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 [原创]高处不胜寒之五: Leading VC Ann Winblad Interview |
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积极生活态度
头衔: 海归中校
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性别:  年龄: -1356
加入时间: 2009/05/30
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来自: 3rd World
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作者：积极生活态度 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Frontier Journal (FJ): Frontier Journal is interviewing Ann Winblad, a co-founder and partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Capital. Ann, my very first question is, for you, what is a typical day in your life, as a busy venture capitalist, taking today as an example.
Ann Winblad (AW): Well, a typical day for me, especially this year where we are in a very robust innovation cycle involves meeting several new companies who are presenting me with their business plans for the first time, potentially interviewing—interviewing potential candidates who would be executives and employees of the companies we’ve already funded, a call with one of the companies we had funded where we are reviewing their operating plan, and tonight a dinner celebrating the closing of a new investment.
AW: So a fourteen-hour day.
FJ: A fourteen-hour day. Okay. My second question would be, as a leading established venture capital firm, why is your firm is so low profile? Your firm is located in downtown San Francisco instead of at Sand Hill Road in the heart of the Silicon alley. Last time it took me twenty minutes to find a parking spot there, at South Park.
AW: Well, we have moved our offices to bigger offices which we have a parking ramp right next to them so you will not have that problem next time.
FJ: You have moved.
AW: What happened in South Park, it became the most vibrant area for startups so it made it the most difficult place in the city to park. So we had to move the bigger offices where we had more space because we added more partners and had the ability to park so it does also indicate how fast growing the city of San Francisco itself is for entrepreneurs.
FJ: Sure. So when you make investment decisions, would you prefer a startup over the huge, existing marketer such as Google for search engine markets or a startup for emerging markets such as Skype for voice-ba<x>sed?
AW: What are our criteria for those investments?
FJ: Yeah.
AW: Well, you pointed to the most important criteria, and that is a large market opportunity. Clearly for Google, the veracity of information growth with the advent of the Internet requires amazing innovation and search. For Skype, we’ve seen the telecommunications systems change from being hardware ba<x>sed to being completely software ba<x>sed, or IP-ba<x>sed, which allowed an Internet ba<x>sed phones system to emerge. So we do look for large marketplaces. Secondarily we look for great people. Even with capital, it’s unclear whether Google ever needed investors. They got up to a very, very fast start, but it’s not just the financial capital that makes great businesses, it’s the quality of the intellectual capital, their ability to attract excellence. For Google, attracting—not just having brilliant founders, but the willingness to bring in leadership and to really grow the company. We look at that ability to attract excellence and then we alternately look at the business model. In the case of Google, it’s very clear what their business model is. In the case of Skype, they we acquired long before they were producing any revenue.
FJ: Exactly. Yeah.
AW: So, Skype is more challenging as an investment. It’s one of the big mistakes in the boom and bust in the United States in the mid-late 90’s is people really got seduced by quantity of customers actually yielding a good business model, and many of them did not. In the case of Google, it—people have forgotten their early business model, where their revenue was enhanced by selling appliances to corporations while they built their core search business.
FJ: Okay, I see. So technically, as you know, from P2P side is all about the quote “convergence”, or it’s called ubiquitous computing or some—sometimes some will call it ubiquitous execution. Now from B2B side is all about consolidation. It’s about autonomous computing or autonomous execution. Now, Humwin was started with so software-focus in mind. Nowadays from system perspective the boundary between hardware and software in a system becomes less and less distinct as you know. So the decision, adopting hardware-ba<x>sed solution, or software-ba<x>sed solution, or a combined solution really depends on performance cost, power and space tradeoffs. In that sense, would you envision your firm focus still going to keep the same or going to be changed as time goes?
AW: That is an excellent question. One of the great beauties of the software—of a software company is its economic model. Really great software companies have—generate 80% growth margin and drop 20% or more to the bottom line as—for earnings. The—the leverage is all in the power of bits. The cost of a second set of software is zero. We actually are seeing more and more versus less and less software opportunities. IP telephony. No one sells a PBX anymore, which was a system and hardware component of that. Even if we look at things like routers, we’re seeing that become more—Cisco is becoming more of a software company than a systems company. The innovation element that you’ve talked about to win the enterprise P2P and consumer, B2B, all of those requirements on improving the capability of software. We had a recent IPO of a company called Omiture. Omniture does real-time web analytics.
FJ: Okay.
