LiftPort Staff Blog

I wrote the following in response to Mark Reiboldt’s “Mark to Market” blog.  I read his blog fairly often, for insights and education in the Venture Capital world.  And while it might not seem like ot, today, The VC environment is an important component to the revised LiftPort business plans.

For this post to make a lot of sense, I suggest you read to articles first:

http://twurl.nl/w0lqom and http://twurl.nl/xxsapk

Mark,
Thought provoking as always.  Loved the comments about not caring, re: Jobs+Apple, Silicon Valley unemployment, or the Tesla.

I Agree with Twitter ‘being cool’, but no business model is a BIG problem.  I’d rather they stay independent, and figure out a paying version (There are several tools/services I would gladly pay for.  It seems a no-brainer, so it makes me wonder why they are delaying so long.)  Google already bought the microblogging tool, Jaiku.com and let it stagnate.  Jaiku was superior to Twitter, but G simply let it collapse.   And I don’t see the natural connection to Yahoo or anyone else.  Selling to Facebook simply does not make sense to me.

But the main points I wanted to comment on was the idea of Menlo Park vs. Boston vs. Seattle vs. Atlanta vs. etc…..  As you’ve said a few times, VC is changing.  Everything about it is changing, so why expect the dominant location to stay the same? My bet is on Boston and Research Triangle, but I think it’s too soon to tell with any confidence.  Both have LOTS of advanced technologies in development.  Boston edges forward because of its capital base, and proximity to New York.  Personally, I’d like to see Seattle come out on top, but I think that is unlikely.

Finally, I think the concept of “clean tech” is too vague, and will be refined in 2009.  Clean tech makes for a good buzzword, and helps your investors think you care about carbon emission and climate change.  But in practical terms, we are talking about technologies in seven “Civilization Shaping” sectors – Energy, Communications, Computing, NanoTechnology (Materials Science), Space, BioSciences and Robotics/Electronics.  Each of these has elements that can be brushed with the broad label of “clean tech”.  And any entrepreneur that can put “clean” into their business plan, stands a better chance of getting it funded.  So I predict a couple ‘dogfood.com’ business models in 2009, too. Whether it makes sense or not… Whenever there is a bandwagon, you will find people willing to jump aboard.

Yet as we’ve discussed before, none of these fit the Silicon Valley Model of VC.  So I am curious to see how this all plays out, because I can assure you, no one is going to rename SV as the “green valley” any time soon.

Take care.
MJL
President, LiftPort Group
www.twitter.com/mlaine

For link-back and tracking, here are the full website addresses.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11304174?source=rss

http://reiboldt.com/?p=374

Written by Michael Laine and posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 8:02 pm and is filed under LiftPort Group. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.