VC Perspectives

Just ahead of the summer vacation, we have together with Viking Venture joined existing investors in the Swedish semiconductor company Nanoradio. As part of the deal, Imsys‘ (one of our portfolio companies) solutions for precise synchronization of distributed networks will be merged with Nanoradio.

We are really excited about the possibility to join in as investors in Nanoradio. We have followed the company for several years and have always been impressed with the technology. Lately they have also been very successful on the customer side forging important relationships with major mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung. Nanoradio has also managed to get design-ins with major mobile and wireless device platforms, which is a very important factor when you are selling hardware or components to mobile phone manufacturers.

Nanoradio has developed a unique WLAN chipset making high-speed wireless access available in portable electronic devices such as mobile phones, cameras and mediaplayers. Key features includes ultra low power consumption, smallest size as well as a unique support for audio applications. The cool thing is that it allows for always having the WiFi-functionality switched on, something that kills your battery in notime with other solutions (try for example the iPhone). The market for this is potentially huge with the number of WiFi-enabled devices amounting to several hundred millions and growing rapidly.

Here’s the press release.

As previously noted, Seedcamp is a great event really tailored for entrepreneurs. Now, the 2009 applications are open.

Seedcamp Week 2009 is a weeklong programme that connects 20 early stage web tech startups with over 400 highly experienced and sought after entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, product and developer experts. Along with current board members Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni, the chosen teams will also have access to Seedcamp’s recently appointed board members who have been selected for their broad range of entrepreneurial experience and international background in order to help Seedcamp deliver its mission to build a world-class, sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Read more here.

According to for example Wikipedia, a customer is a current or potential buyer or user of the products or services of an individual or organization. However, as Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures pinpoints in two great posts (The VC’s customer and The VC’s Customer continued), not everyone agrees on who’s really the VC’s customer.

At Creandum we tend to think that we have two customers, investors AND entrepreneurs.

It is clear that we are selling a product to our investors. Every 3-5 year we are in fund raising mode (although we are keeping in constant dialogue with investors also between fund raising) and present our product (the next fund) to existing and potential investors trying to convince them about investing.

As for entrepreneurs, maybe it is not possible to define our relationship as a customer according to a strict definition but I think it makes a lot of sense to still think about it in that way to ensure good customer service and attitude.

We try to view every encounter with entrepreneurs as a mutual selling meeting. Usually the focus is on the entrepreneur to introduce his/her company and as we want the entrepreneur to have as much time as possible to present, we tend to use very little time talking about our firm. Instead we hope to sell our company through they way we act (politeness, attitude, fulfilling of commitments, answering back to entrepreneurs, keeping timelines etc) and interact (ask questions or even challenge, have suggestions, provide feedback etc). I am convinced that if VCs are getting sloppy about this, it will get noticed and eventually have a negative impact on the VC’s performance as entrepreneurs turn elsewhere for investments.

As Joost has announced a number of changes including the stepping down of CEO Mike Volpi and changing its strategy to focus on providing white label online video platforms for media companies, it could be worth thinking about what went wrong.

Om Malik at gigaom.com provides a good analysis. The key thing that Om and many others point at is lack of good content which is something I fully second. Many also claim that going for an application rather than web browser was a key mistake, but I think a bigger problem was that they weren’t able to capitalize on the potential benefits of an appplication in providing a superior user experience. The user experience of Joost was not very good and included technical problems as well as difficulties finding even the good content that was there. As we have seen with Spotify, it is actually possible to create viral growth of a consumer-facing application if you provide tools for spreading (such as collaborative playlists and embedded playlists) as well as a great user experience.