Billion Dollar Unicorns: Cloud Investment Thesis of 5 VCs

Last fall, we had five VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Cloud Computing investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and Carnival In The Cloud. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Cloud Computing domain, I strongly recommend you listen to these five interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

Discussion with Brian Jacobs, Emergence Capital

The firm has one of the clearest investment thesis I have ever seen. It was unknown and started during the downturn after the dotcom crash. I did a comprehensive interview with Brian, one of the firm’s founders, in 2008, that traces their founding thought process. At a time when SaaS was unknown as a category, Emergence decided to bet on it. The bet worked. They became one of the top SaaS / Cloud domain experts, and boast a fabulous portfolio, including solid exits like SuccessFactors, Yammer, and Veeva.

In this session, Brian discussed his views on where cloud opportunities are likely to be at this point. While we’re in a mature market, he is still bullish on innovation.

Discussion with Jason Lemkin, Storm Ventures

Jason, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. You can read our Entrepreneur Journeys interview with Jason here.

This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.

Discussion with Dave Hornik, August Capital

Dave, as some of you may know, shocked the industry about 10 years back by being the first VC to start blogging. His peers were aghast!

Well, clearly, he saw something before everybody else, and today, many VCs blog, Tweet, and do all sorts of other things to engage in social media, now a dominant force in the industry.

Dave discussed a number of points, of which, I want to particularly draw your attention to his views on the subject of Freemium.

Discussion with Ann Winblad, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners

Ann is one of the most successful women VCs in our industry, and as I mention in my introduction, I have never heard her whining about bias against women.

One of the most encouraging things she discussed is how her firm is sourcing interesting ventures from all over the world, not just Silicon Valley. Mulesoft, one of their hot portfolio companies, had its CEO based in Malta, originally!

Discussion with Naren Gupta, Nexus Venture Partners

Nexus Venture Partners is a firm with an excellent track record of investing in the Silicon Valley – India corridor, but with a global market point of view.

Naren discussed some of his cloud investments in DimDim, Druva, and Aryaka. Each of them are unique cloud offerings started by Indian entrepreneurs, but catering to global markets. DimDim was a web conferencing product that Salesforce acquired, and Naren discussed how well DD Ganguly, the founder, bootstrapped before raising financing from Nexus.

The conversation is full of insights, nuggets, and interesting wisdom from a veteran investor who is also strikingly polite and humble. Definitely, one of my favorites in the business!

This segment is a part in the series : Billion Dollar Unicorns