeting (RTing) and reacting to a web page.
Twitter Channel2
- Twazzup (Twitter | Crunchbase) Human-assisted Twitter search engine. Think Mahalo meets Twitter search. Includes a “most popular” side bar.
- Tweet Scan (Twitter | Crunchbase) Microblogging search engine that scans Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites.
- Twellow (Twitter | Crunchbase) Sort of a Twitter yellow pages/directory where you can find people and organizations by subject categories, expertise, or personal attributes.
- Tweetag (Twitter | Crunchbase) A Twitter search engine that emphasizes 40 of the most frequent tags (”#s”) being discussed. The more it’s discussed, the heavier the search result weighting.
- Twicsy (Twitter | Crunchbase) A photo search engine that looks for pictures being shared on Twitter (ie, twitpics).
To add the Twitter Search Engine Channels to your ButtonALL, you can go to the customization screen and drop down on Blogs:: Twitter Search.
Remember, in the customization screen, you can always add, delete, and re-arrange channel orders (via drag n drop).
Bibiliography
Third channel?? Yes, while researching for this article, I came across another set of good Twitter search candidates/resources. Gonna need a bigger boat.
The Tampa Bay Local Search Engine Channel has been created. To add the Tampa/St Pete channel to your ButtonALL you can go to the customization screen and drop down on Cities:: Tampa Bay. Remember, in the customization screen, you can re-arrange, add, and delete your search engine preferences. The inaugural search channels for Tampa are as follows:
**OK, so what’s Tampa ALL? This is a new feature we are launching for all local city search channels. Up until this point, it has been difficult to winnow the search candidates down to just five choices/buttons for each city. Sometimes as in the case of NYC, we had to create two channels for the city.
All local channels will now incorporate a Google Custom Search Engine (last red button–”City ALL”) that only searches the local media of a particular town (newspapers, magazines, television, and bloggers). In the case of Tampa, the CSE only searches the following resources:
By getting rid of the noise, this strategy allows for more of a refined search of local-only resources. For example, type the term “best restaurants”, and you will only get results relevant to that city. Pretty cool.