AW: But it’s not only pure software, it’s all completely hosted. Nothing is installed. So—also the ability for us to move to lighter-weight software in more established areas whether it’s data center management, ERP, enterprise services bus, that is becoming much more open-standard space, lighter weight software driven by one of the other innovative services which is open source. So we really are seeing that—we are really just at the beginning of what I’ll call the post-modern software era. I started my software company in 1975 — the same year as Microsoft, and there were—every software invention was a great innovation, but there was very, very limited that we could do. Today, the worldwide community, the quantity and quality of software engineers around the world gives us enormous leverage. We rarely fund a software company even at the start today where they do not already have people around the world. We funded an open source company yesterday where the developers are in Germany, Malta, Argentina — So it’s really quite—it’s really weird just entering, as you’re experiencing in Shanghai, the true contemporary software world where we really have—we’re poised for the major ingredients we needed for massive innovation.
FJ: Okay, I understand. So, again talking about software technology, nowadays computing is migrating from human-machine ba<x>sed computing, we called HMC to machine-machine ba<x>sed computing for example such as web services, is geared towards purely automatic among machines, network machines, and human-human ba<x>sed computing such as in your presentation I just listened to yesterday afternoon, collaboration. Human-human ba<x>sed computing. Which one, I mean between this machine-machine ba<x>sed computing such as web services and human-human ba<x>sed computing such as collaboration can be the next application among those two.
AW: Well, I think we make the mistake sometimes of thinking there are silos of innovation. That you can actually look at all of these as individual silos of innovation, and we have in the past seen innovation move from one platform change to the next. The PC to client server, client server to distributed computing, distributed to Internet. And that’s why the pace of innovation was so slow, why it’s taken us 30 years since the advent of the PC to get here, almost. That has changed, and what we have today is that it’s no longer just a platform shift. It really is a combination of all these attributes, and web services is a great example. When you actually move applications to an on-demand or web services, completely service-oriented architecture basis, it effectively allows you to build extremely rich collaborative environments and also brings rich experiences on the user-interface level. Which allows participation by, whether it’s a business user or a consumer to really be the drivers of the applications. It’s no longer business processes, it’s information-sharing, it’s best practices, and it’s sharing content when you move to the consumer space. But these two work hand-in-hand and this is really what is so wonderful about the innovation space we are in today. We’re on—the same innovations that are driving innovations in the consumer sector are exactly the same sector. So we are moving very, very rapidly in leveraging both the human-to-human and machine-to-machine collaboration. It also speaks to the age of technology. Today consumers don’t think about technology.
FJ: Yes.
AW: When you buy an mp3 pla<x>yer or an iPod or an Xbox, you’re very comfortable with technology. You know, if you talk to someone who is FJ: at university today, they don’t use email anymore. That’s something their parents did. They use instant messaging. They’re already living in the collaboration space. And guess what? If you go to a major trading company where you—a major financial services company—they’re using instant messaging with their clients as well. So, again, when we talk about the web services platform or machine to machine, that is the backbone that allows us to have these collaborative environments.
FJ: Okay, I see. In our case we decline to use instant messaging—that’s kind of involved with too much support for our clients. Too much support is—is overhead for us. But anyway. Your firms portfolio, occasion software and related services, so what do you think about this—you mentioned innovation or infrastructure software such as next-generation operating system, next-generation programming languages, or even next-generation databa<x>ses, next-generation platforms. Are there any opportunities there?
AW: Yes. If you look closely at our portfolio, you’ll see a couple of themes. One is virtualization. Where effectively one—
FJ: Information virtualization?
AW: Just virtualization of the—
FJ: Data.
AW: Applications.
FJ: Okay.
AW: Virtualization of the—one example is the company called KimbE. It virtualizes the test environment. So if you were a—if you had development resources around the world, you have to replicate the hardware and systems test environment at every location. In the case of KimbE it virtualizes in one place and then everyone else is working through a browser. In the case of scaling, it virtualizes the application environment so instead of having applications sitting around on servers all over the place it basically virtualizes the inventory so that they’re served when needed. So the role of what was the old operating system is being replaced by the virtualization area. It’s really doing a much better job than just operating the environment. Its virtualizing and leveraging the environment. Storage and analytics are another example. Corporations end-users don’t want something in a databa<x>se they look up, they want real-time analytics. Omiture, which is a recent IPO, is real-time web analytics. Major retailers, major automotive companies, in real-time you want to know—you want to know what your customers are doing. What the behavior is of your relationship be it consumer-supplier or whatever. That’s now handled at the analytic level.
FJ: Yes.
