Distilling Venture Capital

Rachel Chalmers knows your Achilles heel. After two plus decades sitting in Silicon Valley's front row watching start-up technology companies, she has a very clear idea of the single biggest cause of start-up failure.  Rachel was kind enough to sit down for a few minutes at the Montgomery Summit and talk about it. Listen in to hear what she sees as most critical for entrepreneurial success. My Guest Rachel Chalmers has been a long time observer and analyst in the world of technology.  She describes herself as a failed English teacher.  She received a BA degree in English from the University of Sydney and a master’s in philosophy, with a focus on Anglo-Irish literature, from Trinity College, Dublin.  But her time hanging out with engineering students pointed her towards technology writing. She started her career writing for MIS Magazine and Computerwire during the mid-late 90's.  In 2000 she moved to the 451 Group and focused infrastructure computing for the enterprise.  As she puts it she covered: "tools for

Can you raise venture capital too easily? Nagarjun "Nag" Palavalli, my guest on this episode, thinks you can.  Nag's journey from dropping out of college in India to the fast paced start-up culture at the Alchemist Accelerator in Silicon Valley illustrates the pitfalls of quick success.  Nag also discusses why the romantic notion of the lone entrepreneur building a start-up can actually kill a great idea.  And Nag identifies the one person he wishes he'd talked to before launching. My Guest Nag Palavalli is that guy in your dorm that not only talks about dropping out and starting a tech company, but actually goes through with it.  As a student Nag was frustrated that his school lacked a decent learning management platform.  So he quit and started Eduora. After doing initial development work in his hometown of Bangalore, India, Nag moved to Silicon Valley to participate in the Alchemist Accelerator.  Nag shares his experiences launching on a shoe string and then swimming in deep end of the venture capital pool

Nigel Grierson has been investing in start-ups for quite awhile, first by launching Intel Capital Europe and then as co-founder of Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.  To say he's learned a few things about venture capital success from failure is an understatement. In this episode he shares three of those lessons that apply to any start-up. My Guest Nigel Grierson co-founded the Doughty Hanson Technology Fund in 2000 and currently serves as co-Managing Director. His specific areas of expertise include financial venture investment, high technology marketing and organisation development. Previously, Nigel was the Group Director for Intel Capital Europe, managing a team responsible for making strategic equity investments and developing new business opportunities throughout Europe. He and the team together originated and invested in over 35 technology start-up companies and had a number of notable exits.  Nigel started his career as a chip engineer and worked at AT&T in the Communications Product Division lea

Nobody was better prepared for leading a start-up than Jeanette Cajide.  She had a solid academic foundations in public relations, communications, business and finance.  She'd done technology consulting and turn around management.  When a friend pulled her into launching a start-up app company, she was primed and ready.  Listen in as Jeanette shares the struggles of getting Blurtt off the ground, pivoting and most importantly get the right people on board. My Guest Jeanette Cajide currently works at Dialexa, a technology design and engineering firm and leads their Northeast business development efforts out of Cambridge, MA. Jeanette serves in a multitude of capacities at Dialexa working across business development, strategy, product and finance.Most recently she has been helping the company launch Dialexa Labs, Dialexa's internal start-up incubator. The first company to launch in September 2014 is called Vinli, an Internet of Things platform for your car. Prior to Dialexa, Jeanette co-founded Blurtt, an iPhon

Rick Faulk knew what it took to ramp sales for a venture backed software company. He'd done exactly that for WebEx prior to its sale to Cisco. Then he was asked to do the same thing as co-CEO for three merged social software companies. Listen in as Rick shares what he learned from this cat rodeo about M&A diligence, merging corporate cultures and decisive leadership. My Guest Rick Faulk has more than 30 years of experience in executive management, sales and marketing in the software industry. He's worked for some of the world’s most successful SaaS and technology companies, including Lotus Development, j2 Global, Cisco, WebEx, Intranets.com and PictureTel. Currently Rick is the Chairman and CEO of Intronis, a provider of white label cloud storage solutions.  Prior to Intronis, Rick was General Manager of Cloud Services for Sales & Marketing at j2 Global. As President & co-CEO of Mzinga, Rick worked to merge two learning management software companies with a social networking software company. Immed

