I’ve just arrived in Long Beach for the annual TED conference. When I first started going to TED, it was a relatively small, relatively unknown gathering in Monterey, California. But don’t confuse relatively small and relatively unknown for relatively uninteresting. Since its inception, the TED conference has been an amazing gathering of people across a variety of disciplines (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design). And with the advent of TED’s fantastic video destination site and a growing number of enthusiastic boosters, the conference has become much larger and much more influential.
It has been a while since I blogged about TED, but I’m going to try to post some thoughts over the course of this week. There are always nuggets of wisdom I collect throughout the TED conference. And they often come from the most unlikely sources. Perhaps this year that wisdom will be dolled out by Sarah Silverman or Temple Grandin, David Byrne or Nathan Myrvold, James Cameron or Benoit Mandelbrot. Rest assured, whoever the source, there will be wisdom dolled out. And, with any luck, I can be the conduit for some of that TED wisdom.
I think this is my 10th TED. Why do I come back to TED year in and year out? Not only do I find it inspiring to learn about the trials and triumphs of some of the great thinkers of our day, but I find their diversity of background and opinion invaluable. Many of the most interesting innovations throughout time have been the result of cross-disciplinary collaboration. The same is true of the innovations of today — they draw upon a diverse backdrop of technology and leadership. TED inspires me to think more broadly about the world in which we live (how art and science and philosophy come together) and helps to place the companies with which I interact every day into the larger technological and economic universe.
Like so many of you who watch the TED Talks in amazement, I attend the TED conference in amazement and am constantly inspired. I consider myself very lucky to have the opportunity to interact with such a transcendent group of people. I will do my best to share some of those moments of inspiration along the way.
At an annual investors’ meeting in the wake of the dot bust, several LPs in Redpoint Ventures growled that Geoff Yang — who while golfing with John Walecka in 1999, decided to form Redpoint — was spending too much time on the links. (They had looked up his tee times at the Sharon Heights Country Club in Menlo Park.)
No one is complaining about Yang’s favorite pastime anymore. Tonight, Redpoint announced it has just closed a $400 million fund, reward in part for a number of the envy-inducing exits it saw last year, at the height of the worst recession in decades, including: the October sale of WiChorus to Tellabs for $165 million; the November sale of LifeSize Communications to Logitech International for $405 million; and the December IPO of network protection company Fortinet. (Redpoint owned 12.4 percent of its shares after the offering.)
Redpoint portfolio companies Calix Networks and Solyndra have also filed to go public, though they’ll both need big boosts from the markets for its backers to see meaningful returns. Calix has raised $272 million and Solyndra has raised $512 million from investors.
Redpoint’s newest fund is its fourth early-stage vehicle. While it is still awaiting returns on its third fund – it closed in 2006 with $400 million –its second fund, a whopping $1.25 billion fund that closed in 2000, has enjoyed a number of hits. The aforementioned are among them; so was Intermix Media, an L.A.-based company whose chief asset was a little site called MySpace that News Corp. bought for $580 million in 2005.
Yang tells our colleagues at Reuters that the firm first approached investors last fall and that it closed the fund without being able to accommodate all the LPs wanting a stake.
”We were prepared for a much tougher environment based on all the horror stories we had read and if you look at the macro conditions,” said Yang.
The new fund will continue Redpoint’s focus on social networking, as well as be used to back mobile computing, cloud computing and clean tech startups.
An alternately sober-minded and gibbering mad – but never boring and mostly riveting — hour-long what-would-you-invest-in panel with Nassim Taleb, Marc Faber, Hugh Hendry and others from the just-completed Russia 2010 conference:
When the girls were away, the boys set up a scary ambush for their guests with a scorpion taped to the door, and a robot sentry grooving to Crystal Method’s High Roller.
The girls were not impressed.
Since we were waiting in the dark for them to come through the door, I filmed through a night-vision-goggle toy, and with a bit of telephoto, it worked OK.
A study released earlier today shines a bit more light on why most people are afraid to gamble, while others are willing to roll the dice despite sometimes poor odds of a higher return.
Published by scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at University College of London, the research centered on two women with Urbach-Wiethe, a disease that damages the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain linked to feelings of fear and aggression. While it’s generally the case that people are risk-averse, even when facing a potentially big gain — they prefer holding on to what they have, rather than risking it to trade up — the women with Urbach-Wiethe were more reckless, willing to gamble with abandon no matter their chances of a positive return.
“We think this shows that the amygdala is critical for triggering a sense of caution toward making gambles in which you might lose,” said one of the researchers in a statement.
To reach their findings — published in the multidisciplinary journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – the researchers compared the responses of the women with Urbach-Wiethe with those of 12 volunteers who have “normal” undamaged brains.
American journalists and corporate executives have been slow to appreciate the beauty, brilliance, and consumer allure of the virtual goods business model.It’s not that they did not have data points – China is chock full of multi-US$billion market capitalization companies that are based on this business model. That said, many luddites predicted it was an [...]
Lots of little things go into building a great company over the long term. Rally Software is one that I’m proud to have been involved in from the beginning. I remember when Ryan Martens, the founder, would sit for entire days in a small conference room near my office covering the white boards on the walls with his scribblings.
Today Rally is a 150 person company that plans to add another 75 people in 2010 on the heels of Rally’s $16 million financing led by Greylock. And – since their birth in 2002, Rally has had 17 babies (well – people that work for Rally have had the babies, but you probably figured that out.) Recently, Rally’s leadership team decided to do something about this.
Nicely done Tim, Ryan, and everyone else at Rally. Now you’ve just got to get these kids using software from Kerpoof at an early age. I wonder how Agile Parenthood works?
New Investors Topple Masters of the Universe: Asian sovereign wealth funds and venture capitalists, rather than big firms of the past, were the most active investors last year (Wealth Bulletin)
Update: The Kleen Energy plant explosion has claimed five identified casualties. The company, backed by Energy Investors Fund, won Goldman Sachs a Deal of the Year award from Project Finance. (Courant.com)
Watch Your Backs Guys: Four pensioners have appeared in a German court charged with kidnapping a financial adviser they blamed for making rotten US property investments. (BBC)
Tired of Complaining Customers? Ban them! That’s what Tim Horton’s, which happens to be owned by none other than Sun Capital, did! (CBC News) (PS: To clarify, Sun Capital sold Tim Hortons’ wholesale coffee business to Green Mountain earlier this year and sold its retail business to own of its own affiliates.)
I Protest! Generation Y is apparently too lazy and unfocused to be hired, according to a reporter who spoke with three random people who work in the HR industry. (Courier-Mail)
Not So Simple: While raising taxes on PE and VC firms seems inevitable, critics argue that raising the taxes paid by the private equity industry will also hit small partnerships and venture capital, and may not even raise as much revenue as governments hope. (Reuters)
At an annual investors’ meeting in the wake of the dot bust, several LPs in Redpoint Ventures growled that Geoff Yang — who while golfing with John Walecka in 1999, decided to form Redpoint — was spending too much time on the links. (They had looked up his tee times at the Sharon Heights Country Club in Menlo Park.)
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