AW: On the—which means the me<x>tadata versus the plain on data store, the me<x>tadata is much more important than the old data store. And that me<x>tadata is compiled in real time. There are, you know, tremendous changes happening in that area, even in search. Enterprise search is a completely open area. It’s, you know, if you’re in enterprise you might have a Google box or Google appliance, but you can’t really leverage the wisdom of your organization. It’s not behavioral. We have another company called Baynote, which is—has breakthrough technology in behavioral search. Security, a lot of that used to be provided in the operating system. We have another company called Voltage, which completely eliminates the old PKI or certificate infrastructure and does non-certificate, called identity-ba<x>sed encryption. The deal—platform, hard to provision the provision environment. So we really do see that almost everything that was pretty rudimentary in the operating system, the system software, has to be re-looked at in a fully distributed enterprise. It—it can no longer—you know, you can’t replicate everything everywhere. You have to virtualize, you have to use me<x>tadata, and you have to provide very sophisticated analytics, which is what Google is about, and others, in order to really leverage the massive amount of stretch.
FJ: Okay. Talking about software technology again, actually if you look at the past three decades actually is a gap between market expectations and software development capability has been widened instead of narrowed. So despite—actually what is the key bottleneck there? Is that a programming language problem, software process problem, or program paradigm problem? What is—what will be the true silver bullet for such challenge?
AW: That is a brilliant question and I’m so glad you asked that question. I think it is not a technology question, and I think the breakthrough technology point that is really telling us what we needed to do. And that is what’s happened in the open source community. If I think back to five years ago, or even ten years ago, in corporations there were not people called CIOs or CTOs or CSOs. There were MIS and department people. What open source is, talking occurs better in a collaborative environment. What has happened today, where corporations themselves, and consumers, are very technically capable, is that—communicate with our customers. Whether they’re consumers or enterprises. So this element of collaborative real-time development has really changed how software companies are being built. The old fashioned software company, you know their name, we keep waiting for their product to come out because they go back and everybody goes into their programming cubes or environments in front of their desks and comes back a year later with a product. Or two years later if you’re building an operating system. And then we try to sell that product to the marketplace. That model does not work. And that has nothing to do with programming. There’s no collaboration with the customer ba<x>se itself. In the open source model, it’s really not about free software. It’s about the collaborative environment. All of the major corporations using open source are collaborators in development of the product themselves. They devise their own stacks, they contribute innovation stack to the open source company. The products are continuously developed. On top of that, being able to deliver software as a service, meaning nothing is installed, it’s hosted and delivered, it means everybody is always updated and the customers expect constant updates. It’s no different than, you know, you buying a cell phone or an iPod. You’re expecting that that has living software on it. That you’re going to get the latest and greatest software downloaded in real time whether it’s the content or the player, and that is what has changed in the last three years. No go get the specifications, go build it, then go sell it. It is start working with the marketplace immediately and start collaborating, much like the open source model. And enter into this collaboration not just with the worldwide community of developers but with the customers themselves. We’ve also improved the languages as we’ve moved to lighter weight and more, like, s<x>cripting languages and such; we’ve really allowed faster development. We could use still some improvement in model-driven development, but those improvements do not change what is fundamentally important and that is collaboration with the marketplace, and collaborative real-time continuous development. Some people call that agile programming, but I call it collaborative development.
FJ: So your point is collaboration ba<x>sed on open source as well as next-generation languages such as s<x>cripting language might be a solution?
AW: Well, also collaboration with the customers themselves. A marketplace, whether you’re a consumer or an enterprise, it’s not like enterprises themselves can’t build software. You know, build with the marketplace in real time, not build for the marketplace and sell it later.
FJ: Okay, I see. So, for—for any enterprise software, for each vertical, there are so many applications. So my question is, well…solve the mapping—solve the problem by providing solution to map so the vertical application—to map those—so many applications spanning so many verticals?
AW: I am really impressed with the questions you are asking me. The largest fragmented marketplace in the software industry is the application software market. People rank the size of that market from 50 billion to 100 billion, and it is filled with unusual vertical offerings. What has really changed is if you carry the service-oriented architecture further is, and I’ll give you a great example here in Salesforce. What Salesforce has done in their app-exchange platform, which is a service-oriented development environment over Salesforce? Is that its listed applications like SAP that then get verticalized on top? It’s about decomposing this into business processes so that each vertical can select their own business processes but each business process is horizontal in itself. Whether that’s CRM, whether that’s something like, just invoicing, whether it is benefits management. And what has happened is that as we move to sort of three companies dominating the enterprise software space—IBM, SAP, and Oracle—
FJ: Yeah.
AW: They have had very monolithic offerings. The change to a service-oriented architecture is also a change including breaking down from what we call applications to business components. And then the ability on the service oriented backplane to—for any vertical industry to separate vertical from these business components. Versus being sold—and this is very, very important to penetrate the mid-market customer. The customer that’s is growing to 100 million dollars in revenue. They cannot afford or even—but they can take business process especially ones they don’t have to install if they’re delivered on demand and put those together to be solutions for their business. It—and it’s sort of like starting from the beginning when applications were very small but now moving them back to what I’ll call business processes that live on a service system rather than monolithic vertical applications. And this has the potential of opening up this 100 billion dollar application market to companies like Salesforce. Here in the US we had a company—if you look at some of the recent IPOs, Salesforce, Focus, Right Now, there are business components rather than large monolithic applications spaces.
