sequoia on SWiK

[from yurinotigor] Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:51:43 -0700

Reality Check: Surviving Is Always Hard for Startups

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:28:47 -0700

By now Sequoia’s “RIP” slide deck and the ensuing blog coverage have been consumed by every entrepreneur and investor in the tech universe. It hit a nerve. Perhaps it provided a wake-up call, or simply confirmed people’s worst fears. For first-time entrepreneurs, or for those who have forgotten what happened just seven or eight years ago, this sort of shock therapy could be effective.

But the bottom line is that it is superbly hard, even in good economic times, to really impact the world with an innovative new product from a small company. The odds are hugely stacked against you. Would-be entrepreneurs and investors alike tend to forget this. They grow complacent when they are bailed out of mediocre situations or make money far exceeding what they deserve. They begin to believe their own BS. A troubling sense of entitlement lulls them into a false sense of security that they are not actually fighting for their economic lives, every minute of every day. It happened during the dot-com bubble and the housing boom, and now it’s happening on Wall Street.

The truth is, founders should be ruthlessly hard on themselves irrespective of the economic climate. Treat every break you get as the last miracle left on Earth. You should always be asking yourself: What could be done better? What’s not working? How can we be more capital efficient?

Any entrepreneur who woke up this morning and said, “Hey, I found $200,000 that I can cut out of my burn rate,” should be taken out to the woodshed. The fact is, cutting fat should be a standard operating procedure, not a reaction to a financial crisis. A knee-jerk reaction can also cut too deep, stalling innovation and growth, with the same inexorable end: failure. The same is true for VCs. Investors cannot afford to be intellectually lazy in easy times, only to wake up surprised by a changed environment and reactively change their investment tone.

You need to build your business, or your portfolio, based on underlying fundamentals that will carry you through good times — and bad.

Here are a few things I think all entrepreneurs should do now:

1) Reaffirm the value-creating milestones for your business.

2) Focus your capital on hitting them in the most efficient way possible.

3) Ensure that your current cash is safe. Is it invested in stable corporate bonds (like GE)? Or is it sitting in financial institutions, even the finance arms of manufacturing companies (like GMAC)? Are your lenders likely to deliver money they have agreed to lend? Do your investors have reserves for future rounds?

4) Look at your burn rate to make sure current expense rates still make sense. This has more urgency for later-stage companies that are selling a product, but those in R&D mode should always be thrifty.

5) Lead. Reaffirm the viability and vision of your company to the troops. This will counterbalance people’s tendencies to worry about their jobs and dreams, even decrease the time spent watching stock tickers.

Although it is too soon to tell what the true extent of the recent weeks’ turmoil will be, the secondary effects of this crisis will likely prove worse for entrepreneurial companies. Between skittish customers and the herd mentality that often manifests itself in the venture community, the startup jungle will certainly be a less forgiving ecosystem for awhile.

However, while funding will be harder to come by, there will continue to be capital available for really great companies and good ideas. Keep in mind that many of our greatest companies were founded during, or toward the end of, recessions, among them IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

Bryan Roberts is Managing General Partner at Venrock.

Only 55 VC Funds Raised Money In The Third Quarter (Down 29 Percent).

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:06:44 -0700

The third quarter saw the number of U.S. venture funds raising new cash decline by 29 percent to 55 funds, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters. That compares to 78 new funds a year ago and 76 new funds in the second quarter of 2008. And 45 of that 55 were follow-on funds rather than new funds.

Each of those funds, though, raised a lot more money on average. The total raised for the third quarter was $8.1 billion, down only 6 percent from the third quarter of 2007 (but down 12 percent from the $9.2 billion raised in the previous quarter of this year).

And remember, all of this was before the financial meltdown of the past two weeks that had alarm bells ringing at every VC firm.

The three largest funds in the quarter were Sequoia Capital’s $930 million late-stage fund, Austin Ventures’ $900 million balanced-stage fund, and InterWest Partners’ $650 million early-stage fund. In general, more money is going towards later stage, proven businesses than early stage financings. (More at VentureBeat).

Update: Here are some iCharts with the same data:

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Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:00:40 -0700

Updated: Sequoia Capital, arguably the smartest venture capital investor in business, is sounding the alarm and asking its portfolio companies to buckle down for what could be the worst economic downturn of their relatively short lives.

The fund organized a meeting yesterday where it invited entreprenuers/CEOs from its portfolio companies. The attendees were greeted by a cute image of a Grave Stone, with a message: R.I.P.: Good Times, my sources tell me.

