About Me

I've been working closely with entrepreneurs for about 30 years, first as their lawyer and, since 1999, as a venture capitalist, board member and mentor at Mayfield Fund. In that time, I've done more than 1,000 venture financings, mergers & acquisitions, technology partnerships, etc., and have, with some scar tissue, come to understand the trials and tribulations of startups pretty well, both from the entrepreneur's perspective (as my clients) as well as the point of view of the investor. In both my roles, lawyer and VC, I've counseled entrepreneurs, their companies and their boards of directors through seemingly every conceivable set of circumstances.

Now, after almost 11 years as a full-time VC, I've decided to start spending some time on activities outside Mayfield Fund. Starting in 2008, I started doing some things that I'm interested in, but that aren't things a full-time VC has time to do: (1) in January 2008, I stood for election as a board member of the New York Times, (2) In May, I joined the Idealab (www.idealab.com) board of directors, (3) In Q2, I started "angel" investing for my own account and "advising" startups on building their businesses, on capital-raising, on building partnerships in the media world -- I call myself a "Sherpa" rather than "Advisor", since "Advisor" connotes very casual, episodic interactions with the Company -- while my desired modus operandi is to jump into the deep end of the pool and get very involved with my companies.

Among my angel deals:

-- Blekko (www.blekko.com)
-- Halogen Guides (www.halogenguides.com)
-- Lookery (www.lookery.com)
-- SocialMedian (www.socialmedian.com) -- sold January 2009 to XING, AG
-- RakedIn (www.rakedin.com)
-- YouNoodle (www.younoodle.com)

Among the Companies for which I'm a "Sherpa":

-- Intelligize (www.intelligize.com)
-- Performance Pricing (www.performancepricing.com)
-- Mogulus (www.mogulus.com)
-- The Survivors Club (www.thesurvivorsclub.com)
-- HotPotato (stealth)

Hence, my sympathies (hard-wired into my consciousness over the years) remain fundamentally with the entrepreneur.

As an investor, my interests range widely across the software landscape --- and can be discerned pretty accurately from the companies that I’ve invested in listed above.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past couple of years in the general area that I call “social software”. Like a lot of category descriptions, it’s somewhat vague, especially around the edges, but it includes companies using online community building-and-enabling tools, social networking (term I prefer is “social mapping”), wiki’s, blogs, RSS tags and feeds.

I’m intrigued by companies like topix.net (www.topix.net) that are using technology and the richness of the web (both the variety of content on the web and the increasingly dense and powerful connections among content sites) to provide highly granular context and relevance to users in an era of increasing information overload.

I’m a big fan of EFF.

I’m a big fan of Brewster Kahle and what he’s doing at the Internet Archive (www.archive.org).

I think that Eric Stallman’s aphorism in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”: “…With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow…” is an interesting insight into a lot of different business ideas on the web, especially if interpreted metaphorically. With the web, it’s possible to engage lots of people dispersed over wide geographical areas to cooperate on a common project. Check out sourceforge, obviously, for lots of examples in the software development space, but check out OhMyNews (http://english.ohmynews.com/) as an example in an entirely different space: news gathering and delivery.

I’m also intrigued also by the promise of the effects that technology will have on the future of advertising, both on the web and on TV.

Reading interests away from work include economics, philosophy, history (of all kinds), biography, popular science.

I’m happily married (since 1981) and have two "kids" (early 20's). I learn a lot about "new media" from them.

I’m more excited about the next 10 years in the technology world than I was about the last 10 years.