Entrepreneurship is not for wimps. It's a good thing Barry Weinbaum learned how to take a punch when he was a kid growing up in the Bronx. He got socked by a massive telecom market meltdown, an over-sized, cash burning lab and factory, a founder law suit and a divided board. Oh yeah, and he had a few competitors as well.  Barry lived to fight another day, so listen in to hear the valuable lessons he learned. My Guest Barry Weinbaum became a serial entrepreneur after a 20+ year career at Lucent Technologies.  With his rich telecom infrastructure and technology experience, he left Lucent to lead NanoOpto Corp.  After selling NanoOpto, he headed into the lighting sector as CEO of Renaissance Lighting, a venture capital and angel backed LED company.  Renaissance was acquired by Acuity Brands and Barry took on corporate marketing, strategy and coordination across Acuity Brands' 22 lines of business.  Investors then recruited Barry to head back into the start-up world to try and turn around LUMEnergi, a lighting co

Kevin Naughton had done the start-up thing and moved on.  Then came the call: "We're in trouble. Can you come back and help us sell the company?" Kevin answered the call and returned for a second tour of duty at GTess, a Dallas based healthcare claims processing start-up.  Listen in as Kevin explains what he learned about hiring too fast, customer consolidation, following industry norms down the wrong road  and flying blind without proper financial and business metrics. My Guest An entrepreneurial CFO, Kevin Naughton has worked with four different venture backed companies over 20 years.  He's raised over $60M of capital from a wide group of venture capital firms.  Currently, he's part of the senior team at Prodea Systems.  Prior to that he was twice the CFO of GTess. Kevin earned a BS and MBA from Bentley College.  While he's lived in Texas for many years, he's a native New Englander and a life long Cape Cod junkie. The Take Home Lessons During his two tours of duty at GTess, Kevin saw a number of key factors

It was a matter of when, not if. Global forces were pushing Mark Redlus' company ImageTree towards a huge opportunity.  ImageTree's technology would be the gold standard for validating forest assets being used for carbon emissions off sets.  Mark and his venture capital backers had already pivoted once.  Listen in and find out what prevented them from pivoting a second time to save their company. My Guest Coming out of the Univ. of Pennsylvania's Wharton School with a BS in Management, Mark jumped right into the entrepreneurial side of the technology industry.  He launched Red Sector A which was acquired by CoreTech.  At CoreTech he rose to become the CEO.  From there he moved on to ImageTree as employee number one.  After almost five years at ImageTree, Mark moved Yallingup BioEnergy where he worked on a variety of clean tech investment projects.  Shifting out of clean tech, Mark moved to MemVu to become their CEO. Most recently, Mark has joined Polaris Health Directions.  Polaris Health Directions develops

When should you sell your venture capital backed start-up? Entrepreneur Dennis Clerke joins me to discuss the start-up CEO's critical task of managing a company's path to an exit.  Dennis discusses how to monitor your company's market environment and internal investor dynamics, so that you can exit at the optimal time.  We also chat about promoting robust team debate while avoiding cancerous team dysfunction. My Guest As President of Monetization Dennis leads the content-monetization business at NetSeer, helping publishers derive greater revenue and user engagement from display and enhanced search.  He also continues to work with other emerging software companies through his advisory firm DaggerBoard Advisors. Dennis has worked with a number of software organizations on issues such as business strategy, implementation, market strategy, product development and financing. Clients include 3E Company, Alliance One, Bunkspeed, Netseer, RealGifts, Nirvanix, Captaris, SpectorSoft and TitleTrac. Previously, he served

What is The Venture Capital Coroner’s Report?  Why should you listen to it? And who is Mark W King? (and why does he use his middle initial?) Great questions that I answer in Episode Zero, The Prologue.  After 17 years in the venture capital industry, I felt it was time for a public forum to discuss what we’ve learned about entrepreneurship, start-ups, venture capital and business in general from the huge number of companies that have not ended in success.  In this prologue I explain my background in the VC industry and my plans for this podcast. My Background Since graduating from Wheaton College in 1988, I've been involved in entrepreneurial finance.  The theme to my career is loaning money to entrepreneurs who on the surface didn't look like they could pay it back. I started worked in international micro lending and urban development lending.  Then I took the plunge into Venture Debt.  Since 1997 I've had the privilege of working with the same core group of people.  We've moved firms a few times and experi