Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
UMass Boston launches Entrepreneurship Center
MHT's Jackie Noblett: Lessons from the 2007 IPOs
MHT's Galen Moore: Honoring innovation in New England
Google Ventures has two hubs – one in Silicon Valley, at Google Inc.’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, and one in Cambridge in Kendall Square. When Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) venture arm came out of stealth mode last week, its California partners were front and center. But two Cambridge-based partners, Rich Miner and Krishna Yeshwant, have been actively looking at investments for a year or more.
Miner co-founded Android, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based mobile software company acquired by Google in 2005, as the basis for its wireless strategy. Early last year, he began working publicly on Google Ventures with the venture arm’s co-founder, Bill Maris.
Yeshwant is a practicing physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who has also helped found two IT startups and a business plan that won the MIT $100K competition in 2008. He also joined Google Ventures at its inception.
The two talked with MHT reporter Galen Moore about the kinds of startups Google is interested in backing.
Mass High Tech: As VCs, what’s your sweet spot for investment?
Rich Miner: If you look at the principles under which we’re investing, it’s really bright people with big ideas. While Krishna might say he has his life-sciences goggles on when he’s looking at deals, I think all of us are looking at startups pretty broadly. Especially in the Boston area.
I don’t like to say I’m the mobile guy. Nor do I need to. We’ve done 10 deals that we’ve announced. Of those, one of them is mobile focused and I’ve participated pretty heavily in six.
MHT: You mentioned ‘really bright people.’ What qualities make an entrepreneur backable?
RM: There is the repeat entrepreneur – the guy who has done it once or more, and who clearly has learned through some success or scars, and who has the fire in his or her belly and the drive to do another startup, combined with some idea of team and talent and what they want to do. That’s one type of entrepreneur you see, and the other is first-time entrepreneur – super bright, typically young or younger, and in this case it might not be experience, but it’s the pure will to break through any barriers, in part because you don’t know what’s not possible. There’s one category that’s maybe in between where it’s a first-time CEO but with seasoned operating experience.
MHT: Google Ventures has said it will not limit its investments by industry. What about investments across multiple industries? For example, Boston has very strong life science and computer science talent base.
Krishna Yeshwant: Boston is just an incredibly interesting place at exactly that juncture. My background is both in computer science and in medicine and healthcare. I was initially attracted early in my career to Boston for just that reason. I’d argue this is the hub of a lot of the life sciences research that happens pretty much in the world.
MHT: What does that landscape look like for Google Ventures?
KY: Platforms are the way our investment strategy has been going. We cannot be looking at one-off molecules. As a company we don’t have the depth of expertise to assess whether this individual molecule will or will not work. You really have to invest in a lot of companies to have them pay off. But some of the transformational platforms that are being developed now to come up with therapies or diagnostics we don’t yet understand – I think there’s a huge amount of (opportunity) there.
MHT: Are you looking at seed- and early-stage companies in that space?
KY: We certainly look at early-stage stuff. We certainly look at seed-stage stuff – but because it’s an area we are trying to develop and partnering in, a lot of the stuff we’ve been moving forward in is after the basic science has been shown. We’re going to work with and partner with companies that are already established.
MHT: Have you looked for syndications with other investors to find expertise you need?
RM: We certainly look, and I think work very well with other partners. Especially in the biology and healthcare space, we have found experts and other venture firms who have invested in those spaces to be excellent partners. We don’t necessarily have to be world experts in an area if we can work with some of these other folks.
MHT: Rich, not to pigeonhole you, but I’m interested to know your take on the mobile space. What opportunities are coming out of the fragmentation there?
RM: I sort of view it as more cohesion than fragmentation. The real crux of the fragmentation problem was back in the day when all you had for a platform was Java, and Java was fragmented over different phones. You had one platform, and the platform was broken.
The way I see the world today is…you’ve got these couple of platforms. Things are coalescing. You want to build on that. Most people I talk to today, they do iPhone first, because that’s the volume of devices in the market. And then everyone is currently saying Android next. Those two platforms have the most successful market – an app store direct to consumer.
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
