Insight Venture Partners, based in New York, is a venture capital and private equity firm, investing in software, technology and internet enabled businesses. The company, founded in 1995 has a current capital base of around $7.6 billion

The Big data industry is witnessing several trends, which are transforming the sector, with the biggest among them being the increased interest in moving data towards cloud-based delivery and data solutions. Let's look at an interesting example, one of our biggest investments has been in Drilling Info. Through Drilling Info, large oil and gas enterprises are provided with data, so as to enable these enterprises to take better decisions on their spending. The process leverages several trends in the cloud-based delivery, big data and use of analytics for these data while arriving at viable decisions.

Another imperative thing to mention is the recent attempts towards innovation. There are several areas where innovative trends are taking place, which include mobile, payments and others.

Coming to payment technologies, you could see huge investments happening in both the early and later stages. Let's consider social commerce, which is another trend, still in the early stages. In this sector, there are attempts going on in terms of leveraging the social networks and growth for driving conversion for purchases.

Key Investment Options

In my view, mobile is a key area with immense potential for investment. In fact, mobile adoption has been significant across different technology enterprises, including business enterprises or consumer enterprises. Compared to earlier days, today's customers spend much more time on mobile than laptop or PC.
Increasingly, enterprises are highly focused on delivering a great mobile experience for consumers from mobile applications as well as websites. There is focus on mobilizing their core applications so that their employees could access them and use them for interaction.
I feel that it is difficult to recognize the technology that is going to create a shift. We are more excited about platform shifts and mobile platform is the most significant shift that has happened in the recent times.

Hiring the Best

It is highly important that you hire the best people, as it is merely not sufficient to possess great ideas without a team. The best approach would be to look for people who are better than you. The second important point that I would like to emphasize upon is that you need to wait for the right time before raising the capital. Try to stick to your ideas. Looking at most of the successful companies, they were built in the traditional method where capital was raised from the customers, and that used to be the first venture capital for them.

Therefore, one should not be under the impression that it is necessary to raise venture capital as soon as you get an idea.

My advice to entrepreneurs would be not to build a company to exit. Instead, while constructing your own empire keep in mind that you are going to maintain and run it forever. Also, try to have a long-term view while arriving at decisions. The so-called 'built-to-exit' companies are vulnerable to identification. (As told to Shariful Mondal)