• StrictlyVC: July 11, 2014

    Have we mentioned how much we love Fridays? Have a great weekend, everyone!

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    Google isn’t sure how to apply “very vague and subjective tests” to the more than 70,000 removal requests that have landed on its doorstep in the wake of the EU’s “right to be forgotten” ruling, says its chief legal officer, David Drummond.

    Federal regulators announced yesterday that they’ve filed a lawsuit against Amazon for allegedly making it too easy for children to make purchases when using mobile apps without a parent’s permission.

    —–

    The Beauty of Annoying Apps

    Earlier this week, I stopped at the Palo Alto offices of General Catalyst Partners, an East Coast heavyweight that’s been politely muscling its way into more West Coast startups since planting a flag in the Bay Area in late 2010. One of those companies is Snapchat, the popular mobile messaging startup, and one of the investors I sat down with was Niko Bonatsos, who first brought Snapchat to General Catalyst’s attention. Among other things, we discussed why Snapchat’s most popular feature is no longer “snaps.” Our conversation has been edited for length.

    Snapchat users appear to be less and less interested in the company’s “ephemeral” features. Is that a concern?

    It’s the same thing that happens with other software products. When they get started, they’re very simple. Over time, their user base diversifies. So with Snapchat’s newest release, you can basically do a live video chat with others on Snapchat rather than one message at a time. And that’s fantastic. In the past, Snapchat was the icebreaker; now you can do much more. It’s still probably the fastest-growing app out there.

    What early signals do you look for when it comes to non-transactional products like Snapchat?

    If there’s anything that people are talking about in online communities, or if in reviews of apps, you see polarizing reviews, these are good signals.

    When you’re controversial, it fuels word of mouth, which also gets amplified by the media. Back in the early days, for example, Snapchat was perceived as the ultimate tool [for lascivious] texting; it wasn’t true, because 75 percent of the user base was girls. But the media picked it up. Later, Facebook launched Poke, which was characterized as a Snapchat killer. Most people didn’t know Snapchat [at that point], and they looked it up and downloaded it. Controversy is great when it comes to building a brand and acquiring users for zero marketing spend. Obviously, you have to graduate from one controversy to another, or three to six months later there’s fatigue, but it can be controversy because of behavior, content, or because your product annoys people.

    So investors should be looking for annoying apps.

    Yes. With Snapchat, a lot of parents were very annoyed with it. With [anonymous messaging app] Yik Yak, a lot of schools and parents were annoyed. With [the mobile dating app] Tinder, people were telling their friends, “There’s an amazing app where I can check out girls and if I like them and they like me back, maybe we can start chatting and hook up later.” Meanwhile, older people were like, “This is terrible. What are young people doing these days?”

    Secret and Whisper, apps where people share confessions and gossip anonymously, are controversial and, to some, annoying.

    But their word of mouth isn’t as strong. Things don’t spread quickly from one community to another. Secret hasn’t managed to break out of its techie, Silicon Valley roots. You can see that it has something like 100,000 Android downloads. It launched on Android [in mid-May], but for a company that has raised so much money and been so [buzzed about], you’d expect some more.

    I’m also a little hung up by the names Secret and Whisper. How many secrets do you have, really? Maybe one a day? Three times a week? I get the value proposition of the product; it’s like a Twitter parody account. But most content is, “My girlfriend just broke up with me,” or “I hate my boss.” It’s heartbreaking and after a couple of weeks, you don’t want to go back.

    Before I go, what’s one last trend you’re seeing?

    How fast we’ve gone from single apps to portfolios of apps. Google now has 150 apps between iOS and Android. Facebook has about 40. The world basically saw what happened in China, where companies like Tencent [the Chinese Internet company] now have [hundreds of] apps and do a lot of cross promotion and [essentially] game the app store. Mobility into the top 100 has become much harder for early-stage startups as a result, and if you aren’t in the top 100 app [download rankings], no one can find you. That’s the opportunity and the challenge.

    —–

    New Funds

    Bop.fm, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based music technology company that creates permalinks for songs to make them easier to find and share, has raised $2 million in Series A funding led by Charles River Ventures. Other participants in the round included SV Angel, Y Combinator, FundersClub, and individual investors. The WSJ has more here.

    Button, a year-old, New York-based mobile marketing company, has raised $2.25 million in seed funding led by Atlas Venture. Other participants in the funding included by DCM, Greycroft Partners, Mesa+and VaynerRSE, as well as individual investors.

    Cover, a mobile payments startup that enables restaurant diners to pay for their meals without involving a paper check or a credit card, has raised $5.5 million in funding led by Spark Capital. The company has collected $7 million to date. The WSJ has more here.

    D-Wave Systems, a 15-year-old, Burnaby, Canada quantum computing technology company, has raised $28.4 million in new funding, according to a SEC filing that was flagged by TechCrunch. The capital brings the company’s total funding to $160 million, money that D-Wave has raised from Goldman Sachs, DFJ, and the Business Development Bank of Canada, among others.

    Erecruit, a five-year-old, Boston-based company that makes software designed for larger staffing firms, has raised $25 million in funding from North Bridge Venture Partners. It’s the company’s first institutional round of financing.

    Jobandtalent, a five-year-old, Hondón de los Frailes, Spain-based service that matches professionals with available job opportunities and sends them related alerts, has raised $14 million in Series A funding from Qualitas Equity Partners, Kibo Ventures, FJME Ventures, Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz, and Nicolas Luca de Tena. The company has raised $18.7 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    KeVita, a four-year-old, Ojai, Ca.-based company that makes a line of organic probiotic drinks, has raised $6 million in Series D funding led by SPK Capital, with participation from existing investors KarpReilly and Ecosystem Integrity Fund.

    Landscape Mobile, a young, San Francisco-based company whose mobile technology enables users to clip, save and retrieve reading materials in one step, has raised $1.85 million in seed funding from IDG Capital and individual investors.

    Malwarebytes, a six-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based that develops anti-malware technologies to detect and remove malicious programs, has raised $30 million in funding from Highland Capital Partners. The round represents the company’s first institutional round of financing.

    Olacabs, a 3.5-year-old, Bangalore, India-based car rental service, has raised $41.5 million in Series C funding led by Steadview Capital and Sequoia Capital. Earlier investors Matrix Parters India and Tiger Global Management also participated in the round, which brings the company’s funding to $66.5 million, shows Crunchbase.

    Tablo, a two-year-old, Melbourne, Australia-based online platform for creating and publishing e-books, has raised $375,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator and individual investors, including Kevin Hale, a partner at Y Combinator. The company has raised roughly $400,000 to date.

    Vidyo, a 9-year-old, Hackensack, N.J.-based videoconferencing company, has raised $20 million in Series E funding from earlier investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds,QuestMark Partners, Saints Capital, Four Rivers Group, ORR Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners and Juniper Networks. The company has now raised $139 million altogether.

    —-

    New Funds

    FreshTracks Capital, a small, 14-year-old venture capital firm based in Shelburne, Vt., has raised $11.5 million for its third venture capital fund. Assembled with the help of 48 limited partners, the firm intends to spread the capital across 10 to 15 companies. Notable past investments include EatingWell Media Group, acquired by Meredith Corporation in 2011. Notable current invesments include Quirky, a product invention platform that has raised about $175 million over the last five years, including from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz, and General Electric, among others. Vermont Business Magazine has more here.

    The founder of GetJar, a mobile app store that was acquired earlier this year by China’s Sungy Mobile, has created a new fund to back 20 Eastern European startups a year, reports VentureWire. The firm, Nextury Ventures, was founded late last year by Ilja Laurs and former Microsoft country manager Mindaugas Glodas. It’s focusing on mobile startups primarily, with a particular focus on business-to-consumer products.

    InnoSpring, a two-year-old accelerator founded in Silicon Valley to help U.S. and Chinese tech startups expand across borders, is raising a second, $5 million, fund, reports VentureWire. The organization was established by a joint partnership between Tsinghua University Science Park, Shui On Group, Northern Light Venture Capital and Silicon Valley Bank. Its first seed fund, of undisclosed size, was backed by both Chinese and U.S. venture firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Northern Light Venture Capital, GSR Ventures, China Broadband Capital, and TEEC Angel Fund.

    —–

    IPOs

    Alibaba may launch its IPO process as soon as the end of the month, according to a timetable it shared with some investors in an email. The WSJ has more here.

    ReWalk Robotics, a 13-year-old, Israel-based company whose motorized device, designed to aid movement for some people with lower body paralysis, recently received FDA approval, has filed to go public in order to raise roughly $60 million. The company’s biggest backers include SCP Vitalife Partners, which owns 28.4 percent of the company; Yaskawa Electric Corporation, which owns 25.4 percent; Israel Healthcare Ventures, which owns 18.4 percent; Pontifax, which owns 10.6 percent; and Previz Ventures, which owns 6.5 percent.