I was able to confirm this with at least two sources. I am currently trying to nail down more details. Sequoia Capital declined to comment on the news.

The gathering was addressed by at least four speakers, including a brief introduction by Mike Moritiz. Doug Leone was another speaker. I am still trying to nail down more details of the two other speakers. A person who handles Sequoia’s public market investments is said to have talked to the startups. The message delivered to those in attendance was that things could get a lot worse than people think, and it will be a more protracted downturn. To give a historical perspective, Sequoia had a similar meeting back before the last bubble ~~unraveled~~ burst. We know how that turned out.

They want the companies to cut costs, to figure out way to survive and emerge at the other end of this downturn, which could last years. The speakers went through each functional area of the business and told the companies how to cut costs. By holding this special meeting, Sequoia is telling its companies to put survival strategies in place and figure out ways to outlast the broader market troubles.

Uber-investor Mike Moritiz told The Financial Times earlier this week: “It’s pretty clear that demand is going to soften across the board for every company - it doesn’t matter if you’re selling to consumers or companies.” Moritiz isn’t one to mince words, and is one of those few people who likes to get ahead of the fire and not fight it from behind.

Sequoia isn’t the only one advising its startups to tighten their fiscal belts and prepare for a gut-wrenching ride. Ron Conway, a well-known angel investor in the Valley who has invested in companies like Google, offered very sobering advice to his companies via an email earlier today.

Raising capital will be much more difficult now. You should lower your “burn rate” to raise at least 3-6 months or more of funding via cost reductions, even if it means staff reductions and reduced marketing and G&A expenses. This is the equivalent to “raising an internal round” through cost reductions to buy you more time until you need to raise money again; hopefully when fund raising is more feasible.

Letting go of staff is hard and often gut-wrenching. A re-evaluation of timelines and re-focus on milestones with an eye to doing more with less will allow you to live many more days, and the name of the game in this environment in some respects is survival — survival until conditions change. If you are in a funding cycle, you should raise your funding as soon as possible and raise as much as possible but face the fact that if you can’t raise money now you must cut costs.

Folks this is bad news for Silicon Valley, which has been living in a bubble, assuming that it is going to weather the global economic storm without being impacted. We have been following this story since last year, pointing out that the tech is not an island.

Inside Details of Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Meeting With its Companies

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:00:40 -0700

Updated with the Sequoia powerpoint: Last night I reported on a special meeting held by Sequoia Capital for its portfolio companies, warning them about the fiscal hurricane that was going to hit them, and how they’d better figure out ways to survive what could be a big downturn.

There were some gaps in the details about that meeting, but I have since been able to piece together the minutes and what folks there essentially said. Since these are second-sourced details, I cannot say they are a 100 percent accurate, so please view them with a degree of skepticism. Nevertheless, I still feel confident enough to share them.

These were the four speakers:

Mike Moritz, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, who moderated the speakers. The speakers were Eric Upin, Partner, Sequoia Capital, who until recently ran the $26-billion Stanford Endowment Fund, and Michael Partner, Sequoia Capital, who was Sequoia’s very first hedge fund manager and worked at Maverick Capital and Robertson Stephens. The last speaker was, as I mentioned before, Doug Leone, General Partner, Sequoia Capital.

Moritz Musings

Mike Mortiz kicked off the proceedings by saying that these are drastic times and that means drastic measures must be taken to survive. His message to companies was don’t worry about getting ahead, instead, “We’re talking survive. Get this point into your heads.” He warned that companies need to be cash-flow positive, and if they are not, then they need to get there now, because raising capital without being cash-flow positive is going to be tough. He was warning that there will be a price to pay for those who hesitate to act.

Upin Says

Upin, who knows a thing or two about money and markets, told the room that we are in the beginning of a long cycle, what he called a “secular bear market.” This could be a 15-year problem, he said. This comment was accompanied by many slides that showed historical charts of previous recessions averaging 17-year cycles. He pointed out that the issue here is not the equity markets but the credit market, and that will take a long time to recover. He was ominous in warning the startups that this is a global issue, it is not a normal time, and is a significant risk not just to growth but to personal wealth.

He advised startups to make drastic changes, to cut expenses and to cut deep, but to still keep marching. “You can’t be a general if you turn back,” he apparently said. The point he hammered on was that since you can’t manage the economy, manage everything else, including your business. He had some interesting advice for startups.

