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Innovation Bay Pitches In, Entrepreneurs Plate Up

Last night I hosted a fun Angel Dinner together with my Innovation Bay co-conspirators. Ross Dawson has covered the event most admirably - check out his blog post of the event. I’d like to thank those who attended: the entrepreneurs who stepped up to the plate and gave excellent pitches, NICTA for sponsoring, Table for Twenty for their excellent service, but most of all, Phaedon Stough and Ian Gardiner for pulling it all together on top of their busy day jobs.

As Ross mentioned we had someone from the Federal Department of Innovation introduce the group to the Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute. That someone was Donna Valenti and I am most grateful to her for making the trek down from Canberra.

I’d asked Donna to come along as a way to kickstart a dialogue around what the formula for success should be for the CCI. They are in a process of consulting the start up community and it was good to have her share their current thinking.

The key questions for me, with respect to the CCI are: How best can the Australian tech community (in its broadest sense - ICT, bio, nano - researchers, entrepreneurs, investors etc) leverage this incredible opportunity to ensure Australia punches well above its current commercialisation weight? What precedents exist that we can point to, what are the measures of success and how can the Government adequately gauge sufficient economic, social and other ROI for its decision to deploy $196m initially and then around $80m annually? And finally, how can we create an environment in which entrepreneurial magic happens, continuously?

As you can imagine, I have some strong thoughts about these questions, but I’d very much like to hear your thoughts and aspirations - in an ideal world without constraints, how would you envisage the CCI unfolding?

I’d also like to hear from folks, especially in Silicon Valley, who have thoughts around how best to leverage up the current funding for the Institute so that it extends the ramp further for Australian start ups.

Tags: CCI, Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute, Innovation Bay

Startup Lesson No.1: Make Your Own Path

Last evening I had the absolute privilege of being a judge in the Creative Sydney Back My Project initiative. Chosen from a deep pool of applicants eight finalists duked it out on stage in front of a packed room at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the background the Opera House flickered through a panoply of colours, exuding the freshness and vibrancy of Sydney and the mood of the crowd. On stage the pressure was on.

With just four minutes to present, the teams acquitted themselves extremely well and after taking questions from us judges the audience got to applaud for their favorite while we adjourned to deliberate. It didn’t take us long to realise a clear favorite had emerged from the crowd as the applause was deafening for one of the finalists.

Us judges didn’t know who this was, and independently we concurred with them - there was a clear winner. The team, Soapbox Project, had both wowed the room and for us judges we felt they would be able to achieve the most impact from the prize we could award them.

It was a great evening and especially gratifying for me to see the raw entrepreneurial and creative energy unleashing itself in this most wonderful of cities.

Now on to the topic of my heading. Every one of those finalists had one thing in common. A strong desire to carve their own way, a desire to be different, a desire not to follow the herd. This is the key trait required to be a true entrepreneur - and it is demonstrated most beautifully in the following video.

Keep watching. Keep doing:

[Via andrewg]

Tags: backmyproject, creativesydney

Australian Venture Capital: Super Shake Up

BusinessWeek has a great profile piece on prolific early stage venture capitalist, Josh Kopelman of US firm First Round Capital:  Super Angels Shake Up Venture Capital. The article’s take is to delve into the world of investors who are running counter to the cycle. While everyone else is running away from risk, these guys are running into the fire and making investments.

A core premise behind the piece is that in an IPO and acquisition-starved market, the math of billion dollar VC funds doesn’t add up. Enter the traditional, venture capital as cottage industry style fund - smaller, leaner, more agile and definitely more entrepreneurial, similar in nature to the people it invests in and both able to identify with and nuture successful entrpreneurs.

It’s a good article and well worth the read.

I am witnessing somewhat of a shake up in the VC industry in Australia at the moment as well. Together with two partners, I’ve been running Innovation Bay since November 2003. At the time I was an early stage VC and there were a number of other players in the market. Over the next 5 and a half years though, the VC industry has gone through some major contractions. The number of active VCs has totally shrunk, yet the demand for capital and savvy advice has continued to rocket.

Fast forward to mid 2009. Innovation Bay is hosting a new format event on the 9th June. We are putting on an Angel Dinner for a select subset of our members, many of whom easily fall within the BusinessWeek rubric of ’super angels’.

We are inviting along two technology entrepreneurs to pitch their ventures. I’ve been truly amazed at the number and talent of the entrepreneurs who have approached us with a view to being chosen. The hardest part for me is that I’d love to have them all along, but alas we have to limit the numbers for this event.

The demand, though, does point to a real need in Australia and I am hopeful that the newly announced Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute will play a major role in satisfying this demand.

I am also going to be a judge in a pitching competition for creative projects called Back My Project. It is part of the Creative Sydney festival of ideas and has a pool of cash behind it. Come along to the MCA on the 4th June if you are in Sydney - it will be loads of fun. It is all part of Vivid Sydney, the “biggest international music and light festival in the Southern Hemisphere”!

Tags: Australia, Commonwealth Commercialisation Institute, Venture Capital

British To Mind The Venture Gap With Billion Pound Funding

If things look tough in the Valley, spare a thought for companies trying to raise funding in the far flung reaches of the galaxy.

The UK Government is apparently taking this seriously and is going to launch an emergency venture capital fund to help startups through the funding gap that has grown yawingly big in recent weeks.

Do it. Fast. Don’t get caught up in bureaucracy. And whatever you do, don’t give the usual suspects the purse strings. Get innovative, get entrepreneurial and make speed your friend. Startups will love ya for it!

