Based in Menlo Park, CA Menlo Ventures, is a venture capital firm that focuses on seed capital funding for early stage and medium-level companies in various domains including storage, security, communication infrastructure and others. Since inception in 1976, the firm has made successful investments in more than 360 companies.

The combination of mobile, social, and cloud is fuelling huge growth in the consumer sector. Menlo is placing big bets on Marketplaces, which are evolving at an unprecedented rate due to these trends. Marketplaces have grown from Internet listings and reviews-based platforms to full end-to-end services and peer-to-peer capabilities. Previously underutilized assets – homes, cars, hotel rooms, human capital etc are now part of a collaborative network of companies like Uber, Getaround, Poshmark, Rover.com and many more that allow us to make real-time decisions with the touch of a finger.

Connected Technologies

The technologies of the future are connected, intelligent, and dynamic. At Menlo, we believe the best way to predict the future is to invest in it. Menlo was an early investor in Siri for example, the world's first automated personal assistant, which was acquired by Apple. Now there are some exciting technologies emerging in the connected home space with companies like Dropcam, Roku and Nest allowing consumers to have a truly "smart" home that adapts and changes to a consumer's desires, which are connected through a mobile device. These smart technologies are also storing data securely in the cloud, which is additionally fueling enterprise technologies. Networking, Storage, Big Data, and Security are the areas that we are currently focusing in the enterprise right now.

Mobile Marketplaces are Ripe for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Industries ripe for disruption include – travel, home services, healthcare, education, finance, and government. Marketplaces are also going to fuel the next big economic boom in terms of job growth, as service providers can work how they want, when they want, and from wherever they want. We are on the cusp of a golden age with new marketplaces emerging in multiple industries, and companies like Uber, Air bnb and Alibaba operating at unprecedented scale. With network effects being the most defensible moat in the battle for survival, there will be no second place company in each vertical - so the time to act is now before it's too late.

The biggest challenge entrepreneurs face is in figuring out how to focus and drown out all the other distractions. We are living in a time of innumerable opportunities but to succeed one need to be laser focused and be authentic. Instead of trying to create the next WhatsApp or Dropcam, they need to create what truly resonates to them. There is a saying in Hollywood –"It takes 10 years to be an overnight success." That is true in startups – most of the stories you hear about are the result of many years of hard work and toil with lots of setbacks in between. Persevering through those intermediate failures and being focused on the ultimate goal is the challenge. Good news is that it can be done and many have done it.(As told to Shariful Mondal)