It continues to amaze me how VCs point to the economic downturn as a reason for sluggish investing. We all know that at this point they should do exactly the opposite (and a few good ones do).

Information Technology is here to stay as we clearly have not reached the saturation point of its practical implementation, even though short-term M&A and IPO windows have pretty much closed - for now.

But I am especially dismayed by the fact that VCs seem to completely ignore responsibility for the fact that their investments strategies can’t seem to weather the storm and how they continue to hide behind the economic downturn to avoid the disclosure of their bad choices. Reminds you of anyone?

I don’t believe the VC model is broken, in the same way I don’t believe mortgage lending is broken. We will continue to buy new houses - and technologies. Both represent sizable investment returns for years to come. But the risk profile associated with lending money for a home has been miscalculated and I contend the majority of VCs are fundamentally miscalculating the risk of early-stage investing. Birds of a feather.

Here are some of the similarities:

1/ The sheer number of lenders entering the mortgage arena forced an artificial expansion into the low-end. In the technology industry about 790 US investors force a similar artificial expansion down into the low-end. Most entrepreneurs are forced to comply to the “capital efficiency” rule-book or, as I call it, sub-prime VC.

2/ The majority of people working at the mortgage bank cannot accurately assess the risk profile, neither can the majority of people working at a VC firm. The associate in a VC firm (or worse the General Partner), fresh out of school is simply not able to detect disruption. Schools are, by design, setup to teach students about white-swans, not the black swan that usually spawns real innovation.

3/ The lenders took advantage of uneducated buyers, without sufficiently reminding them that buying a house yields a debt, not an asset. Similarly, entrepreneurs are often made to believe they are successful when they land a round of funding, mistaking that for an asset (instead of a liability) and subsequently not paying enough attention to the acquisition of its real assets; new paying customers.

4/ The majority of home-buyers should not have qualified. Similarly, most technology ideas should not. Innovation is only meaningful when it monetizes ideas. So investing based on technology classifications is the wrong qualification of innovation.

As the included chart attempts to depict, the investment strategies in the 1990s and even the exuberance in 2000 produced better variance and returns than the atrophy created by the current VC rule-book. Now, too many investors herd (syndicate) around the same investment strategy, diminishing its returns and making it increasingly less attractive for smart entrepreneurs who refuse to submit themselves to subprime investment rules.

An artificial VC rule-book, sub-prime valuations, lower founder salaries, fewer M&A and zero IPO makes for a very unattractive entrepreneurial playground. If we don’t throw the VC rule-book out of the window, we should expect nothing more than sub-prime M&A and sub-prime IPOs, even when the economy recovers.

The concern is that we are creating fewer companies that someday have the financial wherewithal to acquire its smaller innovative brethren and like the lending market, are stuck with “innovation” that no-one wants to buy. I wrote about that starting more than 3 years back (here, here, here). We need VCs with the ability to spot disruptive business opportunities rather than perpetuate technology gimmickery.

Perhaps we can put the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) to work on something better than mindless self congratulating statistics of the past and misleading videos of the actual workings of venture capital today. It could instead create more transparency of its members, to stave off tougher selection and regulation from the Limited Partners (pension funds etc.) that are otherwise unavoidable.

We, as collective contributors to the technology ecosystem - not the elusive economy - are responsible for the performance of our industry and our ability to produce real value that can weather any storm, and that means we need to get out of sub-prime VC quickly.

Tags: VC, Investment, Integrity, Innovation, Risk, Limited Partners

Not for a second do I buy into the doom-and-gloom spread by early stage investors citing the state of the economy as the reason for cutbacks. While the economic situation is worrisome, much of it is generated by supposed financial and business experts that are not. To say the least.

Sounds familiar? We have a few of those in Silicon Valley too. When money is involved, some people just can’t help themselves (or rather the opposite).

Investors still have plenty of overhang to invest with and their portfolio companies are on a 5-7 year trajectory to exit, meaning the viability of their choices is determined by the value at the end, not the value in the middle or the trajectory. The macro-economic value of a startup should remain intact in an economic downturn. So, the behavior of your investor will tell you whether you “married” well.