    —–

    Exits

    Kior, the publicly traded, advanced biofuel producer that billionaire investor Vinod Khosla personally incubated and which he has backed financially alongside Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, is considering selling itself after missing a $1.88 million loan payment, reports Bloomberg. Kior failed to make the payment on June 30 to the state of Mississippi, where it opened its first U.S. commercial-scale cellulosic biofuel plant in 2012. It still owes the state $69.4 million on a $75 million loan it was provided; Mississippi has agreed to a forbearance period while Kior pursues financing options.

    RelateIQ, a three-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based relationship intelligence platform that allows teams to track, share and analyze professional relationships, has been acquired by Salesforce for roughly $350 million, according to an SEC filing. RelateIQ had raised roughly $70 million from Morgenthaler Ventures, Accel Partners, SV Angel, Stage One Capital, Battery Ventures, Formation 8, Accel Partners, AITV, Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Felicis Ventures, and News Corp.

    —–

    People

    “He’s a great shot, don’t let him tell you otherwise” — Governor Chris Christie on skeet shooting in Sun Valley with SurveyMonkey founder CEO (and husband to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg) Dave Goldberg. (H/T: Sarah Frier.)

    Venture capitalist Bill Gurley has authored a hard-hitting post on the potential market size of Uber, in response to a piece in the FiveThirtyEight blog that Gurley suggests was rife with “unnecessary errors.”

    Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been keeping a low profile at the Allen & Co. conference this week, but Dealbook spotted her heading into a meeting yesterday with Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten — as well as leaving half an hour later. Mayer, says Dealbook, told another attendee that the meeting didn’t go so well.

    Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is donating $1 million to a science center being built at the site of a Long Island laboratory where Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla once toiled, reports VentureBeat. Musk also plans to build a supercharger station for his company’s electric vehicles at the 16-acre site. Musk was spurred to action by the comic website The Oatmeal, which had previously raised more than $1.3 million for the science center through a crowdfunding campaign and gently nudged Musk this spring to get involved.

    Dan Raveh has joined San Francisco-based Commerce Ventures as as a senior associate. Commerce Ventures was formed in the summer of 2012 by Dan Rosen, who’d previously spent six years at Highland Capital Partners. (Its focus — on the intersection of mobile, payments, and retail — has led to bets like the in-store analytics company RetailNext, which announced a $30 million round earlier this week.) Raveh was most recently a teaching assistant at the Wharton School. Earlier, he spent two-and-a-half years with Viola Private Equity.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Pandora is looking for a head of corporate strategy. The job is in Oakland.

    Sony Pictures Entertainment is looking for a director of corporate development in L.A.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Microsoft’s massive mobile problem—and opportunity—in two charts.

    Five years in, growing pains are hitting the popular meme and photo-sharing site Imgur.

    —–

    Detours

    If we could turn back time, we’d probably unread this.

    Novel selfies.

    A new algorithm that finds the most beautiful routes, instead of the shortest ones.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    A portable party, disguised as a cooler. Count us in!

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Related articles

    Connie

  • The Beauty of Annoying Apps

    annoying appsEarlier this week, I stopped at the Palo Alto offices of General Catalyst Partners, an East Coast heavyweight that’s been politely muscling its way into more West Coast startups since planting a flag in the Bay Area in late 2010. One of those companies is Snapchat, the popular mobile messaging startup, and one of the investors I sat down with was Niko Bonatsos, who first brought Snapchat to General Catalyst’s attention. Among other things, we discussed why Snapchat’s most popular feature is no longer “snaps.” Our conversation has been edited for length.

    Snapchat users appear to be less and less interested in the company’s “ephemeral” features. Is that a concern?

    It’s the same thing that happens with other software products. When they get started, they’re very simple. Over time, their user base diversifies. So with Snapchat’s newest release, you can basically do a live video chat with others on Snapchat rather than one message at a time. And that’s fantastic. In the past, Snapchat was the icebreaker; now you can do much more. It’s still probably the fastest-growing app out there.

    What early signals do you look for when it comes to non-transactional products like Snapchat?

    If there’s anything that people are talking about in online communities, or if in reviews of apps, you see polarizing reviews, these are good signals.

    When you’re controversial, it fuels word of mouth, which also gets amplified by the media. Back in the early days, for example, Snapchat was perceived as the ultimate tool [for lascivious] texting; it wasn’t true, because 75 percent of the user base was girls. But the media picked it up. Later, Facebook launched Poke, which was characterized as a Snapchat killer. Most people didn’t know Snapchat [at that point], and they looked it up and downloaded it. Controversy is great when it comes to building a brand and acquiring users for zero marketing spend. Obviously, you have to graduate from one controversy to another, or three to six months later there’s fatigue, but it can be controversy because of behavior, content, or because your product annoys people.

    So investors should be looking for annoying apps.

    Yes. With Snapchat, a lot of parents were very annoyed with it. With [anonymous messaging app] Yik Yak, a lot of schools and parents were annoyed. With [the mobile dating app] Tinder, people were telling their friends, “There’s an amazing app where I can check out girls and if I like them and they like me back, maybe we can start chatting and hook up later.” Meanwhile, older people were like, “This is terrible. What are young people doing these days?”

    Secret and Whisper, apps where people share confessions and gossip anonymously, are controversial and, to some, annoying.

    But their word of mouth isn’t as strong. Things don’t spread quickly from one community to another. Secret hasn’t managed to break out of its techie, Silicon Valley roots. You can see that it has something like 100,000 Android downloads. It launched on Android [in mid-May], but for a company that has raised so much money and been so [buzzed about], you’d expect some more.

    I’m also a little hung up by the names Secret and Whisper. How many secrets do you have, really? Maybe one a day? Three times a week? I get the value proposition of the product; it’s like a Twitter parody account. But most content is, “My girlfriend just broke up with me,” or “I hate my boss.” It’s heartbreaking and after a couple of weeks, you don’t want to go back.

    Before I go, what’s one last trend you’re seeing?

    How fast we’ve gone from single apps to portfolios of apps. Google now has 150 apps between iOS and Android. Facebook has about 40. The world basically saw what happened in China, where companies like Tencent [the Chinese Internet company] now have [hundreds of] apps and do a lot of cross promotion and [essentially] game the app store. Mobility into the top 100 has become much harder for early-stage startups as a result, and if you aren’t in the top 100 app [download rankings], no one can find you. That’s the opportunity and the challenge.

    Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

    Connie

    , ,

  • StrictlyVC: July 10, 2014

    Good Thursday morning! For a look at the wonderfulness you could be getting in your inbox every morning, here’s the email version of today’s newsletter.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    Chinese hackers in March broke into the computer networks of the U.S. government agency that houses the personal information of all federal employees, reports the New York Times.

    Faced with growing opposition from the tech industry, the Obama Administration has ditched its plans to name pharmaceutical executive Phil Johnson as head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

    The potato salad guy has now raised roughly $44,900 on Kickstarter. That had better be some good potato salad.

    —–

    A Small New Fund with a Game-Changing Idea

    Unlike venture capitalists, who get to place dozens of bets in search of a winner, founders typically have one shot at winning the startup game.

    Kent Goldman, a former partner with First Round Capital, thinks he has struck on a way to improve those odds. Today, Goldman takes the wraps off a new, San Francisco-based, $30 million seed fund called Upside Partnership that will give every founding team in its portfolio a piece of its carry, making them effectively Upside’s partners.

    That’s right. Goldman will take what he characterizes as a standard management fee. But he’ll be sharing an amount of carry that he expects will reach “significantly into the double digits,” albeit “less than half” of Upside’s overall upside.

    If a venture capitalist somewhere just spit out his coffee, it’s understandable. Like it or not, Goldman may have just changed the game for everyone. What founder wouldn’t want a piece of a venture portfolio at no additional cost? And what better motivation for founders to help one another?

    VCs like to talk with entrepreneurs about what’s fair. Goldman’s model — where founders will receive carry on a sliding scale, based on Upside’s initial check size — doesn’t get much fairer.

    Other details about the fund: Unlike the many specialized seed funds springing into existence these days, Goldman says he went in the opposite direction, with plans to focus very generally on “purpose-built founders who can explain why this is the right time in their life to pursue their passion.”

    Certainly, if Goldman is predisposed toward certain sectors, you wouldn’t know if from his portfolio at First Round, where his varied investments included the hotel booking application company HotelTonight; the real time analytics platform MemSQL; and Airware, a platform that helps other companies develop commercial drones.

    Goldman says he plans to write relatively small checks, too, staying in the “$300,000 range” when possible. For one thing, he thinks there’s a dearth of VCs who are willing or able to meaningfully help startups without more money riding on those companies. He also suggests that getting into the best deals might be easier if he’s not asking founders or other investors to “make room for me.”

    As for fundraising, Goldman, who is the fund’s sole general partner for now, says it took roughly four months, with most of the capital coming from institutional investors. In fact, Goldman says that less than $2 million came from individuals, including First Round founder Josh Kopelman, with whom Goldman remains close.

    It begs the question of why Goldman left a plum job with First Round in the first place.

    “Venture tends to not be a terribly entrepreneurial industry,” Goldman says. But he had his big idea, and he couldn’t let it go.

