Along those same lines, if you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend reading Ante’s “Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital“. As it said in Ecclesiastes, “there’s nothing new under the sun”, and so it may behoove those of us on the investor side to remember a bit more of the history of the industry and occasionally look for advice and guidance to those who came before us (try finding active VCs whose careers in venture pre-date the Netscape IPO. They exist, but they’re rare).

Here’s the article:

Additionally, here’s a video of Rock from a talk he gave at the Computer History Museum a couple of years ago:

• Private Equity & Finance Blog

Now go back to enjoying the fireworks.

Anyway, it should be worth checking out.  I’ll be there!

Also, quick French lesson for the non-Francophones out there: PME (Petites et Moyennes Entreprises) translates into SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) in English. 

Anyway, here’s a fantastically jaded (and unfortunately all too accurate in many cases), take on 13 things you’ll never hear a VC say:

Upside to interview: Good insight on the changing face of Venture, how problems with endowments is helping FoF’s, the current buyers market, and how big he thinks the industry should be.

Downside to interview: Good luck trying to pay attention to the annoying computer voice! It doesn’t have the same charm as WOPR from WarGames.

Survey says: YouNoodle tracked 149 venture capital deals worth $1.55 billion among the 53,000 startups it follows (most of which are serious, some only serious in the entrepreneur’s head). Of this dollar amount, 26% was invested in biotech and medical devices; 16.5% in energy and cleantech; 14.3% in consumer Internet; 11.4% in hardware (including semiconductors, gadgets, and PC-related goods); 11.2% in finance; 6.2% in software; and the remaining 14% spread across four other categories such as mobile phones and education, each with less than 6%. The data also showed that most of the funding was later stage and Series B with 34% and 33% respectively, suggesting that VCs are taking a cautious approach at the moment by investing in more proven concepts.

These sector breakdowns by investment show the continued resiliency of biotech as it continues to hold up a bit better than other areas. The article points out that it’s taken 10 years for increased U.S. government grants to the sciences to start to bear commrecially viable fruit. Expect a dose of the same with world government’s increase in cleantech funding.