Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 5)

SM: What happened after you closed the fund? Did the thesis check out? What was happening in the marketplace, and how did you get your positioning and your thesis out there to solicit deals? BJ: SalesForce.com went public as we were closing our first fund, and that proved to be a home run for Emergence.

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 4)

SM: Can you give some examples of companies using these subscription or transaction models? BJ: EBay and Travelocity are two. These are companies providing a service over the net to consumers but they are getting paid for the service. That was critical to us. SM: You had a bias towards subscription service versus advertising, which

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 3)

SM: There was a piece of the services industry that is well known, which is consulting services. That is not what you have in mind when you say services. BJ: Correct. We are talking about technology companies that use their technology to provide a service and usually they are using a network to deliver that

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 2)

SM: Even so, 2002 was not a great time to start a new fund. BJ: No, it was a horrible time to do that! SM: Tell me more about that experience. BJ: I knew a few VCs who had tried to raise a new fund in 2002, and most of them gave up. They concluded

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 1)

Most Venture Capitalists that entrepreneurs work with these days have never been entrepreneurs themselves. They have not had to take substantial personal risks. They are used to cushy lifestyles, fat paychecks, and existing brands that their firms have built long before they came on board.

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 13)

SM: What is your take on the Street’s understanding of how to analyze SaaS companies. Why are SaaS companies down so much? MG: It is coming around. I think SaaS gets put in the same bucket as tech. Right now there is a lack of visibility and understanding of how the future is going to

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Stardoll for Little Girls: Mattias Miksche (Part 3)

SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track? MM: We do not comment on our financials. We’re over 7 million uniques a month today and hope to be in the double digits soon. We’re over 2 million uniques in the U.S and over a million

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Stardoll for Little Girls: Mattias Miksche (Part 2)

SM: How did Paperdollheaven come about? MM: Some of the ideas were already there – the initial magic of paperdollheaven.com was all because of Liisa, our original founder and her vision of a fun, creative place for a forgotten demographic on the web: young girls. The new team then added the idea of personalized avators

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