Cut spending. Cut fat. Preserve capital.
Throw out the models and spreadsheets, because all assumptions will be wrong.
Focus on quality.
Reduce risk.

Michael Beckwith

Michael Beckwith’s presentation had lots of charts and data and he pointed out that the V-shaped recovery is unlikely. He also said that the cuts in spending will accelerate in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2009, and pointed to eBay as an example.

Leone’s lessons

Doug Leone told the group that this downturn was a different animal and one from which it would take “years to recover.” He was clear in pointing out that:

Unprofitable companies would have a tough time raising cash, so get cash-flow positive as soon as possible.
Go on the offensive and pound on your competitors’ shortcomings.
Be aggressive with your messaging and be out there. In a downturn, aggressive PR and communications strategy is key.
Decline in M&A will mean that only lean companies with sales models that work will get bought.
When it comes to deciding between capital preservation and grabbing market share, he advised that everyone should be preserving capital.

Leone’s other tips for companies, especially the Sequoia portfolio companies, were something like this:

Start with zero-based budgeting.
Cutting deeper is the formula to survive, and this is an era of survival of the quickest.
Make sure you have one year’s worth of cash.
If you have a product, reduce expenses around it and boost sales. If the product is ready, cut the number of engineers.
Focus on building the absolutely essential features in your product.
Be brutal when it comes to marketing — anything that isn’t working, cut it.
Don’t burn through your cash, for cash is king.
Cut base salaries on sales people and leverage them with upside.
Most importantly, be true to yourself.

Ceo All Hands 10-7-08 Final - Upload a Document to Scribd

Challenge Games Raises Another $10 Million. Well Played, Sir.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:30:08 -0700

Browser-based fantasy game startup Challenge Games has raised a $10 million B round just a couple months after raising its $4.5 million A round. Globespan led the round. Sequoia Capital, which led the last round, also participated (Sequoia partner Roelof Botha is on the board).

Challenge is behind the online role-playing games Duels and Baseball Boss. Both are addictive, and are designed to encourage the trading of virtual goods (better swords, better short stops) to help players improve their chances of scoring higher in the game.

The company is about to launch a new game called Warstorm later this month, and will use the proceeds to develop even more games, expand into Asia, and possibly acquire other game shops.

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Joost To Kill Desktop Client

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:00:20 -0700

Exclusive: In what is likely to be a major shift in the company’s strategy, peer-to-peer startup Joost is going to stop making its desktop client. The decision to suspend the client is likely to be announced soon, I am told. The company is going to a browser-only strategy, in which much of its content is going to be available through a browser-based player. Joost, I am told, will release a small plug-in that would embed itself in the browser and allow you to grab files using the P2P technologies. The web client is likely to have better quality than average video sites. (Update: Liz has an indepth review of the upcoming service along with screenshots.)

Joost had launched its desktop client with much fanfare but for a panoply of reasons, such as bandwidth limitations, software issues and lack of content, the company lost traction and usage of its client dropped. Joost isn’t the only startup to give up backing solely the client. Veoh and Jaman adopted a browser-and-client strategy, which has helped boost their audience.

Joost was started by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström and raised over $45 million in venture capital. The company hired former Cisco executive Mike Volpi as its CEO, and in the summer of 2007, it seemed Joost was heading to the moon. Over past the 12 months, the company has had to tweak its game plan, trim its work force and refocus to a world that is less accepting of clients. The company wanted to be a key distributor of Hollywood content, but that opportunity has faded with the rise of Hulu.

Liz wondered about the possibilities of turning Joost into a web app, and well, it looks like that is finally happening. NewTeeVee writer Janko Roettgers had come up with five ways to save Joost when trouble hit last year — developing a web version was one of them. Killing the desktop client points to that.

What’s There to TokBox?

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:13:36 -0700

Will Tokbox Make It?

Bain Capital must be psychic. Apparently they’ve looked into the future and seen that TokBox, a San Francisco-based startup, will either grow into a large company or find a buyer for what is essentially a Flash-based, in-browser video chat service that’s gotten marginal traction. Sure, the company has a new desktop client that allows you to video chat with anyone, but then so does my iChat.

Bain Capital has led a $10 million investment in TokBox. The move comes less than a month after the company named a new CEO, Nick Triantos, who has worked for many tech firms, but has never before held that title.

