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Intersections of Several New Age Technologies will be the Future
Jishnu Bhattacharjee
Principal-Nexus Venture Partners
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
We invest in early to early-growth companies that can grow into category leaders globally. We have companies based out of Silicon Valley, India and New York, spanning in different sectors, ranging from enterprise software, internet, mobile, digital media, to business and consumer services, agricultural logistics, and water management. Lots of innovation opportunities exist in every sphere of life, across the globe. We are living in a very rapidly evolving dynamic world, blessed with several emerging technology mega trends. And the best thing in being a start-up in such a world is that start-ups are best suited to leverage the technology inflection points and come up with disruptive innovations that can change the world for the good, big companies often lack the agility.

One such major trend is around data generation and management. Amount of data is exploding, mostly unstructured, leading to huge challenges in storing, managing, retrieving, and making meaning out of that data. And that is opening up innovative opportunities across data stack, from storage infrastructure to data analytics.

Then there is cloud adoption, which is increasing at a tremendous rate, because of the benefits related to flexibility, reduced time to market, on demand scalability, and manageability. Associated with the benefits are also the challenges around security, and control. All these are necessitating re-thinking and re-architecting of enterprise IT and applications.

Social media is growing at a never foreseen pace. It is getting omnipresent, as much in businesses as among consumers. Every business today is looking to leverage social media internally as well as externally to increase productivity, engage with audience, enhance brand awareness, service customers, and respond in real time. Plethora of start-up opportunities are emerging out of social.

Mobility is another such fast changing paradigm. Smartphones and tablets are leading to transformational user experience and engagement. There are also increasing challenges around managing and supporting multitude of device types and platforms. There has not been a better time to start companies around mobility, whether consumer oriented or targeting business customers.

Intersections of above technology trends are giving rise to even more interesting opportunities. Offline-online integration is a great example of the confluence of social and mobile, that’s changing commerce in a big way, accelerating the changes in ways consumers discover, browse and transact merchandises, in offline stores as well as online world. Similarly, cloud based technologies, combined with data analytics have the potential to bring in disruptive changes in industries like the health-care, specifically in telemedicine, drug discovery, or personalized medicine. In the emerging markets, entrepreneurs are leveraging cloud and mobility to bring in transparencies and efficiencies even in sectors as basic as agriculture.

My advice to entrepreneurs is that, do what you are most passionate about, and go after solving big problems. Your team is probably even more important than your idea, the ideas will morph and evolve, but people mostly will not. So build an excellent founding team, with complementary expertise, great camaraderie, and steadfast commitment to build a great company.

The author is Principal, Nexus Venture Partners

Nexus Venture Partners is an investor in early growth stage companies across sectors in U.S. and India. The firm's investment size ranges up to $10 million in early-growth stage companies.

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