Wahh, what a day filled with sharings of wisdom by so many intelligent, experienced and successful entrepreneurs and VCs! And I think the most important thing for us is to remember as many as golden rules as possible, and apply them in our future entrepreneurship career path. But the major lesson for me is the idea of Globalization in VCs and Incubators.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson

What impressed me most is the feature of DFJ as an early stage VC group - Global Network of Partner Funds. DFJ has world’s most connected investing network that manages over $6 billion and has made more than 600 investments on four continents. Why does a VC need to be global? Wouldn’t there be enough startups to fund in the local region, especially at SV? While, as Ravi Belani said, “Entrepreneurship is global”, local startups needs to expand outside and foreign entrepreneurs are looking for opportunities beyond local regional market. So what are the reasons for being a global VC?

1)      A lot of great companies are created outside SV.

2)      To better support the development of its investees through global contacts, and therefore creating valuing for the investee, fund providers, and themselves.

3)      It illustrates DFJ’s unique value proposition: “Go for were the entrepreneurs are!”

Plug & Play

The first impression when entering into its building is that there are so many national flags, university and organization posters all over the place! And that illustrates PNP’s international relationship it has built. The world is just getting global…  Annamaria Konya shared to us on Monday to “think global”; today we see that DFJ is doing global investing, and now the most famous incubator in SV is telling us to support global startups that founded in US.

Other thoughts about PNP:

PNP has a fun corporate environment, as can be seen from the colorful walls, beautiful pictures and artistic fertilities. The various services provided and its multiple revenue streams impressed me as well: PNP can assist its incubatee through introducing corporate partners, talent acquisition, Tier One Data Centre, and outsourcing legal advices, accountants, etc. Other than that, PNP is quite commercial, as we can see from its investment arm that generates the most revenues… So the 3 main revenue streams of it are: Real Estate, Data Centre, and Investment, and I feel PNP is quite mature in stages of development as an incubator.

Lastly, I just want to comment on the ready-to-launch business, EXHIBUTES, presented by Nikhil.

While, firstly, it’s a cool idea, and the wall art online market is quite niche. But the following are some of my concerns if I were to invest in this company:

1)      It’s NOT a must to have, but only nice to have business service.

2)      It’s not an urgent problem needs to be solved, a lesson from Winston Choe.

3)      There is NO IP in the company, or little… Its innovation lies in the business model, being a medium to buy, sell, and share art work, which is easy to be copied. I would prefer to invest in or start up a business that more defensible and higher entry barriers than that.

However, since Management team is thought to be important by most VCs, if they have a great team, EXHIBUTES can be a successful business… but they should pay attention to customer loyalty, to utilize the customer renewability nature within the business.

Tags: SV trip day 3

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 3:16 am and is filed under DFJ, Plug and Play, Talks. 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.