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.

From Startup To 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 5)

SM: The strategic moves you implemented seemed to have allowed you to scale very quickly. RK: They certainly did, especially in the 2003 to 2004 timeframe.

From Startup To 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 4)

SM: What differentiated VistaPrint in such a crowded market? RK: In retrospect, a couple of things differentiated VistaPrint and made us succeed. We didn’t try to apply the Internet just to the traditional printing industry. We came from a desktop publishing background and a manufacturing background.

From Startup To 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 3)

SM: The catalogue business was at $3 million dollars. What level had it declined to when you sold it, and who did you sell it to? RK: It had declined to $2 million and it was only in Europe. We sold it to the management team in February of 2001. We then put all of

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From Startup To 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 2)

SM: So you did not really take that model to market. RK: When we finally launched I was able to convince Microsoft France to distribute our catalogues in every box of Microsoft Publisher. That gave us a mechanism to reach out to small businesses who were already buying desktop publishing and who we thought would

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