The company launched in October 2007 and has thus far raised a total of $14 million from Bain and early investors Sequoia Capital. Scott Friend, Venture Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a press release announcing the Series B round, said:

“The company is executing well…We are excited to be investing with our partners at Seqouia in a company we believe has the potential to be the next ‘big thing’ in web communication.”

Just to put his words into context, TokBox recently fired its founder and CEO, Serge Faguet. And according to Compete.com, they had about 179,000 visitors in the month of July, though they did sign a deal with Meebo that stands to get them some traction. (For a list of their competitors, check out NewTeeVee’s round-up of video chat applications.)

From the way I understand it, TokBox is using the built-in video capture capabilities in Flash player combined with the Flash media server to offer in-browser video conferencing. When the company launched, I pointed out that it was an “interesting idea, but more of a feature than a platform for a standalone company or model for a viable, long-term business. If (and that’s a big if) TokBox is going to work, it will need to be rapidly adopted by the marketplace.” Rapid adoption hasn’t quite happened, however, and I wonder if it ever will.

But again, the guys at Bain must be able to look into the future better than us skeptics.

Meraki Unwires SF’s Neediest

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:22:40 -0700

Even if San Francisco’s high-profile, city-wide Wi-Fi network with EarthLink and Google was a fundamental flop, residents of the city that need it the most could still get some free wireless broadband. Meraki Networks, a San Francisco-based startup that makes mesh networking gear is building an ad-hoc San Francisco Wi-Fi network called “Free the Net.” At a press conference on Wednesday, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Meraki CEO Sanjit Biswas plan to announce a project that includes Meraki’s Wi-Fi networks throughout San Francisco’s affordable housing communities.

We’re not sure the extent of Newsom’s announcement, but supporting Meraki is the least the mayor can do after the previously botched San Francisco Wi-Fi network. And in any case, Meraki is actually footing the bill for the entire ad-hoc free Wi-Fi network, including the affordable housing section. Biswas says the cost of the entire network is in the low several millions.

Biswas says Meraki will set up its system of Wi-Fi repeaters and Internet broadband access in “all” of the low-income housing communities in San Francisco, including the Altamont Hotel, where Newsom and Biswas will make the announcement. This is the latest part of the company’s “Free the Net” project and Biswas tells us that the company will have access points in every neighborhood in the entire city by the end of the year.

In the past, EarthLink and Google were both linked to a Wi-Fi effort in San Francisco that really didn’t go anywhere due to political roadblocks. Both companies have backed away from their MuniFi efforts.

Google, however, was one of those who invested in the seed round Meraki raised in November 2006. The mesh gear maker raised $20 million in a Series B round from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Northgate Capital back in January. Meraki could also be taking a page from Google when it comes to testing out ad-serving to support a free network. Biswas tells us that the company has tested out some contextual ads over the network.

City-wide Wi-Fi networks have been proving to not be viable in many cities and communities, but Meraki’s type of very low-cost, ad-hoc networks seems to be best suited for the technology. For just a few million, a company like Meraki can slowly add localized Wi-Fi hotspots in communities that actively want and will use the technology. Newsom certainly wants to work with the company to close San Francisco’s digital divide. We’ll check out the press conference later today and snap some pics of the mayor’s do — and the unwiring festivities.

Update: ImageShack CEO Hints At His Grander Ambitions

Tue, 20 May 2008 16:10:35 -0700

Yesterday, I reported a strong rumor that Sequoia Capital had invested in image-hosting site ImageShack. Today, I spoke with CEO and founder Jack Levin. He would not comment specifically on the funding rumor other than to say that over the past few months he’s been in discussions with a variety of VCs. So he may still be in the late stages of discussions, or he may have closed the round. He really wouldn’t say. But at the very least, he is definitely looking for funding.

He was, however, very forthcoming on other aspects of his business. And outlined a grand ambition befitting an early employee of Google (his claim to fame is the clustering architecture that Google is based on).

Levin did want to correct a few things from the original post, in which I said he has self-funded the startup until now. “I never put a single dime into the company,” he says. Unless you count the $80 for the first month of server hosting back in November, 2003 when he was still working at Google. But that month the company made $200, so it has been profitable from the start. His secret:

We were profitable for the last three years. The most different thing about our company is that it would take 7 to 8 million dollars in opex [operating expenses] per year to run a media hosting company like ours if you were using traditional non-off-the-shelf clustering technology, where we use a tiny fraction of that amount, which allows us to be profitable and take risks other companies can’t.

