Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
MHT's Galen Moore: Charities score with online fundraising
The Murphy brothers' software-selling family tree
This year’s National Venture Capital Association’s annual conference began in Boston yesterday, offering the industry a chance to look at the unique issues facing it in 2009. The conference kicked off in the morning with a call to action on four fronts from the NVCA leadership.
The NVCA’s “four pillars” to restore venture liquidity, announced yesterday, were: support an ecosystem of banks and accounting firms focused on the venture IPO; establishment of a pre-IPO Inside Venture round to help companies achieve IPO critical mass; a lower capital gains tax; and easing of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) reporting requirements for newly public businesses.
But in the technology track sessions that took place in the afternoon, investors were concerned with the same issues as always — how to invest in emerging areas like clean tech, cloud computing and mobile computing.
In the clean tech session, Madrone Capital general partner Jamie McJunkin said there is an 85 percent correlation between the price of gas and investment in clean tech: when the price of fuel is low, as it is now, dollars flow out of clean tech startups, leaving the field wide open for savvy long-term investors.
“We’ve never been more bullish than we are now about clean tech,” he said. His firm is seeing valuations at their most attractive point with distressed sellers attempting to unload facilitized clean tech operations at rates as low as 10 cents on the dollar, he said.
Meanwhile, in a sparsely attended panel on enterprise technology, Matrix Partners general partner David Skok said a stealth-mode cloud company he is backing has suddenly seen potential customers’ C-level executives appearing at sales meetings – an occurrence he attributed to a sudden and painful need to explore new ways to save money.
Skok didn’t name the startup, but this January he invested in stealthy Bedford-based cloud software startup Cloudswitch Inc.
“People will take risks that they weren’t thinking of, because they’re desperate,” he said.
Transunion LLC CIO Peter Hoversten agreed executives are in pain, but he said not every company will see increased interest in their sales efforts as a result.
“Everybody gets squeezed on price,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if we think we had a deal or didn’t have a deal. If my profitability is at risk, so is yours.”
In a later technology panel on consumer and mobile technology, Google Ventures managing partner Rich Miner said mobile advertising and location-based applications like Google Inc.’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latitude will become more accepted as they become more useful.
For example, he said, when a call comes in, phones could automatically display the caller’s last few posts to Twitter, or an upcoming calendar appointment with the caller. “These platforms are powerful. Go-to-market’s there. There’s plenty of opportunities that will be rewarded,” he said.
But Mike Baker, vice president of mobile advertising at Nokia, said there will be few investors willing to wade into innovating search and search advertising, where Google has a “natural monopoly.”
“It’s such a concentrated market that it scares away some money,” he said.
However, he echoed McJunkin’s comments about clean tech, saying some investors have become pessimistic about mobile advertising, offering a well-timed opportunity for the savvy.
“We’re in the trough of disillusionment with mobile advertising,” he said. “In three to five years things are really going to be coming together nicely.”
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