    “I view this like any founder who leaves a great company to try something on their own,” he says. Particularly when that company’s mission involves meeting with entrepreneurs every day, it’s “hard not to catch the bug yourself.”

    —–

    New Fundings

    AdhereTech, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based healthcare technology company that makes patented smart pill bottles that remind patients to take their medication, has raised $1.75 million in Series A funding from undisclosed investors. The company has raised $2.4 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Altierre, an 11-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based provider of dynamic pricing technology to retailers, has raised a new round of more than $21 million co-led by new investor Stratim Capital and D.E. Shaw. Earlier investors ATA Ventures, DuPont Capital Management, Labrador Ventures and Kinetic Ventures also participated in the round.

    Avere Systems, a six-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based company that provides hybrid cloud-based storage to enterprises, has raised $20 million in Series D funding led by Western Digital Capital, with participation from previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital. The company has raised $72 million to date.

    BirdDog, a 15-year-old, Urbandale, Ia.-based company that provides recruitment and application tracking software for companies in the construction and skilled trade industries, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Des Moines, Ia.-based venture firm Next Level Ventures. Earlier investor Bridgepoint Investment Partners, also based in Des Moines, also participated in the round.

    Comfy, a year-old, Austin, Tx.-based company that matches college students with off-campus housing, has raised $600,000 in seed funding led by Dominion Ventures, with participation from Austin Ventures and numerous angel investors.

    NewVoiceMedia, a 14-year-old, London-based company that makes cloud-based contact center software, has raised $50 million in Series E funding led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Earlier investors who also participated in the round include Bessemer Venture Partners,Eden Ventures, Highland Capital Partners Europe, Notion Capital and Salesforce.com. The company has raised $113 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Syapse, a six-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based data platform that integrates complex genomic and clinical data with care pathways and medical knowledge bases to give healthcare workers actionable insights, has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Safeguard Scientifics. The Social+Capital Partnership, the company’s Series A investor, also participated in the round, which brings Syapse’s total funding to $14.6 million.

    Wayin, a three-year-old, Denver-based company whose software gathers social media postings and displays it in real time on its clients’ sites, mobile apps, or, in the case of sports teams, scoreboards, has raised $13.1 million. (We’d first flagged this one for you last month, when an SEC filing showed it had raised $12.1 million.) U.S. Venture Partners led the Series C round, with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, TV producer Burt Sugarman, and Discovery Land Company CEO Mike Meldman participating. Wayin was cofounded by Sun Microsystems cofounder and CEO Scott McNealy.

    WeSpeke, a four-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based online platform for language learning and practice and cultural exchange, has raised $3 million in Series B funding from undisclosed investors. The company, cofounded by the director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, had previously raised $3.2 million over two earlier rounds, shows Crunchbase.

    —–

    New Funds

    137 Ventures, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based firm that lends cash to startup founders and other shareholders in exchange for shares in their companies, has closed on its second fund with, yes, $137 million. The company raised its first, $50 million, fund in 2011. TechCrunch has much more here.

    That London-based Google Ventures unit we’ve been writing about is officially a go. According to a blog post by managing director Bill Maris, Google is entrusting a team of five with $100 million to start. Those partners include Google Europe executive Eze Vidra, entrepreneur Tom Hulme, angel investor Peter Read, Code.org UK head Avid Larizadeh, and current Google Ventures partner MG Siegler, who will reportedly remain in London temporarily to help his new colleagues get up and running. VentureBeat has more here.

    J.P. Morgan Chase has so far raised $797 million for its second digital growth fund, shows an SEC filing. The banking giant closed its first digital growth fund with $1.2 billion in 2011. Twitter, Facebook, Jawbone and, more recently, the e-commerce plays Zalando and Namshi, are among the many companies on which the firm has made big bets in recent years.

    —–

    Exits

    Neebula, a four-year-old, New York-based software company whose products automate the discovery, mapping and monitoring of IT-enabled enterprise services, has been acquired by publicly traded ServiceNow for $100 million. The company, which was founded in Israel, had raised an undisclosed amount of money from Genesis Partners and Pitgano Venture Capital, says VentureWire.

    —–

    People

    Greetings from Sun Valley, where security is tight.

    Abingworth, the international investment group dedicated to life sciences and healthcare, has promoted Ken Haas and Vin Miles to partners. Both are based in the U.S., where they focus on everything from early-stage to PIPE deals.

    During the first six months of 2014, Marc Andreessen tweeted 21,783 times, an average of five tweets per hour, every hour. Quartz has analyzed the whole archive here.

    In another sign that the Winklevoss Bitcoin exchange traded fund is making slow but steady headway, the latest amendment to its S-1 filing shows that it will use COIN as its ticker symbol. (Mais bien sûr.) ETF Daily has more here.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Amazon is looking for business development managers in both Delhi and Mumbai to make friends with local VCs, accelerators and incubators.

    Intuit is looking for a corporate development manager in Mountain View, Ca.

    And The Juilliard School in New York is looking for a director of business development to help it develop a suite of digital products and educational programs.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Documents leaked to TechCrunch from inside Yelp allege that Google is manipulating its search results to favor Google+ content over Yelp content.

    Tinder insiders give TechCrunch their side of the story.

    —–

    Detours

    The TSA’s Instagram feed.

    Freestyling through Manila.

    Underwater photos of dogs fetching balls.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    If you like historic military vehicles and live in the Bay Area, you might check out this upcoming tour. (H/T: InsideHook.)

    The only white jeans you need, we are told.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

    ,

  • A Small New Fund with a Game-Changing Idea

    kent_goldman2Unlike venture capitalists, who get to place dozens of bets in search of a winner, founders typically have one shot at winning the startup game.

    Kent Goldman, a former partner with First Round Capital, thinks he has struck on a way to improve those odds. Today, Goldman takes the wraps off a new, San Francisco-based, $30 million seed fund called Upside Partnership that will give every founding team in its portfolio a piece of its carry, making them effectively Upside’s partners.

    That’s right. Goldman will take what he characterizes as a standard management fee. But he’ll be sharing an amount of carry that he expects will reach “significantly into the double digits,” albeit “less than half” of Upside’s overall upside.

    If a venture capitalist somewhere just spit out his coffee, it’s understandable. Like it or not, Goldman may have just changed the game for everyone. What founder wouldn’t want a piece of a venture portfolio at no additional cost? And what better motivation for founders to help one another?

    VCs like to talk with entrepreneurs about what’s fair. Goldman’s model — where founders will receive carry on a sliding scale, based on Upside’s initial check size — doesn’t get much fairer.

    Other details about the fund: Unlike the many specialized seed funds springing into existence these days, Goldman says he went in the opposite direction, with plans to focus very generally on “purpose-built founders who can explain why this is the right time in their life to pursue their passion.”

    Certainly, if Goldman is predisposed toward certain sectors, you wouldn’t know if from his portfolio at First Round, where his varied investments included the hotel booking application company HotelTonight; the real time analytics platform MemSQL; and Airware, a platform that helps other companies develop commercial drones.

    Goldman says he plans to write relatively small checks, too, staying in the “$300,000 range” when possible. For one thing, he thinks there’s a dearth of VCs who are willing or able to meaningfully help startups without more money riding on those companies. He also suggests that getting into the best deals might be easier if he’s not asking founders or other investors to “make room for me.”

    As for fundraising, Goldman, who is the fund’s sole general partner for now, says it took roughly four months, with most of the capital coming from institutional investors. In fact, Goldman says that less than $2 million came from individuals, including First Round founder Josh Kopelman, with whom Goldman remains close.

    It begs the question of why Goldman left a plum job with First Round in the first place.

    “Venture tends to not be a terribly entrepreneurial industry,” Goldman says. But he had his big idea, and he couldn’t let it go.

    “I view this like any founder who leaves a great company to try something on their own,” he says. Particularly when that company’s mission involves meeting with entrepreneurs every day, it’s “hard not to catch the bug yourself.”

    Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

    Connie

    ,
    , ,

  • StrictlyVC: June 9, 2014

    Good morning, everyone, hope your Wednesday is off to a fine start!

    No top story today — apologies — but we’ll have some good stuff for you in coming days, including a look tomorrow at a new venture firm that’s among the more innovative we’ve seen. (Btw, you can click here for the email version of today’s email.)

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    The Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a cybersecurity bill yesterday that would grant legal immunity for companies to share computer threat data with the government; civil liberties advocates say it fails to adequately shield Americans’ privacy.

    Time for companies to shed far more light on their data gathering, argues writer-investor Om Malik.

    In today’s Potato Salad Watch: Zack Brown of Columbus, Oh., has now raised $56,900 on Kickstarter for potato salad that he plans to make for his more than 4,763 contributors. Brown states very clearly in the “risks and challenges” section of his Kickstarter page that, “It might not be that good. It’s my first potato salad.” But with 24 days of his campaign left, the money keeps pouring in.

