Please join us for a special evening event at the estate of Woodside Capital partner Kelly Porter. Our newest sponsor, Michael Marquez from CODE Advisors, has assembled six giants of corporate development on one stage: Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo!
Our discussion will center on the new world of acquisitions. Our esteemed panel will share what each of their companies are looking for, what has and hasn’t worked in the past, and where they see the acquisition landscape going in the future.
Now more than ever we are seeing acquisitions for talent, where teams are purchased and products end of life’d. We are also seeing far more acquisitions where products are rebuilt from scratch inside the new company. As new industries form around mobile and social, companies are transforming themselves by acquiring the focus and momentum of those brave enough to risk tackling new markets. You will likely never see a line up like this again, so RSVP early to reserve your spot in the grand ballroom.
Derek Idemoto, Cisco
Derek Idemoto is the Director of Corporate Development at Cisco Systems, and is responsible for driving Cisco’s strategy, acquisitions and investments across the consumer and digital media markets. Prior to joining Cisco, Derek was Managing Director of Venture Investment for ITOCHU Technology, the Silicon Valley-based technology venture capital investment and business development arm of ITOCHU Corporation. Prior to joining ITOCHU Technology, Derek was Vice President of Corporate Development at Overture Services, the pioneer of commercial search services on the Internet. Derek received a B.S. in finance and marketing from U.C. Berkeley an M.B.A. from The Anderson School at UCLA where he was a Venture Fellow.
Michael Brown, Facebook
Michael Brown is Manager of Corporate Development at Facebook. Mike’s primary responsibilities at Facebook include acquisitions and corporate strategy. Prior to joining Facebook, Mike was a Principal at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley where he led numerous investments in the consumer Internet sector. Mike started his career at McKinsey & Company in the Firm’s San Francisco office. Mike is an investor in and/or active advisor to a number of Silicon Valley companies including Counsyl, RockYou, Structural Wealth Management, Satisfaction Inc., Tapulous, and Brilliant Earth. Mike attended Yale University and Stanford Business School.
Amin Zoufonoun, Google
Amin Zoufonoun joined Google in 2003, and is a senior member of its Corporate Development team, which is responsible for evaluating, negotiating and executing Google’s mergers, acquisitions and investments. He has led several of Google’s key strategic acquisitions and investments both in the U.S. and internationally, including Google’s first acquisition of a publicly traded company (On2). Previous to Google, Amin was a practicing attorney, both in-house and at a number of Silicon Valley law firms. Amin holds bachelors degree in electrical engineering as well as a Juris Doctor (law) degree.
Fritz Lanman, Microsoft
Fritz Lanman is Senior Director in Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions at Microsoft, where his responsibility spans strategy development across Microsoft divisions, advisory to the CFO, CEO and Board of Directors as well as Corporate Development for Board level deals. He especially focuses on Microsoft’s emerging businesses in Search, Advertising, Mobile and Entertainment and he has worked on several large deals for Microsoft including Facebook and Yahoo.
Jessica Verrilli, Twitter
Jessica works on Corporate Development, New Business Development, and Special Projects at Twitter. She has played an influential role in the company’s search partnerships, Series E financing, and acquisitions. She is currently working on new commercial programs and ongoing M&A. Jessica joined Twitter from Venrock, a venture capital firm, where she focused on technology and healthcare investment opportunities. Jessica is a graduate of Stanford University where she was a Division I lacrosse player and a Mayfield Fellow.
Taylor Barada, Yahoo!
In his current role, Taylor works with the Americas and Global Product orgs at Yahoo! leading strategic analysis/execution of acquisitions, divestitures, investments and other strategic relationships. Recent transactions include the sale of Zimbra to VMware and the acquisition of Citizen Sports. Prior to Yahoo! he worked as an investor, consultant, and operator at Rosewood Capital, Bain & Company, and Peregrine Systems. Taylor started his career as a professional soccer player and was a three time National Champion at the University of Virginia while completing his B.A. in History and Foreign Affairs.
Posted July 26th, 2010By Leonard SpeiserNo Comments
The venture capital industry in the midst of a dramatic transition as prominent firms have shut down and new ones have risen. What’s going to happen? Does it change how entrepreneurs should work with Angels and VCs? Does it change how they should choose firms?
We’ve asked three great–and outspoken–investors to give help us figure out what it all means. John Malloy (BlueRun), David Lee (SV Angels) and Steve Harrick (IVP) have invested in startups like PayPal, MySQL, Twitter, Spiceworks, Hunch and Slide. They’ll give a candid inside view into what the landscape looks like now for VCs and what has changed–and what has not changed–in the way that startups should raise money and find partners.
Join us for a lively panel and discussion on the new VC at our first dinner of the summer.
Steve Harrick
Steve Harrick joined Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) in October 2001 and has over twelve years of venture capital experience. He focuses on investing in later-stage technology companies with exceptional growth potential. Steve was recognized by Forbes Magazine as one of the top 100 venture capitalists in the world by his inclusion in the 2009 Forbes Midas List. He was also recognized by AlwaysOn as one of the top 100 venture capitalists by his inclusion in the AlwaysOn 2009 VC 100 List.