Very few startups should be materially impacted by the state of the economy, because:

1/ Their early stage market penetration is immaterial to the overall addressable “market”, leaving enough room for growth in any economy.

2/ The majority of (consumer focused) startups generate income through indirect monetization such as click-thru advertising, which is somewhat resilient to economic aberrations (even though purchasing may not).

3/ In early stage development, monetization is secondary to land-grab, and smart operating plans have very conservative and immaterial income projections built-in.

So, the fact that investors strike fear in the minds of entrepreneurs is the same as a president of a country at war expressing similar fear; not productive. Sure you need to be cautious and count your chickens, but great investors see this as a fantastic opportunity to double-down on their investments and amplify the market differentiation rather than restrict it.

Access to capital is a serious barrier to entry that can keep competitors out. So, if you are being restricted by your investor at this point it means he’s just not that into you and is doing you more harm than good.

Tags: VC, Markets, Investment, Economy, Consumer

I recently watched an interview on Charlie Rose with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and decided his “Black Swan” theory accurately describes the fundamental problem in early-stage technology investing (and innovation in general).

To paraphrase Taleb; the cultural assumption is that all swans are white (and therefor black swans could not exist). So you think.

Taleb (a partner at an investment firm) believes that scientists, economists, historians, policymakers, businessmen, and financiers are victims of an illusion of pattern; they overestimate the value of rational explanations of past data, and underestimate the prevalence of unexplainable randomness in that data.

The proof that Silicon Valley suffers from the white swan syndrome lies amongst many in the foolish behavior of investors, the predetermined investment allocations based on the tagging with ambiguous acronyms (such as web2.0, SOA, Cloud computing, CRM etc.) and the mindless herding of primarily unsuccessful ideas (or copies of a few successes) at the many popular technology conferences.

I am inclined to take Taleb’s theory a bit further: I believe the majority of people are victims of an illusion of pattern, established by years of (often irrelevant) education infused with the technology Kool-Aid that confined their thinking to a predetermined direction and scope. It prevented entrepreneurs and investors from ever being able to identify true innovation until it had become part of their past. Hence the rampant number of false positives and false negatives.

Taleb further adds that black swans are actually the ones that change the industry, and that the so-called “unexplainable” events (that have no single precedent in time) redefine the future of the whole industry. And so, the search is on, not just for the investor with the right macro-economic views, morals and personality, but also the vision to spot innovation that has no precedent - the black swan.

The noise in our industry is still drowning out the music. We need to change the way we invest and improve our ability to spot black swans or otherwise we will lose the entrepreneurs that can build them. Our excuse today is not the economy but our own performance in producing truly disruptive value that can withstand the test of time. We need to put real entrepreneurs on a pedestal and throw the copycats to the curb, quickly.

Albert Einstein was right all along: imagination is more important than knowledge. That applies to investors too.

Tags: VC, Innovation, Macro-economics, Einstein

Silicon Valley is not dissimilar from the politics in Washington DC in the sense that its existence today is regulated by aristocratic people (investors) who are not up for re-election for another 7-10 years and have created an ecosystem that spawns more false positives and false negatives than any politician could ever get away with.

So, it is not without a smile on my face (as I have been preaching and practicing for years) that I quote Barack Obama’s innovative approach to politics that we in Silicon Valley could learn from:

Strong personalities and strong opinions
Obama looks for strong personalities and strong opinions, while the venture business is often afraid to hire people who challenge its popular opinion. Many technology companies over the years have been invaded by managers who akin to the gold-rush are looking for the gold that is no longer easy to find. We need to change too and cultivate managers that have real experience, strong vision and strong abilities to rally a team around achievable results. Let’s get rid of managers that just like politicians prefer to feed their sex drive (my first boss in the US spent his days watching porn-videos as we prepared feverishly for a major launch) and their 401K with the least resistance possible.

Think anew and act anew
Obama is shaking things up. We should too. The really new ideas in technology are few and far between. We need to build and feel responsible for an ecosystem of new financiers that fund technology ideas that do not fit the mold, rather than continue to create clubs that mindlessly perpetuate businesses that copy few successes or popular acronyms.