    —–

    New Fundings

    Amino, a three-year-old, Boston-based company that has created a mobile-only platform for niche communities (like pet and book lovers), has raised $1.65 million in seed funding led by Union Square Ventures. Other participants in the round included Google Ventures, SV Angel, Box Group, Kal Vepuri and Slow Ventures. BostInno has more here.

    Busbud, a 2.5-year-old, Montreal-based company whose app and website help users discover online places where they can book last-minute travel by bus, has raised $9 million in new funding led by Revolution Ventures and OMERS Ventures. Previous investors iNovia Capital and Real Ventures also participated in the round, which brings Busbud’s total funding to $10.2 million.

    Credit Benchmark, a year-old, London-based company that aims to improve financial market benchmarks by aggregating anonymized credit risk data from multiple banks, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

    Duetto, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes software to help hotels optimize costs, has raised $21 million in new fund led by Accel Partners. Earlier investors Battery Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Thayer Lodging CEO Leland Pillsbury, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s funding to roughly $33 million.

    GetYou, a nine-month-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based company whose app helps people see how well other people “get” them, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, including from the venture firm RDSeed and angel investors, including Wix co-founder Avishai Abrahami.

    Grabhouse, a 16-month-old, Mumbai, India-based startup that helps people find roommates and apartments for rent, has raised $500,000 from earlier investor India Quotient, says VCCircle.

    Healthcare Interactive, an eight-year-old, Glenwood, Md.-based company whose platform collects and manages data, processes benefit plans, and helps it healthcare customer engage with customers online, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Grotech Ventures and Harbert Venture Partners. InTheCapital has more here.

    Jianshu, (meaning “simple book”), a new, China-based writing and blogging platform that’s been compared to Medium, has raised $806,000 in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors, says TechInAsia, which has much more here.

    Linio, a two-year-old, Durango, Mexico-based Amazon-like e-commerce marketplace that was originally incubated by Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based company, has raised $79 million in fresh funding led by new investors Northgate Capital and Access Industries. The company says the financing will be used to expand its footprint to other large Latin American markets like Chile and beyond. The company has already raised $175 million to date, shows Crunchbase. TechCrunch has more here.

    Pokkt, a two-year-old, Mumbai-based alternative mobile payment platform that helps app developers and publishers monetize their users through advertising, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Jafco Asiaand SingTel Innov8, with participation from earlier investors, including Jungle Ventures and serial entrepreneur K Ganesh. Pokkt had previously raised $500,000, says VCCircle.

    RetailNext, a 6.5-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based company whose software helps retailers and manufacturers analyze and visualize data about in-store customer engagement, has raised $30 million in growth funding led by Nokia Growth Partners. Other participants in the round included Qualcomm Ventures, Tyco, American Express, Activant Capital Group and earlier investors August Capital, StarVest Partners and Commerce Ventures. The company has now raised $59 million to date.

    Spring, a year-old, New York-based company that was founded by investor David Tisch and his brother Alan (who is CEO), has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital, Groupe Arnault, and Box Group, with a long list of other venture capital firms and individual investors participating. TechCrunch has more here. Spring is still operating in stealth mode, but TechCrunch suggests it could be fashion retail play given that its many backers include Uri Minkoff CEO Rebecca Minkoff, Proenza Schouler CEO Shirley Cook, and “Project Runway” producer Desiree Gruber.

    Universal Education Group, a seven-year-old, Beijing-based Chinese company that trains students for their postgraduate entrance exams, civil servant recruitment examinations, and more, has raised “tens of millions” of dollars in Series C funding from search engine giant Baidu, reports China Money Network. The company had previously raised $40 million over two rounds, says the outlet, including from Sequoia Capital, Legend Capital, DCM, and the Singaporean private equity group F&H Fund Management.

    Vizury, a 5.5-year-old, Seoul, Korea-based digital marketing company that focuses on the online travel industry, has raised $16 million in Series C funding led by Intel Capital. Ascent Capital also participated in the round, along with earlier investors Nokia Growth Partners and Inventus Capital Partners.

    Webydo, a 3.5-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based SaaS platform that helps designers create and manage cross-platform business websites without writing code, has raised $7 million in funding led by OurCrowd. A Magna Ventures affiliate from Spain and private investors also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $8.4 million, shows Crunchbase.

    Zynstra, a 2.5-year-old, Bath, England-based company that offers remotely managed, enterprise-level IT on a pay-as-you-go basis to small- to medium-size businesses, has raised $8.4 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor Octopus Investments. Numerous individual investors who’d previously invested in the company also participated in the round, which brings its total funding to $14.8 million.

    —–

    New Funds

    Columbia Capital, the 25-year-old, Alexandria, Va.-based venture capital firm, is looking to raise a new, $425 million fund according to SEC filings turned up by the Washington Business Journal. Columbia, co-founded by Mark Warner (now Virginia’s senior U.S. senator), specializes in enterprise IT, infrastructure, wireless spectrum and other complex technology bets. The firm is currently investing out of its fifth, $441 million, fund.

    Greylock IL, the eight-year-old, international affiliate of U.S. venture capital firm Greylock Partners, is planning to spin off and rebrand as an independent entity, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack. To date, Greylock IL has raised $360 million for a pair of funds, the economics of which have been shared across Greylock Partners. Going forward, that won’t be the case, says Primack.

    Ziegler Companies, whose investment banking operations focus on senior-citizens’ health care, is teaming up with Link-Age Ventures, an organization launched by nonprofit senior-living centers, to create a new investing venture, reports VentureWire. The two plan to invest $26.6 million together across 10 to 12 startups.

    —–

    IPOs

    As the Alibaba IPO approaches, the company’s structure, known as a variable interest entity, is raising some concerns among possible IPO investors.

    Sage Therapeutics, a four-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biopharmaceutical company that’s developing a drug for a life-threatening seizure condition, has updated its S-1, reflecting its plans to price its shares at between $14 and $16 apiece. Sage, which has already raised at least $93 million from private investors, would collect $60 million from public market investors at the midpoint of that range, and its market cap would be roughly $360 million. The company’s biggest shareholders include Third Rock Ventures, which owns 58.5 percent of the company; ARCH Venture Partners, which owns 21.3 percent; and Fidelity Investments, which owns 5.6 percent.

    —–

    Exits

    Perceptis, a 10-year-old, Greenville, S.C.-based company that provides IT and help-desk services to higher ed institutions, has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Blackboard, a portfolio company of Providence Equity Partners. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Perceptis had raised at least $7.5 million from investors, including Frontier Capital.

    RakNet, a Costa Mesa, Ca.-based company behind a game networking engine, has been acquired by Oculus VR for an undisclosed amount. Oculus VR, which acquired Carbon Design Group just a few weeks ago, was acquired by Facebook in March for $2 billion. Bloomberg has morehere.

    TwinStrata, a seven-year-old, Natick, Ma.-based maker of cloud gateway appliances, has been acquired by EMC Corp. for an undisclosed amount. TwinStrata had raised $19.4 million over the years, shows Crunchbase. Avalon Ventures is among its backers.

    —–

    People

    Michael Balmuth just joined SV Life Sciences to direct its health-care information technology investments. Balmuth was previously a general partner at Edison Ventures. Balmuth has also logged time as a general partner at Summit Partners, as an investment banker with Broadview International, and at IBM.

    Billionaire investor Mark Cuban talked parenting yesterday with the Huffington Post. The questions included, “From the worlds of both sports and business, what lessons do you try to teach your kids?” Cuban’s answer: “That you have to be a good teammate. That you get out of life what you put in it. That you are responsible for yourself.”

    Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton announced yesterday that he was taking an “extended leave of absence” from the company following news that police are investigating a long string of sexual assault accusations from Kveton’s former girlfriend. (The Oregonion actually crafted a timeline to simplify things for readers.) Urban Airship, a startup that makes mobile relationship management software helps brands push messages to users, has raised nearly $50 million from investors in its five-year history. The Oregonian describes it as one of Portland’s “leading tech companies.” Kveton told employees that the company has hired a search firm to look for his successor.

    —–

    Job Listings

    GE Capital is looking to hire a vice president. The job is in Norwalk, Ct.

    —–

    Data

    LPs heart venture again, looks like. According to data out this morning from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters, U.S. venture capital firms raised $7.4 billion in new commitments across 78 funds in the second quarter. That’s 42 percent more funds than closed in the second quarter of last year and marks the strongest quarter for VC fundraising, based on fund number, since the fourth quarter of 2007. You can check out more fundraising stats here.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Bloomberg looks at the highly rewarding life of the Silicon Valley intern.

    Catalonia to Airbnb: No vacancies.

    —–

    Detours

    The New Yorker is making all the articles it has published since 2007 free online for three months.

    The world’s fastest hot tub.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Batman, the complete series, remastered in HD and coming to Blu-ray.

    Depressing circumstances candles.

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    Connie

  • StrictlyVC: July 8, 2014

    Good Tuesday morning, dear readers!

    So, wow. Some of you did not like yesterday’s column. Here is some reader feedback if you’re interested, including from Google’s 25th employee, David desJardins.