Because of the way he designed his back-end architecture, he can serve two terabytes of images from a single $1,000, Linux server. So he spends only about $200,000 a year on capital expenditures and now has about 500 servers. He was also able to leverage his industry connections to get really cheap bandwidth rates.

Also, subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenues. Most of the revenues come from advertising on the site. ImageShack serves about 10 million ads a day, mostly to people who go to the site to upload their images. Although the site also attracts 500,000 brand new visitors every single day. Levin also notes that it is “unlikely we will ever modify the image” with ads because “that would be like spamming the Internet.”

Rather than put ads in or around the images it hosts, Levin is working on harnessing all the data his service generates about content consumption (perhaps to better target advertising on ImageShack or to syndicate that targetting data to ad networks). Like Google and Yahoo, he is deploying the open-source Hadoop software to create a massive distributed supercomputer, but he is using it to analyze all the data he is collecting. Levin is vague about how he plans to make money from this data, but it is clear he is convinced the data is pretty valuable. He explains the opportunity in broad strokes:

We are like a broadcasting company that broadcasts in every country, in every language, on every topic. There are a lot of misconceptions in the Valley hat the Internet is just two or three companies. But that is not true.

Don’t you think it is ridiculous to see business plans based on how many Facebook widget users you have? We have millions of Websites using our services. It doesn’t matter what Facebook does.

So I am still not sure if Sequoia funded his startup, but I can see why it would want to.

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ImageShack Rumored To Raise Money From Sequoia

Mon, 19 May 2008 22:10:37 -0700

Update: See follow-up post here with comments from ImageShack CEo Jack Levin.

If you had to name the top five image-hosting services on the Web, would ImageShack be one of them? It turns out that it is No. 5 in worldwide visitors, with nearly 28 million last March, according to comScore. (Ranked above it are Facebook Photos, Flickr, Picasa, and PhotoBucket). You might be more familiar with ImageShack’s familiar frog logo, which appears on many of the photos it hosts across the Web.

Sequoia Capital is familiar with ImageShack and its frog. Although it hasn’t been disclosed anywhere, a reliable source tells us that Sequoia recently invested in the company. Sequoia’s investment is believed to be in the $10 million range.

Up until now, ImageShack was entirely self-funded by founder Jack Levin, who built the service himself with his brother and a few part-time employees. The company claims it is already turning a profit (it charges an $8 a month subscription fee for unlimited image uploads). Levin was employee No. 25 or 26 at Google. He was the engineer who built Google’s early server clusters and self-healing architecture. At ImageShack, he has taken a similar approach to creating a site that serves 2.5 billion images a day.

Placing ads on just a fraction of those images could become a much more lucrative business than trying to upsell subscriptions, and that apparently is why Sequoia invested. Figuring out how to put ads in or around images on the Web is a big opportunity. It is a problem that Google (another company Sequoia invested in) is working on. Just earlier today at the Google Factory Tour, for instance, the company noted that hundreds of millions of image searches are done on Google every day and that it is experimenting with both display and text ads paired with image search results. But it is having a tough time.

Someone is going to figure out how to serve relevant ads on all those billions of images on the Web. Sequoia is betting that person will be a former Google employee rather than a current one.

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RackSpace IPO Filing Hints at Expansion Plans

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:13:24 -0700

Data center and hosting provider RackSpace Inc., has filed to raise up to $400 million in an initial public offering. Its financials seem generally sound (unlike many tech companies it’s actually profitable), although profits did drop by 10 percent in the last year.

However, rapid expansion (including its investment in the cloud) are to blame for the decline in profits. The company made $362 million last year and more details can be gleaned from its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some tidbits of interest include RackSpace spending $7.3 million in power used to operate 36,692 servers in 2007.

In the coming year, the company anticipates expanding its data center facilities by a least 72,000 square feet, and may also opt to find a new data center location outside of its existing facilities. It also plans to launch a platform product for customers who want hosted infrastructure but also have the need and skills to customize the hosted infrastructure to a high degree.

The San Antonio company follows in the footsteps of Google and NetSuite with its auction-style offering. Should the offering go well investors Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners stand to gain. The two firms hold 11.6 percent and 16.2 percent of RackSpace stock respectively.

Wondering Which Partner at a VC Firm to Pitch? TheFunded Now Breaks Out Individual VC Ratings.