Extreme transparency
Obama teaches us how the disclosure of governmental documents is the floor and not the ceiling. Compared to that metric, early-stage performance disclosure is probably more than 6 feet under, or in the cellar. We have no transparency in the venture business to discover who has integrity, and who is poisoning the technology ecosystem. We need to deliver transparency in order to improve the trust in technology companies that keeps private and public investor interested.

High integrity and moral
Obama, when moving back to Chicago, took a job doing what he believed in, not what made him the most money. We need to stimulate people in Silicon Valley with a passionate desire to fundamentally improve technology adoption, rather than continue to feed people who hone their skills just to get rich.

Use it or lose it
Obama evaluates and then commits quickly. And then, when the money is forked over, you are expected to make things happen. That’s how real savvy businessmen run their companies, quite different from the puppet role many startup CEOs play to appease their boards, the source of perpetual mediocrity. We need to grow a culture of buy-in and commit, risk and reward that holds people accountable for the results.

Either we regulate the early-stage technology ecosystem ourselves or the market will do it for us - with much less grace. Already, it is predicted that 25% of the VCs will go out of business soon, freeing up LP overhang for a new crop or reallocation to a new segment. Other countries (such as China) are not sitting still, the performance of our technology ecosystem will now be challenged on a global basis.

The only way not to lose grip globally is to hold the values, that made our country vote for Obama high, and aggressively reward integrity, passion and sincerity over greed. Real capitalism rewards the good and punishes the bad. And the American dream flourishes again.

Tags: Innovation, Eco-systems, Economy, Limited Partners, CEO, VC

For over 10 years I’ve built and managed growth for early stage innovation in Silicon Valley and more than ever do I believe that building real disruptive customer value is more important than trying to time an acquisition opportunity. You may too, unless of course you are a gambler and firmly believe that the $3 red-white-blue slot machines in Vegas consistently yield the greatest returns. I will not argue the outcome.

Acquisitions remain nothing more than a welcome diversion on your way to building the largest technology empire. And even now when IPOs have dried up any focus away from building your empire is damaging. Real disruptive innovation is resistant to economic aberrations and a consistent focus on customer value remains your only rescue.

I believe that IPOs for technology companies will return (and subsequently spur more pre-IPO acquisitions), albeit not with the same players. Real companies can only be built by real entrepreneurs, with real disruptive products supported by real investors. New participants (on both sides) with higher moral values will be the ones to restore trust in the technology industry and subsequently public stock markets that want a piece of it.

Today, the VCs are stuck with a product of their own aristocratic making. Commoditization of investment philosophies since the 1990s has generated technologies that can best be described as sexy-cool rather than disruptive and meaningful (with a few exceptions). It paved the way for get-rich-quick entrepreneurs that are skilled in feeding the dogs the dog-food, rather than support the real entrepreneurs that have a dissenting view of the world.

So, assuming you as an entrepreneur are for real, how would you recognize an investor that is not. Here are some of my anecdotal recommendations:

1/ Avoid an investor who blames his quick response on ADD
Attention Deficit Disorder is an illness, not a skill. Recommend the investor to consult a doctor.

2/ Avoid an investor who does not carry (or seriously considers) an iPhone
The iPhone is the biggest innovation in consumer electronics in my lifetime (so far) and if your potential investor does not understand its ramification to the technology ecosystem as a whole, it is unlikely he will get yours.

3/ Avoid an investor who cannot price your company ahead of you.
Any technology investor should be able to price the value of your disruption. Ask the investor for the valuation and if he is close to your target, you can share with him your cost model and where you are today on the trajectory. Cost model and stage (the risk) are a discount to the disruptive value, the ability to build the technology is merely a commodity. In Silicon Valley technology is not the risk, but market entry with sufficient disruption is. Walk away from investors that incorrectly evaluate the risk model.

4/ Avoid an investor whose partners you can’t stand
Investors in a fund make decisions collectively, they need partner consensus before they can invest - just like in politics (more on that later). A firm with a partner you don’t like should be taken off your VC prospect list, as you cannot risk the influence of the bad apple to your company’s future. Develop your personal blacklist (as we did) based on fundamental people principles.

