The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 6)

SM: A third major area in which I would like to see leadership is in education. What do you think needs to happen for that momentum to build up? GT: We are seeing innovation on education in two fronts. One innovation trend in education is the notion of crowdsourcing education in modules.

The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 5)

SM: There was a time when VCs stepped into uncharted territory even though they did not understand the risks. The disruptive potential made all the risk worth it. Today, if we need to break open new areas of potential, my guess is that they will be in territories which require cross-domain innovation. That will require

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The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 4)

SM: Since the dot-com crash we have seen a few different things come together. The SaaS market has really developed, and the Web 2.0 and cleantech markets have also developed. SaaS and Web 2.0 are not capital intensive areas which have had a lot of investment while cleantech is very capital intensive. What is your

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The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 3)

SM: You are a $300 million fund, but is your structure a standard 2 + 20? GT: We don’t discuss the actual structure of our fund, but it is identical to our historical structure. When we started, [we were] circulating the idea that we would raise Trinity 10 with an identical focus to our other

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The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 2)

SM: You are saying the early venture capital industry was performance driven? You could not get a lot of management fee-driven income with $31 million. GT: Yes. The mentality of the people who entered the business in the late 1980s, the early 1990s and when I entered it in 1996 was that you joined the

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The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 1)

Gus Tai is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures and joined the firm in 1996. He focuses on consumer-enabling technologies and services and enterprise software. His past investments include Blue Nile, eSurance, Photobucket and Sygate. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard and an MS in engineering and an MBA from MIT. SM:

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From Startup To 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 7)

SM: Earlier you explained how you made a transition from your core business to a much wider variety of businesses. One area that seems like an obvious opportunity for you is in the software-as-a-service business. SaaS does carter to a lot of small businesses with various solutions, including email marketing and CRMs. Have you considered

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From Startup To 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 6)

SM: What is your current operating margin? RK: Our net profit after tax is about 10%. Our EBIDTA is about 23%. Our operating profit is in the teens.