SDForum: Shaping the New Age Of App Development, Venture investments| Tech happenings

SDForum: Shaping the New Age Of App Development, Venture investments

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Kevin Efrusy, Accel Pasanna Krishnan, Draper Fisher Jurveston Lars Leckie, Hummer Winblad Jon Teo, Benchmark Moderated by: Christine Crandell, Egenera

What leads to success
- Own the community
- Love your customer, own your product (testing, coding, product spec)
Characteristics VC are looking for in entrepreneurs they funding are not different than in a better economy but more focus on
- new ways of creating, selling, marketing, monetizing your app
  - creative marketing/scale that increases bang for each buck in maximum, allow trial for free
  - Monetizing it as a service, managing the application lifecycle and not the development time
  - Use of opensource gets you out to the market in a frictionless way
- cloud computing model to go after conflicting view points
  - app development tools lousy business go to software as a service
  - app development tools good business
Funding rounds
- DFI common mistake getting series A and planned for getting another round before becoming profitable, hard to get series B now
- Benchmark only thing that will get a series A investor excited is traction and some monetization already.
What VC’s are looking for product, market, and team. Order of importance varied across panelists
- Kevin, Accel: You CAN change the market. The right passionate can get it done. Like businesses where teams dev something that solves a burning problem that they have.
- DFI product, market, team
- Benchmark: would someone fund passionate people with integrity, going after something they can chew on
Opportunities
- small-budget items that can be purchased in bite-sized pieces
- IT infrastructure equipment that saves money
- data analytics, cloud and Cleantech
- make money in distributed web content model
- opportunity for virtualization of desktop
Want to see
- Benchmark: VC monetization model for transactional and relational apps
- DIF: cloud computing third wave of computing evolution