5/ Avoid an investor who wears his education on his sleeve
Wearing a Super Bowl ring means you made it in the real world, wearing an Ivy League ring does not. I wholeheartedly agree with Craig Venter that later stage education (without operating experience) in general is a deterrent to creativity and innovation or the ability to spot and spawn it. The majority of Silicon Valley investors are remnants from a bull market, echoing beliefs that are founded on skewed business principles.

6/ Avoid an investor who asks really dumb questions and is proud of it.
I never thought dumb questions existed until I ran into one investor who proudly blogged about how other entrepreneurs simply walked away from him, making his life easier. We walked away from him too.

7/ Avoid an investor who thinks he knows your industry better.
Even in the unlikely scenario he does, you should still walk away. Investors that know industries better than the entrepreneur should have become one. So either the investor is better informed (which should send you back to the drawing board) or he thinks he does (which becomes a pain in board meetings). Investors see a lot of things that don’t work, rather than discover the opportunities that do.

The bottom line is that we recommend entrepreneurs not to squander their great ideas with the first investor that waves money in their face. Real disruption does not become extinct quickly and so you literally have years to find a great investor out of the 790 firms that exist in the United States.

Thankfully the get-rich-quick money schemes in technology are drying up, so make sure you, as the entrepreneur, also have the integrity to build real disruption that spawns real and lasting customer value for years to come.

I look forward to helping develop new investor 2.0 and entrepreneur 2.0 strategies with you.

Tags: IPhone, VC, Investment, Commodity, Entrepreneurs

As any economist will tell you, a dollar bill is not worth a dollar. And so the real value of that paper bill is defined by the trust we put in it. The trust that you will receive a certain (yet fluctuating; some days a dollar is worth more than others) amount of goods and services in exchange. Simple right?

So given that, trust is the most important denomination in determining the value of a product or a service. And trust builds from consistent delivery on stated promises, which - in turn - requires the unwavering commitment from people with integrity and honesty....do you feel the slide coming?

So:
1/ Why do many companies make promises they don’t keep?
I evaluate a lot of technology companies (about 60 this year alone, public and private) and most are simply lying about, or overstating (decibel marketing) the benefits of their proposition. Because the majority of potential customers and investors are ill-informed about the pros and cons of this specialized industry, technology companies can often get away with sneaky monetization strategies that take advantage of a lesser informed audience.

In Silicon Valley, “success” is often defined by how skilled you are in fooling customers and sucking up to aristocratic investors (to which few have access), rather than the authenticity of your proposition. A mediocre ecosystem is what still remains after the technology bust from 2001 in which self proclaimed “serial entrepreneurs” and investors have been able to dodge real value creation and sell out short.

Not the VC model is broken, but many of the participants are. That noise is severely eroding the trust in an inherently sound technology industry. We need to enforce more transparency and hold ourselves to higher standards to restore the integrity and trust.

2/ Why do we allow short-selling on public company stock?
First, the performance of public stock says nothing about the actual value or outlook of a company, in the same way the dollar offers no guarantee of what you get for it. Public stocks are already a lousy interpretation of the actual performance of a company, as it merely echos popular opinion (and not the company facts).

So, selling short is really a bet on performance of popular opinion and does nothing but undermine the trust in the longevity of a business and cannibalizes shareholder value. Quarterly earnings reports are an absolute joke as many companies move profits around, claim leadership in a market that is defined by themselves and reduce cost rather than improve their marketplace position in order to make quarterly earnings look good. They also force healthy companies to focus on often unpredictable economic aberrations rather than on their long term and macro-economic leadership position.

The ability to sell short creates unrest and undue fear in a system that requires the opposite. Can you imagine holding the president of the United States accountable on a quarterly basis? That would be bad for our country (in most cases).

We should implement a predetermined holding period for the sale of stock, the expiration determined by the company and regulated by the SEC (which can also prevent some nasty insider trader deals) to build back trust.