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:12:39 -0700

Up until now, if you wanted to see the ratings of individual venture capitalists on TheFunded, you had to be an invited member, which meant that you had to be the CEO or founder of a company (or pay $200 for six months access and prove that you are a senior adviser or consultant). But now anyone who visits the site can see the ratings for 17,000 individual VCs without logging in (before only the ratings for entire VC firms were publicly available). Only members can rate VCs.

Many of the ratings are still spare. Some VCs don’t have any, or only a couple. For instance, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins (4.5 out of 5), only has two ratings, indicating that perhaps he is not as active as he once were (or that entrepreneurs are too scared to rate him, even anonymously). But for those who have at least three ratings, entrepreneurs can now compare them to the overall rating of their firm. It shouldn’t be any surprise that some of the big hitters in the VC world rate highly, like Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz (4.4 out of 5, versus 3.9 for Sequoia) or Roelof Botha (4.1). Dick Kramlich at New Enterprise Associates rates a 4.8, compared to 3.4 for his fund.

But every venture firm has some partners bringing down the average. For instance Mark Kvamme at Sequoia has an abysmal 2.9 rating, a full point below the firm’s average. Other notable VCs and their ratings (out of a maximum of 5):

Bill Tai, Charles River Ventures: 5.0
Joshua Kopelman, First Round Capital: 4.4
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures: 4.3
Tim Draper, Draper Fisher Jurvetson: 4.2
Steve Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson: 3.0
John Hummer, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners: 1.2

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Few Details On Sequoia-Backed CDN Startup Cotendo

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:54:20 -0700

Earlier today some blogs reported that Sequoia Capital had invested in Cotendo, a content delivery company based in Israel. The reports didn’t offer much details in terms of technology and the people involved with the project.

Thanks to some helpful friends in Israel and in the CDN business, we found out that the co-founders of the company are Ronni Zehavi and David Drai. Zehavi is the CEO and Drai is the CTO of the new company. They both worked for anti-spam and security software company, Commtouch Software.

Their profiles on LinkedIn describe Cotendo as a company “developing a sophisticated innovative infrastructure which provides an efficient and low-cost CDN service. Cotendo new approach open the ability for new services which help content providers to get the maximum benefit from content acceleration.” The company has 10 employees, many of them from Commtouch. It is not clear what kind of technology they have developed and how much funding Cotendo has raised.

Unisfair Nets $10M for Virtual Trade Shows

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:12:48 -0800

Virtual meeting company Unisfair has scored $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners after proving that meeting people face-to-face isn’t always necessary or cost effective. As a telecommuter, I’m duty-bound to agree, although I’d rather gouge out my eyes than attend a virtual product launch party.

Still, many people must attend product launches, trade shows and job fairs for a living and doing it online is far cheaper (and greener) than trucking around the world with a trade show booth or the latest company literature. Unisfair doesn’t disclose revenue, but says it grew 350 percent last year after what might be considered a slow start. Founded in 2002, Unisfair decided to go with a virtual-environment product delivered using the software as a service model. Competitors at the time were promoting teleconferencing and online trade shows, but Guy Piekarz, CEO of Unisfair, says now he’s certain his company made the right choice with virtual meetings.

Thanks to the media and corporate attention given to virtual worlds such as Second Life, the idea of virtual trade shows isn’t that far-fetched. But in Unisfair’s secured version of a trade show the avatars can’t fly and the environment isn’t, er, prone to attacks from the air. That’s a plus for Unisfair’s enterprise customers, which include the likes of Cisco Systems, National Instruments and Cognos.

Online Ads Still the New Black as AdBrite Raises $23M

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:37:58 -0800

Update: The buzz on Sand Hill Road these days is all about online advertising plays. Never mind the fact that most of the “online ad” business is living on scraps compared with the Godzilla-like Google (GOOG). The latest testimony to this craze: $23 million in new funding for AdBrite, a company started by Phil “Pud” Kaplan, well-known for his escapades and his iconic site, F–kedCompany.

PE Hub reports that the three-year-old AdBrite got cash from Sequoia Capital and their quasi-affiliate hedge fund, Artis Management. With this new infusion, the company has raised a total of $35 million. We suspect there may be more cash coming their way, as this round might not be closed just yet.

