Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 10)

SM: You announced this million dollar challenge for SaaS startups developing on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. What are you seeing in response to that? BJ: We have a great relationship with Salesforce.com, and as you know their big initiative now is their Force.com platform – the ability for a developer to use the SalesForce infrastructure to

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 9)

SM: What is in your portfolio in those later two categories? BJ: We mentioned InsideView as an information service. We have a company called Krugle which provides a search engine for software developers. Most software developers start with a base of code, often an OpenSource project they download as the basis for a new project.

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India’s Labor Arbitrage Strategy

It has been an interesting few days of being on the receiving end of tremendous hate mail due to my widely syndicated and (looks like) read and discussed Death of Indian Outsourcing article.

Deal Radar 2008: Lucidera

LucidEra, the on-demand business intelligence solution provider was founded in 2005 by Ken Rudin, John Sichi and Tai Tran. We had featured Ken Rudin, the CEO of LucidEra last year in an interview.

Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 8)

SM: An example is when InsideView did the acquisition of True Advantage and laid off 150 people who were doing the same thing manually. I wrote a piece recently called the “Death of Indian Outsourcing” that featured InsideView and I talked about that example. My thesis is the Indian BPO industry is very much at

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 7)

SM: Tell me about some of the deals that you have done since coming into existence, and what is unique about them? BJ: Since we started Emergence we have had three IPOs. That is pretty good for a young firm. Obviously SalesForce.com was one. We also invested in a software provider in the Human Resources

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Why is it so hard to develop a drug that cures cancer?

By Carlo Maley, Guest Author [SM: Carlo is an old friend of mine from MIT. We met at orientation in 1993. At the time, there was no formal field called Computational Biology, which was his area of interest.] We all know that cancer is a big, scary problem. Approximately 40% of Americans will get some

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Pushing the Performance Edge of Your Business Model

By Michael Kanazawa, Guest Author Many companies play it too safe within the confines of their business model. That’s a fancy way for saying they often accept too little in terms of pricing and don’t fully leverage their purchasing power. For private equity investors, one driver of finding new value in existing companies is to

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