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    A potato salad has so far raised $38,000 on Kickstarter. Here’s how.

    —–

    Mitch Kapor on Dropcam and Data Collection

    Lotus Software founder Mitch Kapor is well-known for his philanthropy, including through the Kapor Center for Social Impact, which funds startups as one prong of a strategy to strengthen underrepresented communities.

    But Kapor has also made many bets on companies based purely on their technology and teams. Among them is the home surveillance startup Dropcam, acquired last month by Google’s Nest Labs for $555 million. In fact, Kapor was its first investor.

    Late last week, we talked about how that deal came together, and how Kapor feels about the outcome.

    How did you find Dropcam five or so years ago?

    I came across it through a third founder who left very early, Anson Tsai, who went on to found Cardpool, a market for buying and selling gift cards. Cardpool was acquired by [the payments network] Blackhawk early and very successfully. I’d met Anson socially through [entrepreneur and popular blogger] Andrew Chen.

    I don’t think people realize there was a third founder.

    Yes, with Greg [Duffy] and Aamir [Virani], who’d worked together at [the email startup] Xobni, which was just shut down by Yahoo, ironically [roughly a year after it was acquired for undisclosed amount]. I think the chemistry wasn’t right, so Anson left to start his own company, but I liked Greg and Aamir and what they were doing and thought they were riding some good themes so invested.

    Were you privy to any of Dropcam’s conversations with Google? I always wonder which investors know what and when.

    Our relationship as seed investors is heavily concentrated from the time we first make an investment up through a Series A. In Dropcam’s case, the Series A came pretty early, because, to his credit, Sameer [Gandhi] of Accel saw something in the company [and led the company’s Series A round in 2011]. Once Dropcam had a board, our relationship changed. I was involved, but more on demand, when Greg or Aamir wanted coaching or advice or introductions. In fact, I found out about the sale by reading about it in my Twitter stream and getting congratulated, and that’s typical if you don’t have a board seat. Seed investors often find out about big events as they’re happening or sometimes just before.

    What kind of return did you see on your investment? More than 100x?

    Definitely more than 100x. It was a big return.

    As a big believer in the company, do you think selling to Google was the best outcome for Dropcam?

    The right outcome has to do with the founders who are in place and deciding the right thing to do. Sometimes, they think it’s the right time to sell because being part of something bigger helps in achieving strategic objectives and getting [a financial] outcome. There are tradeoffs, too, if you stay on your own. You enjoy your independence and you can maybe build something larger, but it comes with a lot of headaches.

    I’m surprised people aren’t more concerned by certain companies’ moves to dominate the connected home, given their growing reach into other aspects of our lives. Do you have any thoughts about why that is?

    I think ultimately there will be some kind of new social contract backed up by laws that will put some restrictions on what companies that collect a lot of data on people can do with that information, and that would include Google, Apple, and Facebook. I believe it will be a long and messy road to get there, but if we look at what’s going on today, we see the outlines of how it will happen. For a number of years, for example, Silicon Valley companies resisted releasing their employment data. Google gets credit for its willingness to put it out there, though. It was difficult, because its diversity numbers are terrible. But the time had come for the company to take a step forward and it has.

    When do you think we’ll see these protective regulations?

    Probably 5 or 10 years from now, and I think it will come from unhappiness among consumers and other forces that convince Google that its long-term interests are better served by agreeing to do something that previously it found difficult or impossible to do.

    People will have to get more upset about the whole subject of large amounts of personal information being collected. But change happens. Consider gender issues. There’s been one embarrassing scandal after another, with Tinder, Github, and others. I don’t think there’s more of that going on now than before, but people are more aware that it’s going on now, it’s covered more, and there’s more of a climate that this isn’t right. It’s an issue that’s no longer ignored.

    We’re not there yet on data collection, but I think we’ll get there. It will happen.

    —–

    New Fundings

    Adtile, a nearly four-year-old, San Diego, Ca.-based mobile ad tech company that develops more interactive ads, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding from undisclosed investors. The company had previous raised $2.7 million, reports TechCrunch.

    Box, the nine-year-old, Los Altos, Ca.-based online-storage startup, has raised $150 million in funding from private-equity firm TPG and hedge fund Coatue Management, according to the WSJ, which says the financing values Box at about $2.4 billion. Box has now raised around $565 million altogether from investors, including General Atlantic, DFJ, New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners, The Social+Capital Partnership, SAP Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners.

    Cloudian, a 2.5-year-old, Foster City, Ca.-based cloud storage company that features a two-tiered pricing system, has raised $29 million in Series C funding from Innovation Corporate Network of Japan, Fidelity Growth Partners Japan, and earlier investors, including Intel Capital and Goldman Sachs.

    Curse, an eight-year-old, Huntsville, Al.-based gaming services company that offers in-game voice communications platforms, among other things, has raised $10 million in Series B financing led by new investor GGV Capital. The company says it has now raised $22 million to date, including from Ventech, SoftTech VC, and IDInvest Parters.

    FishBrain, a four-year-old, Gothenburg, Sweden-based social network for anglers, has raised $2.4 million in funding led by Northzone and Active Venture Partners. Other participants in the round included new investors GP Bullhound and Edastra Venture Capital, along with earlier backers.The company has raised $3.9 million to date, says TechCrunch. (Readers might recall that Fishidy, another social startup that provides fishing information to anglers, just raised $1.5 million in Series A funding last month.)

    Fuisz Media, a three-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based company behind a new commerce-enabled interactive video technology, has raised $2.1 million in seed funding led by Metamorphic Ventures and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Other investors include Science Inc., WGI Group, United Talent Agency, Mesa+, and numerous individual investors.

    mBlox, a 14-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based mobile marketing company, has just raised $43.5 million in new funding, including from Comerica, Horizon Technology Finance, Norwest Venture Partners, Scale Ventures, Avanti, Trident, Stratem and Saints Capital. The company, which has now raised at least $120 million over the years, tells VentureWire that it’s using the money to rebrand its service by adding many new features.

    Mint Solutions, a four-year-old, Iceland-based hardware startup whose scanning device aims to ensure that healthcare workers provide each patient with the right medicine and dosage levels, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by the European investment firm Life Sciences Partners and Seventure Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

    OpenDoor, a new, San Francisco-based company that aims to to make buying homes as simple as clicking a few buttons, has just closed $9.95 million in an ” insane party round,” as TechCrunch puts it, one that was led by Khosla Ventures. The company, which has yet to launch, was cofounded by Eric Wu, the former head of geo and social products at real estate listings platform Trulia, and Keith Rabois, the former Square COO turned venture capitalist. More on OpenDoor’s long list of investors here.

    Racemi, a 13-year-old, Atlanta-based company whose cloud migration software helps automate the process of migrating workloads to public, private and hybrid clouds, has raised $10 million in Series C funding led by Milestone Venture Partners. Earlier investors Harbert Venture Partners and Paladin Capital Group also participated in the round. The company has now raised roughly $25 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

    Regent Education, an eight-year-old, Frederick, Md.-based company that makes financial aid management and enrollment optimization software for higher ed institutions, has raised $9 million in venture and debt funding. The company closed a $4 million Series C round from new investor New Markets Venture Partners, which joined by earlier investor Chrysalis Ventures. Meanwhile, Ares Capital provided $5 million in debt financing. Regent has now raised roughly $23 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

    Robin, a months-old, Boston-based company that’s developing a service for presence sensing and automation in the office, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by Atlas Venture. Other participants in the round included Deep Fork Capital, Boldstart Ventures and Space Pirates, a seed venture group. BostInno has more here.

    Spark Labs, a 2.5-year-old, Minneapolis, Mn.-based company that sells a Wi-Fi development kit to engineers and designers who develop connected hardware products, has raised $4.9 million in Series A funding led by Lion Wells Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Other participants in the round included Collaborative Fund, and SOSventures. The company has raised $4.9 million to date, it tells the WSJ.

    TranServ, a four-year-old, Mumbai, India-based prepaid payments company, has raised an undisclosed amount in Series B round led by Faering Capital, with earlier investor Nirvana Venture Advisors also participating. The Economic Times has more here.

    WordStream, a seven-year-old, Boston-based search-marketing software company, has raised $9 million in Series C funding led by Baird Capital of Chicago, with earlier investor Sigma Partners participating. The company also raised an addition $3 million in venture debt from City National Bank. According to Crunchbase, WordStream has raised $28.4 million to date.

    Xapo, a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-base “bank” for bitcoin, has raise $20 million from Greylock Partners and Index Ventures, which were joined by Emergence Capital Partners, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner, and Jerry Yang. The company has raised $40 million to date. TechCrunch has more here.

    YouChe.com, an eight-month-old, Beijing, China-based online retailing platform for second-hand cars, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by IDG Capital, according to China Money Network, which says the company previously raised “several million RMB” in seed funding from Zhen Fund last December when the company was founded.

    —–

    New Funds

    DST Global, the nine-year-old investment firm cofounded and controlled by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, is raising its fourth fund, DST Global IV, according to an SEC filing that doesn’t list a target. Milner, whose bets through DST have included Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, among others, talked with Forbes late last year about some of those past investments and where DST planned to spend some of its time in 2014. VentureBeat has more here.