Adbrite issued a press release that lists DAG Ventures and Mitsui Ventures as new investors. BritePic, Full Page Ad, and Facebook App Channel – have fueled AdBrite’s rapid growth, Ignacio Fanlo, CEO of AdBrite said and claimed that company was the third largest ad-network behind Google and Advertising.com. The round the company says is closed at $23 million.

http://blogs.sun.com/JagadishPrasath/entry/using_sequoia_with_glassfish

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:09:49 -0700

Francois Orsini's Blog - Sequoia database clustering middleware with GlassFish and Java DB (Apache Derby)

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 15:19:50 -0700

http://blogs.sun.com/JagadishPrasath/entry/using_sequoia_with_glassfish

Mon, 28 May 2007 12:06:58 -0700

Calacanis’ latest, Project X, Kokua?

Tue, 01 May 2007 10:50:29 -0700

Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs Inc., and now an entrepreneur-in-action at Sequoia Capital is working on a new company called, Project X. Valleywag published some details about the company earlier this week, that has the apparent backing of Mark Cuban, Jon Miller (ex-AOL) and Sequoia Capital, amongst others.

An anonymous tipster tells us that the new company could go under the moniker, Kokua. Kokua, apparently means to help or guide in Hawaiian.

When we checked Calacanis does own the domain and we also saw some interesting screen shots of the new company, though it is hard to say if they really are authentic. While Calacanis didn’t deny the fact that he owned the domain, he declined to comment on further speculation about the nature of his business. (Disclosure: I am one of the dozens of advisers for TechCrunch 20, a conference being put together by Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington)

An unconfirmed outline of the company appears after the fold, and please treat it like that - unconfirmed speculation.

The new company apparently is said to be a blend of Wikipedia and podcasting with a focus on highly lucrative segments like automobiles and video games. Each segment is likely to have a host (compensated perhaps) just like About.com. The host would do a show and build a community that will also help populate the Wiki.

Highly-focused niche content is becoming more valuable these days where Google’s search results leave you clicking in confusion. From a more practical standpoint, the videos and contextual content can generate better AdSense dollars and higher video advertising revenues.

Given that Calacanis has built two studios - one on the left coast and one in New York — our tipster may not be that off the mark.

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eBuddy Launches Mobile App

Tue, 01 May 2007 01:48:17 -0700

eBuddy, the Amsterdam-based IM aggregator, is turning 3 years old this week — a respectable middle age in the web startup world. And while I wouldn’t go as far as saying there’s a mid-life crisis coming, since the company became profitable and brought in 10.3 million unique monthly visitors to its web service as of March, the company is definitely working hard to grow and differentiate itself — particularly from fast growing Silicon Valley based IM competitor Meebo.

The compay, which raised 5 million euros from European VCs Lowland Capital Partners, thinks it can outshine the competition via mobile. The company just released a new java-based mobile client into private beta. You can try to sign up to be a beta user on their web site, or just wait for them to open up the application to the public in the coming weeks.

Co-founders Jan-Joost Rueb and Onno Bakker took some time off of the AdTech conference last week to show us the java app. The client has a few nice functions - folding long chats to keep them in the frame, and a much more rich experience than is already available on its mobile web service.

In the short run, a mobile client might be more hassle than its worth. The company had to create 60 different software versions for 250 to 300 phones — this is the mobile world, people, not the open Internet! The company says it won’t charge for the application, for now, and being able to monetize the service through mobile ads is still a long ways away. Probably the best near term return eBuddy can expect from it mobile client is increased stickiness for all its services.

In that vein, Meebo co-founder Seth Sternberg says his company thought long and hard about mobile, but decided against it right now. “As such, we don’t have a releasable mobile client at the moment,” says Sternberg. Mountain View-based Meebo is backed by Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

But in the long term, eBuddy’s mobile client plans might be a smarter play, especially if it can convince a couple of carriers to push its offering. Mobile IM is just used by 6.3% of U.S. cell phone subscribers and grew at a rate of 1.2% over the past several months, according to M:Metrics. Mobile web usage and text messaging grew at a rate of 2.0 and 2.5% in comparison. With most new phones now including IM services, awareness of mobile IM will only increase.

eBuddy’s mobile web service is bringing in 1 million unique visitors per month, so a not-so-small portion of its users are already interested in mobile. It might take many years to grow substantially, but the same reason that IM aggregation on the web has brought in users, mobile users will want the same functions.

eBuddy is also hoping a stronger Silicon Valley presence will help it gain some attention and new mobile users. The company is thinking about opening an office (or at least maintaining a presence) in the area and is considering raising local funding. The company already checked out Sand Hill Road for its last fundraising plans, but says it got a better valuation back home. Maybe Silicon Valley will look brighter this time around.

