Entrepreneurs The fundemental Raw Material for VCs
Ashu Garg
Venture Partner,
Foundation Capital
Foundation Capital
In a candid interview with Siliconindia Ashu Garg, Venture Partner in Foundation Capital, shares his thoughts about the new trends driving the start up eco system.
New Trends Driving the Industry
We have a very vibrant eco system of entrepreneurs in the valley. The fundamental raw material for our business is the supply of great entrepreneurs who want to do interesting things, and I think this momentum will continue uninterrupted. The reasons for this being, the presence of great role models, availability of capital from high quality firms, and the cost of building a start up that continues to come down. These make it easier to experiment with new ideas. The new trends in the themes we are investing can be considered in three folds - from Client Server System, Client Server Infrastructure towards Cloud Based Infrastructure. And this trend continues both to the infrastructure layout and the application layout.
The second trend is the fact that the traditional IT budget is been supplemented by the marketing budget. 10 -15 years ago startups were more focused on budgets for CIOs and consumers. Now a third allocation of the funds for marketing via Google Adwords, and online marketing has come into purview.
The third trend is video. The growth in online video is reasonably well understood, people still underestimate how huge it is. Today Neflix, an online video streaming portal, has as many subscribers as Comcast. When you sit back and think about the implications of that, it is very fundamental, the number of people who watch online video as a medium of entertainment, whether it is premium or non premium, is now comparable to the number of people who watch TV. The quantum of time for which they watch it is lower, but that is changing every year. So if you think about the world a few years from now where all video content will be watched online, then across that eco system there are opportunities for innovation. Not just for content providers but also for infrastructure providers, for platforms, and for advertisers.
One technology trend that I would say is driving a lot of change today is the low cost storage solutions. Cloud computing is one of the hosts of underlying technology trends which is enabling that.
Challenges in the startup market
It is hard to generalize, as the challenges depend on what market you are going after. The challenges in a consumer segment are very different from the challenges in an enterprise segment and both these are very different from an advertisement related start up.
New Trends Driving the Industry
We have a very vibrant eco system of entrepreneurs in the valley. The fundamental raw material for our business is the supply of great entrepreneurs who want to do interesting things, and I think this momentum will continue uninterrupted. The reasons for this being, the presence of great role models, availability of capital from high quality firms, and the cost of building a start up that continues to come down. These make it easier to experiment with new ideas. The new trends in the themes we are investing can be considered in three folds - from Client Server System, Client Server Infrastructure towards Cloud Based Infrastructure. And this trend continues both to the infrastructure layout and the application layout.
The second trend is the fact that the traditional IT budget is been supplemented by the marketing budget. 10 -15 years ago startups were more focused on budgets for CIOs and consumers. Now a third allocation of the funds for marketing via Google Adwords, and online marketing has come into purview.
The third trend is video. The growth in online video is reasonably well understood, people still underestimate how huge it is. Today Neflix, an online video streaming portal, has as many subscribers as Comcast. When you sit back and think about the implications of that, it is very fundamental, the number of people who watch online video as a medium of entertainment, whether it is premium or non premium, is now comparable to the number of people who watch TV. The quantum of time for which they watch it is lower, but that is changing every year. So if you think about the world a few years from now where all video content will be watched online, then across that eco system there are opportunities for innovation. Not just for content providers but also for infrastructure providers, for platforms, and for advertisers.
One technology trend that I would say is driving a lot of change today is the low cost storage solutions. Cloud computing is one of the hosts of underlying technology trends which is enabling that.
Challenges in the startup market
It is hard to generalize, as the challenges depend on what market you are going after. The challenges in a consumer segment are very different from the challenges in an enterprise segment and both these are very different from an advertisement related start up.
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