    HomeAway, the nine-year-old, Austin-based vacation rental marketplace, is thinking about ways to formalize its startup investing, reports TechCrunch. The company’s cofounder and CEO Brian Sharples tells the outlet: “There are lots of entrepreneurs in the travel space — and now in particular around the vacation rental space . . .We’re very actively looking at [investing]. Historically we have either bought companies outright or bought a joint position.” The company has already made roughly 20 acquisitions since its founding.

    —–

    IPOs

    TubeMogul, a nearly seven-year-old, Emeryville, Ca.-based video ad platform that filed its S-1 in March, looks to be proceeding with its plans to go public, despite a choppy market for ad tech companies. The company has raised more than $50 million in funding. Its biggest shareholders include Trinity Ventures (which owns 26.5 percent of the company prior to the IPO), Foundation Capital (22.7 percent), and Northgate Capital (8 percent). TechCrunch has more here.

    Yodle, a nine-year-old, New York-based online marketing platform for small businesses, has filed to go public. The company has raised at least $40 million from investors, shows Crunchbase. Its biggest shareholders are Bessemer Venture Partners, which owns 29.7 percent of the company; DFJ, which owns 24.4 percent; JAFCO Technology Partners, which owns 8.7 percent; and David Rubin, formerly the CEO of ProfitFuel, which Yodle had acquired. Rubin owns 5 percent.

    —–

    Exits

    Newport Media, a nine-year-old, Lake Forest, Ca.-based fabless semiconductor company, has been acquired for $140 million by the publicly traded semiconductor company Atmel as Atmel shifts more of its focus toward smart connected devices. Newport had raised $66 million over the years, shows Crunchbase, including from Oak Investment Partners, Global Catalyst Partners, Venrock, Pinnacle Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Benchmark. VentureBeat has more here.

    —–

    People

    Fortune profiles John Arrillaga, the billionaire real estate developer (and father-in-law to Marc Andreessen), who “grew up one of five children in a lower-middle-class home in Inglewood, Calif.” and whose mother “kept the kids full with pieces of bread stuffed with lettuce. When Saturday ‘steak night’ rolled around, the seven of them shared one flank.”

    Apple CEO Tim Cook is reportedly looking for some fresh faces to add to Apple’s board. According to a WSJ story, “Mr. Cook is actively seeking new directors to add to Apple’s eight-person board, known for its loyalty to Mr. Jobs. Six of the seven outside directors are aged 63 or older. Four of them have served for more than a decade, including two who have been on the board since the late 1990s: former Intuit Corp Chief Executive Bill Campbell and J. Crew Group Chief Executive Millard S. “Mickey” Drexler.”As 9to5mac notes, most of the Apple’s current board members were hand-picked by Steve Jobs, with Cook adding only Disney CEO Bob Iger and promoting Art Levinson to non-executive Chairman of the Board.

    Katie Stanton, previously VP of international market development at Twitter, is stepping into the role of the company’s media chief, weeks after the departure of her predecessor, Chloe Sladden. Stanton, reports Variety, was already running the company’s international media division; in her new role, she be overseeing the U.S. division, too.

    —–

    Job Listings

    Frost Data Capital is looking for a summer associate (this is an unpaid eight-week internship). The firm is in San Juan Capistrano, Ca.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    Meet the ex-Google hacker who’s taking on the world’s spy agencies.

    Young Israelis are suddenly flocking to Germany to start their businesses, says Newsweek.

    Reminder: The SEC is due to review the definition of accredited investor this summer.

    —–

    Detours

    Yada, yada, yada: Larry David looks back at 25 years of “Seinfeld” in aQ&A with Rolling Stone.

    Spectators jumping into the road to snap selfies are becoming a giant pain in the arse, say Tour de France riders.

    Are you smart enough to get into a private New York City kindergarten?

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    An iPhone charger that looks like an umbilical cord. (It’s horrifying, but you kind of have to see it.)

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

  • Mitch Kapor on Dropcam and Data Collection

    MitchKaporLotus Software founder Mitch Kapor is well-known for his philanthropy, including through the Kapor Center for Social Impact, which funds startups as one prong of a strategy to strengthen underrepresented communities.

    But Kapor has also made many bets on companies based purely on their technology and teams. Among them is the home surveillance startup Dropcam, acquired last month by Google’s Nest Labs for $555 million. In fact, Kapor was its first investor.

    Late last week, we talked about how that deal came together, and how Kapor feels about the outcome.

    How did you find Dropcam five or so years ago?

    I came across it through a third founder who left very early, Anson Tsai, who went on to found Cardpool, a market for buying and selling gift cards. Cardpool was acquired by [the payments network] Blackhawk early and very successfully. I’d met Anson socially through [entrepreneur and popular blogger] Andrew Chen.

    I don’t think people realize there was a third founder.

    Yes, with Greg [Duffy] and Aamir [Virani], who’d worked together at [the email startup] Xobni, which was just shut down by Yahoo, ironically [roughly a year after it was acquired for undisclosed amount]. I think the chemistry wasn’t right, so Anson left to start his own company, but I liked Greg and Aamir and what they were doing and thought they were riding some good themes so invested.

    Were you privy to any of Dropcam’s conversations with Google? I always wonder which investors know what and when.

    Our relationship as seed investors is heavily concentrated from the time we first make an investment up through a Series A. In Dropcam’s case, the Series A came pretty early, because, to his credit, Sameer [Gandhi] of Accel saw something in the company [and led the company’s Series A round in 2011]. Once Dropcam had a board, our relationship changed. I was involved, but more on demand, when Greg or Aamir wanted coaching or advice or introductions. In fact, I found out about the sale by reading about it in my Twitter stream and getting congratulated, and that’s typical if you don’t have a board seat. Seed investors often find out about big events as they’re happening or sometimes just before.

    What kind of return did you see on your investment? More than 100x?

    Definitely more than 100x. It was a big return.

    As a big believer in the company, do you think selling to Google was the best outcome for Dropcam?

    The right outcome has to do with the founders who are in place and deciding the right thing to do. Sometimes, they think it’s the right time to sell because being part of something bigger helps in achieving strategic objectives and getting [a financial] outcome. There are tradeoffs, too, if you stay on your own. You enjoy your independence and you can maybe build something larger, but it comes with a lot of headaches.

    I’m surprised people aren’t more concerned by certain companies’ moves to dominate the connected home, given their growing reach into other aspects of our lives. Do you have any thoughts about why that is?

    I think ultimately there will be some kind of new social contract backed up by laws that will put some restrictions on what companies that collect a lot of data on people can do with that information, and that would include Google, Apple, and Facebook. I believe it will be a long and messy road to get there, but if we look at what’s going on today, we see the outlines of how it will happen. For a number of years, for example, Silicon Valley companies resisted releasing their employment data. Google gets credit for its willingness to put it out there, though. It was difficult, because its diversity numbers are terrible. But the time had come for the company to take a step forward and it has.

    When do you think we’ll see these protective regulations?

    Probably 5 or 10 years from now, and I think it will come from unhappiness among consumers and other forces that convince Google that its long-term interests are better served by agreeing to do something that previously it found difficult or impossible to do.

    People will have to get more upset about the whole subject of large amounts of personal information being collected. But change happens. Consider gender issues. There’s been one embarrassing scandal after another, with Tinder, Github, and others. I don’t think there’s more of that going on now than before, but people are more aware that it’s going on now, it’s covered more, and there’s more of a climate that this isn’t right. It’s an issue that’s no longer ignored.

    We’re not there yet on data collection, but I think we’ll get there. It will happen.

    Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

    Connie

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  • Googler #25 and Others Respond to That Khosla Interview

    Larry PageSunday afternoon, I wrote a column about a new video that features investor Vinod Khosla interviewing Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I noted the interview was not going to be well-received outside of tech circles, where it was uniformly applauded. For example, asked by Khosla about rising income inequality in San Francisco, an issue that’s been linked in the public mind to Google, Page called it a  “governance problem.” Page also talked at length about a future in which machines replace human workers without addressing who will keep those workers afloat financially.

    I didn’t realize the piece would be quite so controversial, but a number of readers reached out this morning, complaining that I was unfair to Page. Adrian, for example, said that my “coverage of the Page / Brin interview is righteous and disappointing. You are bashing Page for not feeling guilty for and not self flagellating in public over being rich. Seems like you think some contrived displays of guilt and some vague promises of being a better ‘corporate citizen’ (whatever that means today) would have been better than his attempt at a thoughtful response / analysis.”

    Meanwhile, Graeme wrote, “I could really do without the stereotypical political commentary. I can get that from [we’ll just skip this part of Graeme’s email] or [and this] or the shitheads at [you get the point]. Yay let’s cheer on political terrorists attacking people in their homes or on their way to work! Fuck those smart people and their work ethics!”

