About Me

After almost 20 years as a lawyer (Wilson, Sonsini et al. (www.wsgr.com) and Latham & Watkins (www.lw.com)) representing entrepreneurs, I became a general partner at Mayfield (www.mayfield.com) about eight and a half years ago. During my career as a lawyer, I probably worked on more than 700 venture capital financings, mergers & acquisitions and strategic partnering transactions. Hence, my sympathies (hard-wired into my consciousness over the years) remain fundamentally with the entrepreneur.

As a venture capitalist, my interests range widely across the software landscape --- and can be discerned pretty accurately from the companies that I’ve invested in. Currently, I’m on the boards of the following Mayfield companies:

-- Varsity Group (NASDAQ: VSTY) (www.varsity-group.com)
-- Beatnik (www.beatnik.com)
-- Electric Cloud (www.electric-cloud.com)
-- Scalix (www.scalix.com)
-- Pluck (www.pluck.com)
-- Black Arrow (www.blackarrow.tv)
-- Snap (www.snap.com)
-- Tagged (www.tagged.com)
-- Slide (www.slide.com)

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 (e.g., PlanetOut), social networking (term I prefer is “social mapping”)(e.g., Tribe), wiki’s (JotSpot), blogs, RSS tags and feeds (Pluck).

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 love what Dan Gillmor’s working on in his new gig.

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 (e.g., Revenue Science, a Mayfield company for which I’m the back-up partner and quite involved) and on TV (e.g., Black Arrow).

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

I’m happily married (since 1981) and have two teen-age kids (always good for keeping one’s perspective on things).

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