3/ Why are some allowed to resell securities?
Reselling securities (which was illegal a few years back) based on finagled credit scores are perhaps the double whammy in the erosion of trust in public companies. Company credit scores that are maintained (and marketed) by commercial companies create profit driven scores and unrealistic prices (up and down) for securities. We simply need to stop the resale of securities and regulate the process of maintaining credit scores (both business and personal) vigorously and immediately.

Regulations do not turn us into a socialistic society, but the reality is that no economy operates without rules to protect trust. Free-markets require a basic set of rules to prevent a few bad apples to create insurmountable fear for the rest of us.

For the technologists amongst us: eBay deploys no less than seven dedicated servers to detect suspicious transactions that could challenge the trust in its free-market model.

In the same way we deploy rigid traffic laws to drive a car, should we deploy rules of engagement to protect our economic serenity. As long as we don’t dictate the destination of our travels or where we place our individual economic bets, we should be just fine in our support of a blossoming capitalistic society.

Trust comes from transparency, integrity and authenticity that builds real value, not from taking advantage of the ill-informed. So, building a successful company does not start with a new product strategy but with a leader who has the drive to win that is larger than his greed. Building disruptive products that truly improve people’s lives will yield personal satisfaction and trust that will keep customers coming back for more.

Trust is the only currency that matters, so stop squandering it.

Tags: EBay, Economy, Eco-systems, Free-market, VC, Stock, Transparency, Securities, Capitalism, Macro-economics, Economy

When Facebook decided to integrate new application capabilities that were first available as a third-party application from a marketplace participant, they broke the cardinal rule of marketplace meritocracy. When Getty Images’ staff-photographers allegedly took new pictures similar to previously top-selling pictures from participants they too broke a fundamental marketplace rule. When Amazon.com optimized sales results based on margins requirements they too broke many of the free-market rules as described in “Look, but don’t touch”.

By calling themselves platforms or marketplaces those companies misled their participants and engaged in what I would characterize as false advertising. Not only did the suppliers expect to be treated equally and become successful based on a true meritocracy, buyers expected to get an untainted view of that meritocracy to make informed purchasing decisions.

Technology platforms need to obey to a simple macro-economic marketplace definition:

A marketplace connects unrestricted supply with unrestricted demand through an un-arbitrated and transparent exchange.

Marketplaces thrive because they support free-market principles, and as a result they level the playing field for all participants. No longer are unfair advantages for participants defined by geographic location, subscriptions, volume or other artificial boundaries, but simply by the value and the price of their products.

Here is what platform vendors, to maintain free-market principles and thrive, should stick to:

1/ Don’t employ sales people that sell marketplace content. Sales people give preference to specific content which violates the integrity of the marketplace. Sell the effectiveness of the marketplace mechanism instead.

2/ Don’t market specific content, but market the effectiveness of the exchange. Unfair advantage is an attribute of a premium market not a free-market.

3/ Don’t arbitrate. Anyone should be able to participate, participation fees (that anone in the target group can afford) are okay.

4/ Don’t hide sales results. Transparency of the effectiveness of the marketplace is crucial to invite new entrants on the supply and buy side.

5/ Don’t participate in the marketplace yourself. Clearly seperate yourself from the participants, platform vendors should just build the platform, not the content.

Technology companies that are building platforms should check out our cardinal marketplace rules and investors should measure their platform companies on the compliance to those rules. Investing in a premium market business is fundamentally different from investing in a free-market platform business. Funding requirements and use-of-proceeds differ dramatically.

I’ll make the point again that investors should understand macro-economics impact before they invest.

Marketplaces are not for-free and still support capitalism, but the money will be made by platform owners from a transparent margin on the exchange (and sometimes carefully applied advertising opportunities). Diligent consumer marketplaces achieve winner-takes-all participation levels and massive exchange volumes and revenues. eBay and the Apple AppStore are great examples of more disciplined marketplaces.

Because of the virtually unlimited global reach of the Internet we have an incredible opportunity and obligation to present the world with free-market platforms that treat all participants fairly and with respect.

Let’s stop whining about the authenticity of our presidents, and instead, as the creators of the technology industry show the world how we turn authenticity, embedded in our technology, into a massively sustainable advantage.