    It also seems worth steering readers to a response sent my way this morning by Google’s 25th employee, David desJardins, who is now a private investor. Specifically, desJardins had wanted to talk about “Abundance,” the book Page cited when speaking to Khosla about the free time we’ll all enjoy when our jobs disappear.

    While desJardins said he agrees that “human ingenuity and exponential growth are exceptionally powerful tools for solving a wide range of problems and challenges,” he disagrees completely that “human society has been, and is, on a trajectory to harnessing those tools to address our biggest problems and challenges.”

    Here’s more of desJardins’s email, published below with his consent:

    [Abundance authors Peter] Diamandis and [Steven] Kotler make many arguments about the power of innovation and human ingenuity with which I agree. However, they then make an essentially utopian argument about how deeply and rapidly these tools are being used and will be used to address current and foreseeable problems.  In this area, I claim that they are wildly optimistic.  The question is not whether human civilization could harness its ingenuity and creativity to solve all of the problems they discuss—of course it could.  The question is whether it will.  And as to that I think their optimism is totally unwarranted.

    They only arrive at an optimistic conclusion by cherry-picking the evidence.  They trumpet a few anecdotal examples of dedicated and resourceful individuals making big contributions to society with only modest costs.  The problem is that the examples they use are mostly notable for how rare and unusual they are.  As Larry Page says, but they ignore, 99.9999% of people aren’t working on stuff that can dramatically improve the world.  That means we’re only generating 0.0001% of the innovation on critical problems that we could be generating.  And that’s just not enough.

    The role of government is hardly mentioned anywhere in the text.  In the U.S. today, we’re slashing public investment that isn’t driven by a pure profit motive.  Of private investment, the vast majority is profit-driven rather than public-benefit-driven.  This is yet another reason that the fraction of human ingenuity that’s actually being applied to our biggest challenges is really small.

    The assumption in the book is that self-organizing, self-motivating, self-actualizing individuals, left to their own devices, can and will independently address virtually all human problems.  But this is a subject on which we have considerable empirical evidence, and the evidence is much less encouraging than they would have it.  Corruption is rising in most parts of the world.  Exploitation of people by others is rising in most parts of the world.  The vast majority of innovation is directed to trivial problems rather than to big problems (the world invests far more in treatments for erectile dysfunction or skin wrinkles than in treating any of the most widespread diseases).  People whose lives could be dramatically improved by a 60-watt bulb, have been in that position for decades and they still don’t have the bulb.  The observation that we could give them that bulb (or a 6-watt LED replacement) doesn’t mean that we will—what makes anyone think we are going to start making a serious worldwide effort to address human needs when we have never done that so far?

    The authors suppose that as the “bottom billion” are lifted out of abject poverty, they will become consumers and their needs will be valued and met.  But that’s wildly optimistic.  The bottom billion are far, far behind the graduates of even the worst U.S. schools in terms of their knowledge and education and preparation to compete in the world economy.  The economic value of their labor is going to remain near zero for the foreseeable future.  By the time they make it to third grade, they are going to need a postgraduate degree to be prosperous.  It may only cost a few dollars to prevent malaria or to give someone a light, but it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (and takes generations) to educate people to the level where they can make really significant contributions to society.  Most of the jobs that people can do without a significant education are disappearing and becoming obsolete.  The bottom billion aren’t getting richer and more educated as fast as the world economy is leaving them behind.  

    The arrow of accumulation of human knowledge is pointed in the right direction.  But the arrow of organization of human society—the extent to which we serve humanity rather than exploit it—is pointed in the wrong direction. 

    Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

    Connie

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  • StrictlyVC: July 7, 2014

    Hi, everyone, welcome back. Hope you had a terrific break!

    —–

    Top News in the A.M.

    A quick heads up: the TSA says that it will no longer allow U.S.-bound passengers to board flights at certain overseas airports with uncharged electronic devices.

    —–

    Missed Connections: Larry Page on Income Inequality

    Over the long weekend, Khosla Ventures released a video of its founder, Vinod Khosla, interviewing Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who rarely participate in joint speaking engagements.

    Page and Brin come across as charming in different but complementary ways. Page plays the straight man, responding earnestly to Khosla’s questions about Google’s priorities. “I guess we feel that, right now . . . the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend is still pretty bad. And I think our job is to solve that,” he says.

    Meanwhile, Brin is like the smart-alecky brother who cracks wise at Page’s expense. When Khosla asks the founders about machine learning, Brin drapes an arm around Page, saying, “Well, look, this is our latest model right here. See? Not perfect yet but doing pretty well.” The crowd bursts into laughter as Page buries his face in his hands. (We also laughed, watching it online.)

    For all the founders’ endearing chemistry, the interview is far from a public relations coup for Google, whose gleaming private buses sparked San Francisco’s so-called “culture wars” last winter. In fact, the video might serve as further evidence that Google’s CEO and co-founder doesn’t think very much of the growing wealth disparity between tech workers and everyone else.

    Consider Page’s response when Khosla somewhat timidly asks him about “short-term issues like you see in San Francisco,” such as “people not appreciating that people who are part of the ideas economy … are doing much better than people who aren’t.” Page might have used the question to assert Google’s interest in being a good corporate citizen. Instead, he effectively dismisses the idea that Google has any responsibility for San Francisco’s growing divide between rich and poor.

    “This kind of thing is really a governance problem,” says Page, “because we’re building lots of jobs, lots of office buildings, and no housing. So it’s not surprising that [has] caused a lot of issues. You also have a lot of people who are rent controlled, so they don’t participate in the economic increase in housing prices. It actually hurts them. It doesn’t help them. So I think those problems are more structural and very serious problems. We’re not really on a path to fix those problems in this area.”

    Page sounds more out of touch when Khosla asks him about the consequences of machines replacing human jobs. “If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy – housing, security, opportunities for your kids – anthropologists have been identifying these things — it’s not that hard for us to provide those things,” he tells Khosla. “The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1 percent at the moment.”

    Because everyone needs to “feel like you’re needed and wanted and have something productive to do,” one solution might be to “just reduce work time.” Page then adds, “Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek.”

    Simple, right? Not exactly. Page sidesteps the economic consequences of reducing employee hours in an economy in which most people still live paycheck to paycheck. Does he expect companies to pay their employees the same amount of money for less hours? Should the government foot the difference? He doesn’t say.

    Judging from the interview, Page wasn’t prepared to talk at length about social issues. After all, this wasn’t a sit-down with the Washington Post. He and Brin were being interviewed by Khosla, a fellow billionaire, at an intimate CEO summit.

    But it’s probably time to ditch the platitudes of “Abundance,” a book by serial entrepreneur Peter Diamandis that describes a world in which everyone’s quality of life will continue to rise thanks to the exponential growth of technology. (“I totally believe we should be living in a time of abundance,” Page tells Khosla.)

    At the very least, Page might pretend for a moment that he’s not worth $30 billion and consider how his words might sound to those who are working to make ends meet and, in many cases, failing. It’s worth remembering that more than 45 million Americans are right now living in poverty.

    We know Brin was just joking when he said his friend Page was a robot. Now it’s time to prove it.

    —–

    New Fundings

    Bonobos, the seven-year-old, New York-based fashion brand that started selling menswear direct-to-consumers online and is now expanding into physical “guide shops” where customers can try on the company’s clothes, has raised $55 million in Series D funding led by Coppel Capital. Bonobos’s earlier investors Accel Partners, Felicis Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Glynn Capital Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mousse Partners and Nordstrom also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $127.6 million. PandoDaily has more here.

    FXiaoKe, a three-year-old, Beijing, China-based mobile sales management tool, has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Northern Light Venture Capital, with firms Huaruan Venture Capital, Boya Capital, and IDG Capital participating. FXiaoke previously received “several million dollars” in Series A funding from IDG Capital in July 2012, says China Money Network.

    GeneWeave Biosciences, a four-year-old, Los Gatos, Ca.-based diagnostics company that aims to help doctors more quickly identify and fight drug-resistant organisms, has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor Decheng Capital. Other previous investors, including Claremont Creek Ventures and X/Seed Capital, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $25 million, shows Crunchbase.

    Hansoft, a nine-year-old, Uppsala, Sweden-based company that makes project management and and collaboration software, has raised $10 million in Series A funding from Hasso Plattner Ventures and the Nordic venture capital firm Creandum.

    HiWiFi, a 16-month-old, Beijing-based maker of “smart” routers, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the Taiwanese semiconductor maker MTK, according to reports. The company had previously received “tens of millions” of dollars in Series A funding from GGV Capital and Innovation Works, according to China Money Network.

    Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, a 15-year-old, Mumbai, India-based aggregator, developer, publisher and distributor of Bollywood and South-Asian entertainment content, has raised $40 million in new funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, reports VCCircle. Earlier investor Intel Capital, which poured an undisclosed amount of funding into the company in 2012, also participated in this round.

    Lmbang, a 1.5-year-old, Shenzhen, China-based online social platform for young mothers to share their experiences, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Greenwoods Asset Management. Earlier investors Morningside Ventures, Matrix Partners and K2 Ventures also participated.