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TechCrunch20 Now Live

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:54:36 -0700

While the startup-sphere was all knee-deep in DEMO coverage last January, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Sequoia Capital EIA and Weblogs Inc cofounder Jason Calacanis talked up their plans to launch their conference TechCrunch20. Their idea is to bring together 20 new startups, which are chosen on merit alone, and don’t pay to present — “taking the payola out of DEMO-ing,” as Calacanis put it then.

Arrington tells us today that the site just went live, with more details about the event and the process. They are looking to talk to any startup that will be ready to launch or publicly demo by September 17, when the conference will start in San Francisco. The companies will be chosen by a panel of 20 experts, including GigaNet’s biased favorite Om. Arrington says the conference will charge for attendance and for sponsors, but that sponsors are not eligible to present a new startup.

Does the world need another American Idol-style pitch conference for startups? No, but the Valley does need a conference where the presenting companies don’t have to cross a huge financial hurdle to participate, but do have to cross a threshold of quality. Anyone who’s been to any of these launch conferences knows how unproductive they can be — hopefully TechCrunch20’s new model will be a better one. Good luck.

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Jagadish's Blog : Weblog

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:44:58 -0700

A mysterious CEO change at Stoke

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:34:46 -0700

A few months ago we had heard some rumblings that Stoke CEO Randall Kruep was on his way out of the company. Kruep, whom we got to know well when he was running Procket Networks, assured us himself that he was going nowhere.

A couple of weeks later the networking start-up announced a big round of funding, taking the total to about $50 million from investors like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

A surprise awaited us when we check the Stoke management page, following an anonymous tip. Kruep is listed as a founder, but not as the CEO. Instead, the management page points out that Dennis Barsema, a director is now the acting CEO. We wonder what changed between the time when Kruep gave us his assurance and now. Curious, don’t you think.

Just in case you were wondering what does Stoke make, an excerpt from an old post:

The carrier-closet box, which Stoke says is already in trials, is designed to help service providers better manage subscribers from multiple types of emerging access technologies, including WiMAX and dual-mode Wi-Fi/cellular handsets.

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Really Plug and play WiFi

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:46:43 -0700

Netequality, a Portland, Oregon-based not-for-profit organization that provides free internet access for low-income communities has hacked together a plug-n-play version of Meraki’s wireless mesh router, that can be plugged right into a power socket, for easy set-up. The wall-plug version is simply a Meraki Mini in a different case - it uses the Meraki Mini PCB - but optimized for ease of use and for easier installation in apartments and other unsecure public locations.

The device that is sold for $79 just went on sale, says Michael Burmeister-Brown, one of the two co-founders of NetEquality. A serial entreprenuer who has sold some of his previous start-ups to the likes of Symantec and Yahoo, says that idea behind the Meraki Mini Repeater in a Wall Plug Enclosure is to ensure an easy set-up, and take away some of the complexity that is typically associated with Wi-Fi. “We are ensuring that the whole thing is pretty simple.”

Burmeister-Brown, who spent nearly five years at Yahoo explains that in low income communities, a single DSL connection can be plugged into a Meraki router, and then one wall plug unit is needed every four homes. At present Netequality has built and deployed networks in six communities, with 6-to-150 units.

Meraki, is a Mountain View, Calif.-based mesh router maker that is backed by Sequoia Capital and Google. The company has developed an ultra lowcost wifi mesh networking router and is currently rolling out a square mile wide test network in San Francisco. (Our previous Meraki coverage.)

While the wall plug hack is unofficial, Burmeister-Brown told us that the folks at Meraki are aware of their twist on the basic Meraki router. In an email, Burmeister-Brown wrote:

we are very close to Meraki - we placed an order for 2,000 originally to help launch the company and we are authorized resellers (see their partners page). I have been working with Sanjit [Biswas, CEO of Meraki] since long before Meraki on the roofnet project while he was at MIT…

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Francois Orsini's Blog

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:40:12 -0700

Sequoia database clustering middleware with GlassFish and Java DB (Apache Derby)

Jagadish's Blog : Weblog

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:40:09 -0700

Using Sequoia with GlassFish

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:40:08 -0700

VentureBeat » Firefox Kid Blake Ross to launch Parakey — this could be big

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:01:06 -0800

Blake Ross

[from bushwald] Gags-to-riches tale of the Welsh wizard who bet on YouTube

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:59:10 -0800

"...and avoid anyone wearing Armani T-shirts, loafers with no socks."