Done Deal: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Story

Amazon.co.uk Review
“Until a few years ago”, notes journalist-consultant Udayan Gupta, “venture capitalists were hardly on anyone’s radar screen”. That’s not the case these days, as financiers who used to work behind the scenes now regularly set markets afire with their public support of high-profile technology and Internet stocks. In Done Deals, Gupta allows 35 of the brightest stars in what has become a $30-billion-a-year business to tell their own stories in their own words. We get to see exactly what they were thinking when they backed such endeavours as Intel, eBay, Excite, Genentech and 3Com. Gupta’s intention is to demonstrate how the industry has changed over the past half-century and how it differs today among its various forms. He achieves this beautifully by dividing the first-person accounts into thematically attuned sections that focus on deal makers of the future (such as Mitch Kapor of Accel Partners), early pioneers, West Coast veterans (such as Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital), past and present East Coast practitioners, and visionaries (including John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Some of the stories are more detailed than others, but taken together they provide a well-rounded view that will interest anyone who must deal with this often intertwined yet still individual world. –Howard Rothman

Product Description
This work provides a revealing history of the venture capital industry as told through first-person accounts. It chronicles the industry’s beginnings and highlights the differences between America’s West and East coast firms. More than thirty leading venture capitalists – from early pioneers such as Eugene Kleiner and Arthur Rock to current top players like Geoff Yang and John Dorrer – reveal insights gleaned from their personal experiences in successful deal-making.

Buy now: Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Story

Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise

Technology Ventures is the first textbook to thoroughly examine a global phenomenon known as “technology entrepreneurship”. Now in its second edition, this book integrates the most valuable entrepreneurship and technology management theories from some of the world’s leading scholars and educators with current examples of new technologies and an extensive suite of media resources.

Dorf and Byers’s comprehensive collection of action-oriented concepts and applications provides both students and professionals with the tools necessary for success in starting and growing a technology enterprise. Technology Ventures details the critical differences between scientific ideas and true business opportunities.

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Crossing the chasm

Author Geoffrey Moore makes the case that high- tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. His chasm theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. This pattern, says Moore, is unique to the high-tech industry.

Moore suggests remedies for the problems that can help businesses meet their long-term goals. He coaches marketing professionals on how to move slowly through the gulf, teaching them to create profiles and target specific segments of the population rather than trying to plough right into the mainstream. He cites examples of successful chasm crossings by such companies as Apple, Tandem, Oracle and Sun, showing what they all had in common and exposing the different weaknesses in their strategies. Moore also assigns responsibility for success to programmers and developers by suggesting they design a “whole product model.” Here, because integration tasks are daunting to the mainstream market, all the components of a technological product must be in one package. Moore also describes strategies for competing with rival companies and assessing the best distribution channels for penetrating the target market.

Written not just for marketing specialists but for all employees whose futures ride on the success of a technical product, Crossing the Chasm delivers crucial information in an engaging, readable tone. –David James

Buy now: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers

Wikinomics

One to read quickly, a chapter at a time, like Digital Economy an excellent review of where technology is at, and where it is taking us. Focussed on the impact of Web 2.0 type innovations like wiki, and user input, it argues for a new way of working that is collaborative and ideas driven. Written to the standard of a good Wired or Economist article, well researched and well written. For many people, they are increasingly becoming a modular unit, in a flexible workforce, that uses their ideas and input, their problem solving, but often fails to recognise and reward the contributions that are hard to measure. This is a work environment that requires different behaviours, flexibility and innovation, but self sufficiency too. If the West is to remain more successful than competitors, it needs to be smarter than traditional hierarchical structures.

On the debit side, it has been printed on pretty shabby paper, and it has a couple of typos. Although insightful and thoughtful, I’m not sure that it contributes anything terribly new, that most readers would not have more or less figured out themselves. It also fails to clarify where new approaches are likely to work, and where they are unlikely to work. A more technologically empowered and ideas orientated organisation is essential in some sectors, less so in others. A better understanding of the variables, would make for a more rounded understanding. Cheap computing, and connectivity makes it possible. From a personal point of view, I would be intrigued to see how these approaches could be incorporated into government.

Random Quote

“The bottom line is this: The immutable, standalone Web site is dead. Say hello to the Web that increasingly looks like a library full of chatty components that interact and talk to one another. Increasingly, poeple are engineering software, databases, and Web sites so that they not only meet private objectives, but so that they can be used in ways the originators did not know or intend. this makes it very easy to build new Web services out of these exisitng components by mashing them together in fresh combinations.” p38

Buy now: Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything

Getting to Plan B

Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model is John Mullins’s second book on entrepreneurship, to be released on the 16th of September 2009. If the quality of the publication is as high as John’s New Business Road Test, it should be a good read full of good tips.

Description: Unlock better opportunities with a new strategy for reinventing any business model. Succeeding with a new business whether in a corporation or a venture based setting requires taking a leap of faith. But in order to grow, the business will need to morph and adjust many times before it meets the needs of a viable market. Getting to Plan B guides you through specific steps to effectively reinvent your entrepreneurial business model.

John Mullins is Associate Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, where he heads the school’s entrepreneurship faculty.

Randy Komisar is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, one of the world’s premier venture capital firms.

Buy now: Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model