Trends in Venture Capital Date:   Wednesday , April 08, 2015 The California based 1997 founded Storm Ventures is nichely focused on early-stage enterprise investments, especially in the verticals of mobile, SaaS and cloud infrastructure. It has been almost two decades since Storm got started. We were and still are focused on Early Stage investing in innovation in Information Technology for the Enterprise. While we invested in core technologies like semiconductors and optical components in the early 2001\'s; currently we are only investing in software solutions for the enterprise in three markets; SaaS, Private Clouds and Mobile Infrastructure. Over the last 40 some years, the VC industry invested in core technologies that delivered significant increases in compute, storage and bandwidth. The innovations funded by venture capital delivered not only tremendous increases in raw capacity but also lowered costs significantly. At the same time, Moore\'s law delivered all of this in smaller and smaller form factors that combined with advances in wireless and cellular enabled a revolution in mobile solutions, with the phone and tablet. Cheap, small and powerful compute, storage and ubiquitous connectivity are enabling new ways of doing business not possible heretofore. Having laid the foundation for the internet with these new digital technologies, we are now seeing innovation in business models (rather than in technology) that is disrupting the traditional way of doing things. As a result, we saw Netflix eliminate the need for Blockbuster and iTunes drive Tower records into bankruptcy. We are seeing companies like Amazon in the U.S. and Flipkart and Big Basket disrupt conventional bricks and mortar retailers. Uber and Lyft are disrupting the Limo and Taxicab industry. Rent the Runways is seeking to make Designer Clothes more affordable. The ability to see the products on your phone/tablet/computer and visualize how it will look on you and/or get feedback from customers who have bought the product or service before, are all enabler for e-Commerce. Increases in e-Commerce have also been helped by better marketing and targeting of products to the right customers. These technologies are being used to decrease the cost of customer acquisition. You may recall that when television first started, the soap and detergent manufacturers sponsored programs for stay at home housewives. These serials became known as \"soaps\", but their primary purpose was to advertise detergents and other consumer products to the homemaker. Increases in e-Commerce have also created the need for more security of personal information and so the area of cyber security continues to offer opportunity for innovation and hopefully investing for good returns. Before the agricultural revolution, 100 percent of mankind was focused to hunting for and gathering food to survive and sustain them. It was the original \"social, local, mobile\" marketplace. All the population lived in the villagers who were all \"local\" and they had to travel by foot (mobile), to get water, or hunt for food and the village ecosystem was the social network where they relied on each other to survive. The agricultural revolution which brought fertilizers and pesticides and irrigation changed all of that and today, less than two percent of the world\'s population work on feeding the remaining 98 percent. Similarly, the Industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th century brought mechanization and automation to enable mass production of cars, and machines and textiles and others. Now we are living through a Technology revolution that is connecting us to people all over the world bringing us closer. Voice, Video, Chat, email are all available easily and readily and are being used in a social sense to keep in touch with our friends and relatives, but also facilitate business through improved collaboration. Technology is commoditizing products rapidly, making computers, cell phones, TV\'s, cameras. Music-Players; all very affordable and within the reach of the common person. Digitization of content has made it easy for us to create, distribute, and consume movies, music, magazines, and newspapers anytime and anywhere. We will soon have self-driving cars, which will be safer. There will be significant advances in medicine with more personalized/customized drugs. Better imaging and better diagnostics will help in earlier identification of diseases, some as early as in-utero. This will raise some ethical and moral issue There will sensors everywhere; in our homes, in our cars, even at work and also at play. Sensors embedded in our garments will be able to monitor our activities, our calories and more. All of this will create and explosion of data. Data Analytics will become very valuable. How do you find the needle; the one valuable nugget of information in the Haystack of data? Increased Data will also create privacy and security challenges. The U.S. will continue to be the Innovation Leader for three reasons. The U.S. had the top 100 academic institutions in the world which attract the best and brightest from all over the globe. These great Universities have a broad variety of research programs mentored by esteemed Professors who leverage the intellects of young ambitious students wanting to get Bachelors, Masters and PHD\'s. Secondly the U.S. has significant amount of Research Funding from the DOD, DARPA, NASA and others. These agencies have been instrumental in helping fund the early research which has delivered technologies that we use every day; Radar, GPS, Microwave Ovens, Mobile Phones and several others. This funding is augmented by corporate funding for research. No other country can match the resources that available for fundamental and applied research. Thirdly, we have the Fortune 1000 company trained and experienced CXO\'s and Managers, and individual contributors that are needed to commercialize the research and scale it to make it available and affordable for consumers and enterprises. So I expect that we will continue to see large amounts of innovation that gets rapidly scaled and commoditized to make it affordable and ubiquitous. These innovations will disrupt the incumbent solutions which will hurt the larger well established player. Unfortunately, that will mean layoffs and cutbacks at those previously successful enterprises. So employees will have to be on their toes, always improving and enhancing their skills so that they don\'t become obsolete even as the products and solutions and services they worked on in erstwhile successful enterprises face obsolescence.