E Street Musings

Maybe I should have just gone to Vegas instead??

estreetpartners — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:08:20 +0000

I guess I should have already known this, but I still found this morning’s PEHub data quite fascinating….almost startling: “…..from 2001 to 2009, about 24,100 VC-backed companies were started. Of those, about only 750, or just over 3%, resulted in exits above $100M in enterprise value.”

I’m still holding firm in my belief that you can create very interesting/successful companies for less than $3M in capital, resulting in exits in the $15M to $50M range and in the process create the occasional bigger “hit”. So I still plan on going to Vegas, but “in addition to”, not “instead of” angel investing

Super Angels

estreetpartners — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:14:24 +0000

I thought this was a pretty good post on the topic of Micro VCs and Super Angels. Probably also a good name for a new comic book series

Congrats Reductive Labs!!

estreetpartners — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:49:52 +0000

I was thrilled to see this come across the wires this morning! I’ve been working with the Reductive Labs crew (originators of the very popular Puppet OSS project)as an advisor, since late last summer. How I came across them is an interesting tale in itself – but I will save that for another post (which at my current rate of blogging may not occur for a few years ) Nontheless, given my background in both systems management (NetIQ) and OSS (Scalix) – Reductive Labs had me at “Hello”.

There are several compelling dynamics when looking at Reductive Labs, of which I will highlight two: 1) Natural viral adoption – as I learned with many lessons of the past, this falls in the “priceless” category regardless of how much money you have in your budget for marketing and related activities and 2) Puppet is able to accomplish the incredibly rare “business exacta” (for you horse racing fans) of being both disruptive from a pricing perspective while providing “next generational” capabilities when compared to a Bladelogic or an Opsware.

With apologies to my buddy Mike Maples Jr. and in the “you gotta be kidding me” category and even more ironic in the context of my prior post on Twitter, I love the coverage that has somehow positioned Puppet as a Twitter Scaling Solution!! What next, Blackberrys and iPhones being called Twitter Personal Emitters??

Congratulations to True Ventures on their new investment and to Luke, Andrew and Teyo of Reductive Labs. I’m expecting even bigger things now moving forward!

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Twitter is the new …….

estreetpartners — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:49:10 +0000

In the last month alone, I think Twitter has been annointed the new Google, the new Facebook and most recently the new business card. You can’t make this stuff up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan and I think it’s more than just a passing fad (although I found the comment comparing Twitter to the CB Radio quite amusing). I do like to see the entrepreneurs that I work with in “community/market engagemenet mode” and Twitter is a very powerful tool at their disposal. Maybe somebody can write a Facebook/iPhone/Blackberry app that is a drinking game mash-up of “ Twitter is the new Blank” with “Blank is about to acquire Twitter”??

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Sun, Oracle and virtualization

estreetpartners — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:42:29 +0000

My friends at Convirture have added an interesting post here on the implications for Xen with Oracle’s purchase of Xen. While I won’t equate IBM passing on Sun with the Oakland Raiders passing on Michael Crabtree, things did work out well for Oracle on the sequence of events as they did for the SF 49ers

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Hello Convirture!

estreetpartners — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:29:29 +0000

I’ve been working with the team behind project ConVirt since last summer. I share their vision that folks using OSS virtualization technologies such as Xen and KVM, deserve (and need!) enterprise caliber tools to manage those environments. Last night marked a dual milestone for us – we dropped ConVirt 1.0, which you can get here, and unveiled the Commercial Company behind the project. Moving forward you’ll see and hear a lot more of Convirture and ConVirt in the news.

Congratulations Arsalan, Jaydeep and team; well done!!

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We’re blogging again!!

estreetpartners — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:39:03 +0000

I haven’t written a blog entry for almost 18 months……and amazingly the blogosphere survived! In the coming weeks and months (and hopefully years) I’ll use this blog to talk about why Emerson Street Partners came to exist, express my views on the start-up world, and most importantly, shamelessly promote the companies and entrepreneurs that I advise. I also may from time to time drop in a sports opinion or two, but since I could easily get carried away when discussing sports, I will try to exhibit as much discipline as possible. Which may not be much

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