Tags: Platform, Amazon, FaceBook, Getty-Images, Photography, Macro-economics, Meritocracy, Marketplace, Markets, Premium

With the proliferation of the new iPhone, Mobile Applications as a viable VC investment category is dead.

Companies like Digital Chocolate (founded by software gaming pioneer Trip Hawkins) are now painfully aware of that. Recenty switching gears, it is debatable whether they can compete with the endless supply of a new free-market.

The future of many companies like Aeroprise, still basking in the glory of a proprietary Blackberry environment and tucked away in the enterprise mobile markets, will be severely threatened by standards-based technlogy running on any internet capable device, very soon.

The premium market of mobile applications protected by walled gardens has been changed to a free-market by Apple’s iPhone and the App Store. Macro-economics, discussed in this blog many times before, at work again.

Rather than single minded companies being able to protect their turf with a collection of proprietary applications (usually aimed at businesses), now individuals will start to create applications for other users. By the people, for the people. N/N :the airplane code for Steve Jobs’ Gulfstream. Get it already?

User-generated-content (one of those awkward Silicon Valley attempts of describing content that resides in a free marketplace) has a brand new companion, it is called: applications.

But these applications are no longer mobile applications, they are internet applications - that happen to run on a great mobile internet device. And they will run on many other internet devices, hard-wired or mobile. Think of them as the big brother of widgets, task oriented applications that remove the need to use a browser to benefit from the Internet. They target regular consumers, not internet savvy technologists and they self-configure, based on location and other user preferences.

So the investment model for mobile has changed dramatically and the recently announced $100M iFund (by top investment firm KPCB) and a similar one by BlackBerry - the vehicle of purportedly investing $1M per application vendor - makes no sense at all. Here is why:

1/ User-generated content does not provide a great foundation for large upside - let alone an acquisition or IPO that is priced to produce interesting VC returns.

2/ The value to the VC is in the “winner-takes-all” platform, not the content (albeit that produces great value and choice to the consumer). Apple, with the App Store platform for distributing applications using free-market principles (although still not perfect, check out our marketplace rules) will again walk away with the same benefits it reaped from the iTunes store, direct and halo.

3/ Application development is a very high cost business, especially in a highly competitive marketplace. The gaming industry wrapped in a slower transition from premium to free-market is finding that out too.

4/ Mobile used to be a proprietary, and protectable, path to the internet. No longer. The intelligence of the backend service, accessed through a mobile of hard-wired computing device is where the value is.

So, i suggest to rename the iFund in Software-As- A-Service fund, agnostic to access paradigm.

Nokia and Blackberry (RIM) will have to follow quickly. But they would need to start hiring people that understand macro-economics, not just technologists that create poor copies of Apple’s implementation.

All phones need to have a real operating system inside, and Roger McNamee’s investment in Palm may make sense in that way, but they better step it up quickly. Nokia is off playing with Symbian, Microsoft has its own concotion. All of them pretty much asleep at the macro-economic wheel.

Yet for individuals, on the supply and buy side, all this disruption leads to new opportunities that are derived from a meritocracy. Fantastic applications are being developed and used in massive numbers. The world is indeed flat after all.

Tags: Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Free-market, Marketplace, Meritocracy, SaaS, Proprietary, Gaming, Funds, Wall-Street, ITunes

Finally the market is talking, and I knew it would have more impact than my blog:


(from VentureBeat)

Years back we suggested the diminishing value of micro-economic innovation (or technology silos) and a stubborn VC club that still operates under old fashioned principles (see “In Search of the Economist VC” written in 2005, “10 Investment lessons learned” and “Invest different” in 2008) as the main reason for this decline.

Alex Haislip on PEHub agrees:
“The VC industry is laboring under a set of outdated assumptions, a structure optimized for conditions no longer applicable and an unwillingness or inability to embrace the tectonic change it is undergoing. The hand wringing about various short term shocks (such as skittish investors) that sunk the second quarter’s IPOs misses any serious discussion of the long-term systemic shifts that many VCs have failed to act on.”

