Venture Capital Goes Super-Size to Outsize Competition
Is super-sizing your funds a way to create venture runway to steer past or through the downturn and stay competitive in the global market? Many startups – like Mahalo, Ning and LinkedIn – pride themselves on raising enough funding to survive the nuclear winter of late 2008 and basically all of 2009. Facebook decided to add runway and incent its employees through a follow-on $100 million passive investment from DST, Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies group, who also put $180 million into Zynga in December.
Last Tuesday, Intel Capital and 24 VC firms set to put $3.5 billion over two years into US startups to bump up America’s competitive edge. Intel Capital is earmarking $200 million individually.
Via the NYT: in a program called the Invest in America Alliance, Cisco, Intel, Google and Microsoft, among other big tech employers, are hiring 10,500 US college tech grads to regain international ground lost. Per Intel’s Paul Otellini:
Unfortunately, long-term investments in education, research, digital technology and human capital have been steadily declining in the U.S. So, too, has the commitment to policies that made us such an entrepreneurial powerhouse for more than a century.
As many VCs raise more to create investment mines in nascent countries such as India and China, the market seems to be correcting in trending tides: first startups who squirreled away cash, Angel capital/investment groups who are finding High Wealth Individuals (HWIs) looking for early discounts, tech companies seeing their international talent and US competitive edges decreasing, and now VCs who see value in creating big funds. Read more >>
Cable’s Lost Generation
They called it the “Battle Royale” of media and entertainment. This year’s CES pitted Internet video upstarts like Hulu, Roku, and Boxee in a cage match against industry stalwarts such as Comcast and Time Warner. At stake: the hearts and minds of millions.
It was spun as a victor-versus-vanquished battle. It was either going to be Internet video’s David hoisting aloft the head of the Goliath that is cable TV, or cable mowing down Hulu and the others like so much other Internet roadkill.
At first glance, it appears that David is a stone’s throw from victory. The ever-crucial 18- to 24-year-old viewer, who spends $11 billion a year on entertainment, no longer watches TV as we know it. They are Cable’s Lost Generation. However, it turns out that they may not be as lost as we think. Read more >>
Video as Publishing: This Is How We Do It
A lot of what we see on the Internet is digital publication; usually we can print it out. This notion underlies my grand unified theory of Internet video: treat it like publishing, not film or television, and this will become a viable industry.
Much of the film and television business is based on risk management. Will this show work? Maybe! So why make it? Because it’s based on this book that sold a million copies and it stars Brad Pitt and it’s a murder mystery and we know that murder mysteries are SO HOT right now, especially with teen girls in suburban neighborhoods. Every brand, talent and genre has a particular following, and we have a vague sense of how big that following is and who is in it. And the marketing people in Hollywood, they’re brilliant. They know exactly how to reach these audience pools and how much money to spend doing so. All things considered, if there’s a pretty good shot people will watch a show, and the projected audience is big enough to justify the cost, the project’s a go. Read more >>