Other thoughts: broadstuff .

Will other countries follow their lead?

[Pic courtesy of HDR London]

Social Network User-Placed Videos Get Auditude With MySpace and MTV

Palo Alto-based Auditude is a startup focused on identifying videos, and parts of videos, uploaded to the web and then overlaying ads within these clips. They’ve amassed a database of over 250 million videos and 4 years of TV content and have now done a deal with MySpace and MTV that will allow these parties to monetize the videos being uploaded by MySpace users.

As MySpace’s president of sales and marketing is quoted as saying in the LA Times, “This is a game changer.”

No longer are the content players swimming against the tide - if this holds as a precedent, we should see a complete about face and some strong strokes as they all try to pull ahead in the race to monetize their content.

Tags: Auditude, MTV, MySpace

Cloudera: Hadooping The Downturn

A group of Silicon Valley technologists are thumbing their noses at the down(turn)-talk and setting up a new venture to provide support to companies wanting to make use of Hadoop.

Bay-area based Cloudera will provide enterprise-level support for Apache’s top level, open source map reduce technology, which enables companies with large amounts of data to have significantly more detailed analysis and efficiencies related to this data.

The team includes Michael Olson, the former CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of the open source embedded database engine Berkeley DB, which Oracle acquired in 2006.

Other founders include Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the data team at Facebook and Christophe Bisciglia, who created Google’s Academic Cloud Computing Initiative.

According to Venturebeat, the fourth founder, Amr Awadallah, is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners - while this does not guarantee they will back Cloudera (ask former Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale - he was an EiR with them before they passed on funding Second Life), there is a good possibility they will tip into a round to get the company operational.

Tags: Accel, Amr Awadallah, Cloudera, Hadoop, Jeff Hammerbacher, Michael Olson

iPhone App Development Grows Up: Goldminers and Litigators Arrive

Last year the flavor was Facebook’s F8 Platform. This year it’s been all about iPhone apps. Fast followers, like Google, with Android, and RIM are emulating Apple’s app store, but the defining moment(s) that point to the platform having reached a stage of nascent maturity are twofold:

* firstly, the Sydney Morning Herald has cottoned on to the fact that there is good money to be made from developing apps - I’ll let you read the piece written by Asher Moses for yourselves, but I suspect/hope the developers will now descend on this new vein of “easy” moola;

* secondly, an iPhone developer has taken on Coors in a litigation over a beer drinking app emulation that users the iPhone’s tilt motion. Brave move, I wish Hottrix luck and hope their law firm is taking this on purely on contingency.

It will be great to see more developers tapping into these mobile app stores, but the key will be in keeping up the quality in the apps.

Tags: Android, Apple, Google, iPhone, RIM

Silicon Valley: WAKE.the F. UP. - this ain’t Wall Street or a Walk in the Park

You gotta hand it to Dave McClure. He has a way of saying things. If you are in Silicon Valley, aspire to be or simply live the Valley-way wherever you happen to be then you oughta read his take on things.

Sure, the rosy glow surrounding our world may have dimmed, but hey - your’e in the fast lane…keep on drivin’ - HARD!

[Picture of Elon Musk driving a Tesla provided by kqedquest]

Tags: Dave McClure

TechCrunch5(2) Reductio: “Sell to Google, Never!”

This was definitely drinking-from-the-fire-hydrant week in California for high tech startups. Three days of TC50 demos, parties with Scoble-Mooregate verifying the echo chamber effect is alive and well in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood (if you believe Valleywag, that is) and Jason Calacanis venting steam while still miked up for all on uStream to hear.

As I tweeted yesterday, while the event may have been marred with a few second year mishaps, all in all kudos to the organisers (aka Tyler and his team) for providing an excellent tech showcase.

Two questions emerge - firstly, what will the landscape look like next year. Can Chris Shipley and Calacarrington kiss and make up in time for the first DEMOCrunch event. Or will a professional competitor come in from left field and clean up the space?

Secondly, what was the final set of take outs from the three days. I’m sure we all filtered the event in different ways but for me here are the salient points:

* Product placement as an up and coming business trend ran through the conference as a theme — highlighted by a comment from prolific angel investor, Ron Conway: “it’s a multi billion dollar business emerging right before our eyes”;

* Yossi Vardi once and for all categorized business plans: “as a great sub genre in the science fiction section”;

* Collaborative venture capitalist Peter Thiel defined the holy grail of creating business value: maximizing optionality. He felt that Facebook’s $15bn valuation is justified through the company’s extensible optionality. This is a theme to explore more in the coming months;

* And lastly fellow South African and Sequioa venture guy, Roelof Botha urged startups to “trim down their aperture and focus on key user pain points”.

The rally cry for the event though had to be one startup founder’s response to the question of whether he would sell to Google: “Never!”

Tags: Demi Moore, Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrnington, Peter Thiel, Robert Scoble, Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, TechCrunch50, Yossi Vardi

DemoCrunch Week: Under Starter’s Orders…

It’s going to be a busy week ahead in California for start up followers what with Demo taking place in San Diego and TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco.

There is bound to be heaps of coverage of both events, but as a starting point Rafe Needleman’s guide is as good a place as any to begin.

Personally I cannot help but think that there are more efficient ways of cutting through the morass than these cattle call-like events. But for now this is the way it is.

Anyone remember the days of Garage’s Kickstart for Startups events? Yeah, it’s all been done before, guys - nothing unique or earth shattering, but have fun out there and try not to squint under the lights!

Tags: Demo, TechCrunch 50