    Matterport, a three-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based company whose 3D reconstruction system allows users to construct 3D models of physical objects and interior spaces, has raised $16 million in new funding led by DCM, which was joined by Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. Earlier investors who also participated in the round include AMD Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lux Capital, Navitas Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Rothenberg Ventures, as well as Crate & Barrel founder Gordon Segal and Sling Media founderBlake Krikorian. The company has now raised $26 million to date, shows Crunchbase. The WSJ has more here.

    ParkTag, a 2.5-year-old, Berlin-based mobile app whose community of users help each other to find parking spots, has raised $680,000 from Germany’s High-Tech Gründerfonds, a semi governmental venture fund; the KfW Bank group; and numerous industrial groups, including Deutsche Telekom and Siemens. TechCrunch as more here.

    SpaceWays, a new, London-based self-storage business, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the German startup backer Rocket Internet, which hired the founders to create the service, reports Reuters. SpaceWays, which launched in London last week, it reportedly “looking to transform the self-storage market into an on-demand business more like package delivery.”

    Synchroneuron, a three-year-old, Waltham, Ma.-based biopharmaceutical company that’s developing new therapies to treat tardive dyskinesia and other neuropsychiatric disorders, has raised $20 million in Series B funding from Morningside Technology Ventures. The company has raised $26 million altogether, all from Morningside, shows Crunchbase.

    Traity, a two-year-old, Madrid and San Francisco-based online reputation startup, has raised $4.7 million in Series A funding led by Active Venture Partners. Other investors in the round included Horizons Ventures, KRW Schindler Private Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Lanta Digital Ventures, 500 Startups, Lisa Gansky, Juan Lopez, Matthew Bothner and Dalibor Siroky. TechCrunch has more on the company here.

    —–

    New Funds

    Edison Ventures, a 28-year-old, Lawrenceville, N.J.-based venture firm that focuses on expansion-stage companies in the Eastern U.S., will begin raising its eighth fund later this year, reports VentureWire. Reportedly, the firm will target around $250 million, roughly matching the size of its seventh and six funds. Among Edison’s newest portfolio companies is Trialscope, a Jersey City, N.J.-based company whose software helps clinical trial sponsors comply with legislation and internal policy, as well as to register their clinical trials and disclose their results. The company raised $10 million last month.

    Runa Capital, a four-year-old, Moscow-based venture firm, is targeting $200 million to $300 million for a second venture fund that it’s currently raising, reports VentureWire. Serguei Beloussov, the firm’s cofounder and senior partner, says Runa plans to invest the new fund mostly outside of Russia because of Russia’s still small (comparatively) customer base for IT services. Among the firm’s newest portfolio companies: Ecwid, a Moscow-based company that enables merchants to add an online store to their existing website or mobile site.

    Santander, one of the largest banks in Europe, is launching a $100 million venture fund to back startups in the financial-technology sector. The London-based fund will operate as a standalone unit and have a global focus.

    —–

    IPOs

    DreamSky Technology, a five-year-old, Shenzhen, China-based third party mobile game publishing platform, has filed to go public on Nasdaq to raise up to $115 million in funding. THL A19 Limited, a company controlled by Tencent Holdings, is the company’s largest shareholder, with a 26.6 percent stake. Dream Data Services, meanwhile, owns 22 percent; Legend Capital owns 20.4 percent; and Redpoint Ventures owns 16.6 percent.

    —–

    Exits

    Expedia just agreed to acquire Australia’s Wotif Group for $658 million. Skift has more here.

    Novus Biologicals, an 18-year-old, Littleton, Co.-based supplier of both outsourced and in-house developed antibodies and other reagents for life-science research, has been acquired for $60 million in cash byTechne Corp., a publicly traded company that does business as Bio-Techne. More here.

    Wilocity, a seven-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based company that builds multi-gigabit wireless chipsets, has been acquired by Qualcomm for undisclosed financial terms that some reports peg at $300 million. Wilocity had raised $55 million from investors, including Benchmark, Sequoia Capital, Tallwood Venture Capital, Atheros Communications, Marvell Technology, Jerusalem Global Ventures, and Vintage Investment Partners.

    —–

    People

    Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, tweeted out some funny (and probably fairly true) advice over weekend, writing that “If you are wondering why big tech company bought small tech company, a good default answer is: phones.” He then added, “In fact, you could probably go to a tech cocktail party and answer every question with ‘phones’ and you’d sound pretty smart.”

    Jason Goldberg, the CEO of richly funding and flailing Fab, has a new furniture site called Hem that he says it’s going to be fabulous, telling a skeptical reporter: “I’ll tell you what I told our investors: We never signed on to building a two-year business . . .We signed onto build a business over 10, 20 years.”

    —–

    Job Listings

    Syracuse University is in the market for an entrepreneur, business executive or venture capitalist to serve as an assistant professor. (The job is full time, with a renewable annual contract.)

    —–

    Happenings

    Allen & Co.‘s annual Sun Valley conference kicks off on Tuesday.

    —–

    Essential Reads

    How Twitch’s founders turned an aimless reality show Into a video juggernaut.

    Wired reports on Google Map hackers, who “can destroy a business at will.”

    The Life and Death of “The Internet’s Own Boy.”

    —–

    Detours

    Inside the Viper Room, Hollywood’s most exclusive poker game.

    A new report finds that higher intelligence is linked with rural-to-city migration, and with city-to-suburb movement.

    James Suroweicki asks: Why are the super-rich so angry?

    —–

    Retail Therapy

    No cloud hanging over your head? You might try this one.

    Paddle ball set, now on sale.

    —–

    To sign up for StrictlyVC, click here. To advertise, click here.

    Connie

    ,

  • Missed Connections: Larry Page on Income Inequality

    Brin, Page, KhoslaOver the weekend, Khosla Ventures released a video of its founder, Vinod Khosla, interviewing Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who rarely participate in joint speaking engagements.

    Page and Brin come across as charming in different but complementary ways. Page plays the straight man, responding earnestly to Khosla’s questions about Google’s priorities. “I guess we feel that, right now . . . the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend is still pretty bad. And I think our job is to solve that,” he says.

    Meanwhile, Brin is like the smart-alecky brother who cracks wise at Page’s expense. When Khosla asks the founders about machine learning, Brin drapes an arm around Page, saying, “Well, look, this is our latest model right here. See? Not perfect yet but doing pretty well.” The crowd bursts into laughter as Page buries his face in his hands. (We also laughed, watching it online.)

    For all the founders’ endearing chemistry, the interview is far from a public relations coup for Google,  whose gleaming private buses sparked San Francisco’s so-called “culture wars” last winter. In fact, the video might serve as further evidence that Google’s CEO and co-founder doesn’t think very much of the growing wealth disparity between tech workers and everyone else.

    Consider Page’s response when Khosla somewhat timidly asks him about “short-term issues like you see in San Francisco,” such as “people not appreciating that people who are part of the ideas economy … are doing much better than people who aren’t.” Page might have used the question to assert Google’s interest in being a good corporate citizen. Instead, he effectively dismisses the idea that Google has any responsibility for San Francisco’s growing divide between rich and poor.

    “This kind of thing is really a governance problem,” says Page, “because we’re building lots of jobs, lots of office buildings, and no housing. So it’s not surprising that [has] caused a lot of issues. You also have a lot of people who are rent controlled, so they don’t participate in the economic increase in housing prices. It actually hurts them. It doesn’t help them. So I think those problems are more structural and very serious problems. We’re not really on a path to fix those problems in this area.”

    Page sounds more tone deaf when Khosla asks him about the consequences of machines replacing human jobs. “If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy – housing, security, opportunities for your kids – anthropologists have been identifying these things — it’s not that hard for us to provide those things,” he tells Khosla. “The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1 percent at the moment.”

    Because everyone needs to “feel like you’re needed and wanted and have something productive to do,” one solution might be to “just reduce work time.” Page adds, “Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek.”

    Simple, right? Not exactly. Page sidesteps the economic consequences of reducing employee hours in an economy in which most people still live paycheck to paycheck. Does he expect companies to pay their employees the same amount of money for less hours? Should the government foot the difference? He doesn’t say.

    Judging from the interview, Page wasn’t prepared to talk at length about social issues. After all, this wasn’t a sit-down with the Washington Post. He and Brin were being interviewed by Khosla, a fellow billionaire, at an intimate CEO summit.

    But it’s probably time to ditch the platitudes of “Abundance,” a book by serial entrepreneur Peter Diamandis that describes a world in which everyone’s quality of life will continue to rise thanks to the exponential growth of technology. (“I totally believe we should be living in a time of abundance,” Page tells Khosla.)

    At the very least, Page might pretend for a moment that he’s not worth $30 billion and think how his words might sound to those who are working to make ends meet and, in many cases, failing. It’s worth remembering that more than 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.

    We know Brin was just joking when he said his friend Page was a robot. Now it’s time to prove it.

    Sign up for our morning missive, StrictlyVC, featuring all the venture-related news you need to start you day.

     

     

    Connie

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