What needs to change is:

1/ VCs need to start investing in businesses rather than technologies
No one outside of Silicon Valley cares about Web2.0, Mashups, UPnP etc unless it proves to deliver a unique experience, deliver substantial competitive advantage or significant cost savings to customers. Indeed, back to fundamentals.

2/ VCs need to embrace different investment models
We need a long-and-short and high-and-low in technology investments, and everything in-between. With a business centric view of the world comes an investment model that is tailored to that business. Every unique company ecosystem has unique financial requirements. History has shown not all businesses benefit from low-ball investments; the majority of seed stage deals go for less than half the price of a regular house in Palo Alto. The superficial categorization of businesses in technology categories is turning new business opportunities into (forced) commodities.

3/ VCs need to change how they find deals
The problem starts at first encounter. The Ivy League kids fresh out of business school that are the first point of contact for most entrepreneurs are just not capable and experienced enough to spot disruptive technologies that have macro-economic impact. A first time pilot right out of school is not allowed to take the helm of a commercial airliner, neither should an MBA graduate be allowed to veto an investment. False negatives are rampant and deflating overall market value. We need unconventonal companies, not more conventional ones.

But the great thing about the demise of the current VC model is the need to create a new one that, in turn, spawns a new more exciting asset class.

Tags: Investment, Eco-systems, VC

Nothing is sweeter than success, real success, hard earned success. That is what my grandfather achieved when he helped create the company (van Melle) that still makes the Mentos candy today and, in the early 1900s turned it into a worldwide company and brand. Every day, I strive to live up to his achievements. Not just to make a buck, but to fundamentally challenge the establishment and contribute to improving the world we live in. Albeit my sweet spot is technology.

Building a business is all about people; entrepreneurs and investors working hard together towards achieving the common goal. Too many times do I see or hear from investors how entrepreneurs finagle their way into the money pot, with damaging consequences.

While I do not consider myself in the league of Donald Trump in terms of inspirational speaking, I do want to emphasize how important the evaluation of personal skills are to support a great company. I learned some valuable lessons from my grandfather early on - not by asking him many questions (I was too young to do so intelligently) - but by watching him operate. My grandfather did not have access to the funds we have at our disposal in Silicon Valley, but the rules of success have not changed.

1/ Have an opinion.
Unless you are ill informed, having an opinion and expressing it is vital. Vital to you personally - in achieving what you want, and vital to the company you work for - to provide the best quality of service. If you can't see the flaws around you (and in yourself from time to time), you won't be able to detect or imagine true innovation.

2/ Have guts.
The world is full of artificial rules to keep us all in check. Throw them out from time to time, just to see what happens. I run a stoplight litmus test with most entrepreneurs, to demonstrate how tucked-in we still are. And you'll be amazed.

3/ Have integrity.
The goal of creating a lasting personal brand should outweigh the short-term obsession of making money. "Nice" people don't make great impressions, what they stand for does. I bet you'll make more money sticking to your personal brand, then you ever will chasing dollars.

4/ Be transparent.
Transparency is the fair assessment of capabilities, good and bad, combined with the ability to expose them. The companies we create together inherit our good and bad, yet no one will suffer if they are exposed properly. Quite the opposite, transparency builds fairness and trust.

5/ Find your passion.
You will not see me go-green anytime soon, even though there is a lot of money to be made there. My passion is technology, specifically consumer technology and has been since I was twelve years old. I was lucky in that way, but it hasn't been easy, extricating myself from common beliefs. Explore your own true passion (not that of someone else), and don't rest until you've found it.

Many times is the path to success cut short, not by the market, but by the entrepreneurs themselves. As a CEO I have left companies where major shareholders lack or infringe on those fundamental principles, and I killed investments for similar reasons.

The real sweet taste of success is being true to yourself. So, next time you knock on your investors' doors, pay a little more attention to yourself - rather than the business plan.

(In memory of my hero and grandfather Simon de Smit, I miss him in more ways than one)

Tags: Investment, Integrity, Transparency

Over the last 10 years I've also been closely involved with early stage technology funding (advising VC firms and Angels) and have invested personal time and money in early stage ventures. That has given me a unique perspective of the challenges between entrepreneurs and investors.