Thursday, June 5, 2003
Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital
Two recent articles on entrepreneurship and the venture capital business make interesting reading. Joichi Ito of Neoteny wrote about his company's investment process nearly a month ago. Joi was previously chairman of Infoseek Japan. Earlier today, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software posted his latest article on what is wrong with the venture capital process. Joel specifically quotes from Joi's posting to boost his argument on why entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have different, conflicting goals.
Both these are of particular interest to me because I intend to jump onto the entrepreneur ship next month. My employment with Johns Hopkins ends with this month and I intend to get into the business of managing how information is presented to consumers, be they human or machine. I'm looking at all the ground from the data access API on top of the database to the markup used for the final presentation. I know this sounds rather vague, but I think the market demand exists. I've seen too many good data repositories that are unusable because the interface limits the possibilities. If it doesn't work out like I planned, I suppose I will have to fallback on my former consulting work, but I'm not expecting that.
As for the references to Joi Ito and Joel Spolsky: I'm not expecting to be running a business needing venture capital anytime in the next few years. It's just good to know what to expect in the coming years.
Oh, and I need a name for my company. Anyone got ideas? I'm considering using the name "Seacrow" itself. It's meaningless and a little hard to pronounce (people keep saying "See Crow"), but in the written form it jolts people into taking notice, and that is a good thing.
Both these are of particular interest to me because I intend to jump onto the entrepreneur ship next month. My employment with Johns Hopkins ends with this month and I intend to get into the business of managing how information is presented to consumers, be they human or machine. I'm looking at all the ground from the data access API on top of the database to the markup used for the final presentation. I know this sounds rather vague, but I think the market demand exists. I've seen too many good data repositories that are unusable because the interface limits the possibilities. If it doesn't work out like I planned, I suppose I will have to fallback on my former consulting work, but I'm not expecting that.
As for the references to Joi Ito and Joel Spolsky: I'm not expecting to be running a business needing venture capital anytime in the next few years. It's just good to know what to expect in the coming years.
Oh, and I need a name for my company. Anyone got ideas? I'm considering using the name "Seacrow" itself. It's meaningless and a little hard to pronounce (people keep saying "See Crow"), but in the written form it jolts people into taking notice, and that is a good thing.
evan — Jun 4, 2003 6:46:36 PM — # ↩
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jun 5, 2003 4:49:40 AM — # ↩
mmk — Jun 5, 2003 4:47:27 AM — # ↩
ravi — Jun 5, 2003 5:43:07 AM — # ↩