FJ: Okay, sure. So talking about business model, many businesses like IBM sold hardware come with software for free. Nowadays some sell software through subscription come with hardware for free. Will it be—will it happen some day that some companies is going to sell—not sell, offer—both hardware and software for free? If it is—if the answer is yes, what will be the revenue model for startups or for those companies?
AW: I think for the most part that your customers, your—let’s talk about business customers, because this question is most important to them. They don’t’ really think about buying software. Or buying hardware. They think about buying solutions, solutions for services. And what they are looking at is the business value of what their buying. We’ve seen a number of changes to this model. If you look at companies like RedHat, they effectively sell a relationship, a service-level agreement, effectively, with you to really help let you help them service and support your open source software. They don’t even call it a software license; it’s a service license. They—you know, and the value there is, you know, is really supporting that open source stack. In the case of software service vendors like Salesforce, you are effectively paying somewhere in that pricing for the hosted services, but the hardware’s never counted. There are large datacenters everywhere for Google, very, very large ones, so are the customers ultimately paying advertisers, paying for those words, search words, paying for hardware. Yes. Is hardware ever mentioned? No. In fact there not even paying for software, they’re paying for a service. So we’ve already gone past the change of selling software or selling hardware, we’re selling a solution, which is effectively any combinatorial of software and hardware. And certainly the Google and Salesforce examples are very good ones, and RedHat because they don’t fall under hardware or software but they do include enormous hardware components that are being serviced by the software vendors themselves.
FJ: Okay, good, good. So I have two more questions—actually we are slightly running out of time, but anyway, how do you see the relationship between a venture capital and a startup? Is that a relationship ba<x>sed on like husband-wife, parents-children, or buyer-seller, or something else?
AW: It’s more like the — well, first of all as an investor and a board member we have a duty of care. Which means we have to be helping all shareholders build value. But in the relationship, I think of it more like a relationship between a pla<x>yer and a coach.
FJ: I see.
AW: It’s as if I’m a coach of a soccer team. You know, I don’t get to go out there on the field and play. I can’t run out there on the field and tell my goalie what to do, but I get a few minutes on the sidelines. And when we’re at practice sessions, like the board meetings, we have to discuss our strategy. We have to discuss the competition. We have to discuss whether—are our players good enough? Do we have to trade some players and get better ones? It’s very, very much like the relationship between a coach and player. The good investors know that they’re not the players, and the good players know let’s get the best coaches.
FJ: So the power coach can influence the pla<x>yer in sometimes in some way. My last question would be very few startups can be funded, and for those funded very few get acquired or go public and for example taking as your startup Open Systems. You started with your company and $500, and five years later your company was acquired probably in $15,000,000 dollars or so?
AW: Fifteen, yes.
FJ: So bootstrapping startup. Like us. What’s your advice?
AW: The advice—I think sometimes the bootstrap—bootstrap startup has to us consideration—you have to be so careful in your decisions because every one counts. And it causes you to have a laser focus on the market opportunities. And many times we have bootstrap startups that have bootstrapped for a year and come in, and they basically have really found the exact customers they needed, the exact road map for their software, because their vision has to be so crisp. For a startup that their—that there are—you know, you really have to be—have to determine if you have a tight knit—tight fit to a market opportunity. You also have to look for leverage, the same as any funded startup. Even a funded startup is not as well-funded as Microsoft or IBM or Google or Oracle so you have to look for leverage points. Can you find someone else who will resell your product? Who else in the marketplace wants you to be successful? That will help you with your marketing dollars. And so the search for leverage is not unique to a bootstrap company, it’s also part of a funded company. I do think above all that, as history has proven out, companies that have really a clear vision of market opportunity and the passion and willingness never to quit become very successful. And that is—does not mean that you have to be funded.
FJ: That will be great insight for all our investment. So this concludes the System Design Frontier Journal interviewing Ann Winblad, founder and—co-founder and partner of Humwin Venture Capital, and thanks for your time. I really appreciate it.
AW: And thank you for an excellent interview, I really appreciated your questions.
FJ: Thank you. Bye-bye.
AW: Bye-bye.
作者：积极生活态度 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 [原创]高处不胜寒之五: Leading VC Ann Winblad Interview -- 积极生活态度 - (24721 Byte) 2009-6-26 周五, 16:02 (1679 reads)
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