Steve led IVP’s investments in Aster Data Systems, Business.com (acquired by R.H. Donnelley Corp.), CafePress.com, eHealth (EHTH), MarkMonitor, Motion Computing, MySQL (acquired by Sun Microsystems, Inc.), RGB Networks, Spiceworks, Teros (acquired by Citrix Systems, Inc.), Tripwire, Varolii and WebEx (WEBX). He was actively involved in IVP’s investments in ArcSight (ARST), Danger (acquired by Microsoft Corp.) and Yext. Steve currently serves on the Board of Directors of MarkMonitor and Spiceworks and is a Board Observer for Aster Data Systems, Tripwire and Varolii.
David Lee
David Lee is General Partner of SV Angel, an angel fund that focuses on investments in the consumer Internet, mobile, video and other IT industries. Some current investments include Twitter, Hunch.com, StackOverflow, NowMov and DailyBooth. Prior to SV Angel, he was a partner at Baseline Ventures, a leading seed-stage investment firm with investments in companies like TrialPay, Aardvark (acquired by Google), Heroku and Weebly. He also had business development leadership positions at StumbleUpon and Google, and was an attorney at Morrison and Foerster representing high-tech companies in commercial transactions. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins, NYU (JD) and Stanford (MSEE), where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate fellow.
John Malloy
John is a General Partner and co-founder of BlueRun Ventures, formed in 1998. John’s commitment to entrepreneurs and their market vision is reflected by his thoughtful, passionate and consistent efforts to help founding teams reach the full potential of their endeavors.
John brings global operations and marketing experience into such investment areas as internet services, digital media and mobile broadband services. He has more than 20 years’ experience as an executive, entrepreneur, investor, and director of venture-backed start-ups, and has served on the boards of more than 20 companies. Most notably, he was the first venture investor and board member in Paypal, for which he was named on Forbes’ Midas List of Top Venture Capitalists.
Some of John’s current investments and boards include Chomp, Slide, Topsy, Varolii and FusionOne.
Prior to founding BRV, John served in management and executive roles with Nokia, Go Communications and MCI. He holds a J.D. from George Mason University and B.A. from Boston College.
Posted June 21st, 2010By Leonard SpeiserNo Comments
As Google I/O wraps up and we digest the news from Facebook and Twitter, startups need to decide where to invest their time and resources. If you had only one engineer, which platform, if any, would you invest your time? To make enough time for all the platforms, May’s Startup2Startup is going 100% Salon-style. To help you review, here are just a few of the contenders:
Google
Making Waves, Doing the Robot, Business Apps or just good ole fasion SEO. Google still accounts for most of the world’s traffic and a whole lot of the world’s online advertising dollars. You are evil if you don’t choose them.
Facebook
You gotta like Facebook, and if you do all your friends (and now the rest of the world) will know! Will you make Facebook the way people access your product? If you don’t, you are anti-social. Anti-social people are evil.
Twitter
@Anywhere you go, Twitter is there to broadcast your every move, making it the first place people go to find out what is happening in the world. Twitter has attracted the world’s rich and famous, how about you? And wannabees who use auto-follow tools to jack up their numbers and look famous, well, you are evil.
Apple
Phone? Check. Computer? Check. Tablet? Check. Glasses? Check around our bar and you might just find their latest creation. Apple may soon trump everyone as they remind us all the machine gets first dibs on the user. Be evil, but do it with style!
Microsoft
Who? Oh, that multi-billion dollar company that can infinitely spend until they win in a market? If you are counting Microsoft out already, you are a Silicon Valley elitist (and probably proud of it). Azure, Silverlight, Windows Mobile aren’t getting much love in the press, but maybe you should look at Quantcast to be reminded they are still in the game. Be evil, but don’t be anti-trust evil.
This month, we’re moving our dinner to San Francisco to host three key members of the PayPal mafia: Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Jeremy Stoppelman. Our own Dave McClure will lead a fireside chat to talk about their PayPal experiences, compare current ventures and find out how startups are changing in the current environment.
Max Levchin is the founder and CEO of Slide, which creates and distributes popular Web applications on Facebook, MySpace, and elsewhere. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
David Sacks is founder and CEO of Geni and Yammer. Geni is the world’s largest family tree, allowing families to share their genealogy online. Yammer is a micro-blogging service for the enterprise, boasting over 70,000 businesses worldwide. At PayPal, Sacks was the Chief Operating Officer, where he managed 700 employees and oversaw many departments, including product management and design. Sacks attended Stanford University and holds a J.D. from University of Chicago Law School.
Jeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp. Yelp, founded in 2004, is a local reviews site which connects people with great local businesses. They had over 31 million uniques in March, 2010. At PayPal, Stoppelman was the VP of engineering. Stoppelman founded Yelp after his first year at Harvard Business School, and before that, was an engineer at Excite@Home.
Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of internet startups. We meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology and entrepreneurship, connect with new people and companies, and share our knowledge and experience.
Bradley oversees product management for Google Apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Docs, Blogger and Picasa. Before joining Google, Bradley led Yahoo’s advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.
Bradley holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab and was pursuing his Ph.D. there when he co-founded Virage.
Pre-event interview video with Bradley Horowitz and Dave McClure:
