25 October 2004

Sistema Triple Play

It's pretty difficult to get overly enthused by anything Sistema does or says its almost a direct copy of the countries bureucracy. James Enck posts on the announcement that Sistema and Alcatel are partnering for a DSL triple play. With ARPU's in this market at $20 and heading toward $14 pretty rapidly, with 13 free-to-air channels broadcasting all the meaningful content and with still crappy pulse dial up I cannot see DSL being a winner. Having said that Sistema has access to the best new "elitny" houses which is where pricing is fairly inelastic - maybe there they have a chance. My bet is with the Ethernet home LAN's being aggregated.

22 October 2004

Creative Destruction in Emerging Markets

No this is not another rant about the stupidity of people in Russia's government - though I will take the opportunity to have a go later on.

I caught the train to St. Petersburg on Wednesday night to speak at InfoCom 2004's wireless forum. Not quite as prestigous as speaking at VON. I took the opportunity to try out my how creative destruction in the telephony world will affect Russia. If I was a good writer I would now set out the state of the telecom industry in Russia. That would take too much time and isn't as much fun as trying to determine where its going.

In short;

Substantially all residential is still on pulse dial-up
Large corporations are well covered by a mixture of politically-connected incumbents who have aggregated CLEC's and the one or two CLEC's that made it, such as Golden Telecom - now NASDAQ listed and one of my previous investments.
A motley band of smaller CLEC's trying to service SME's and SMB's who cannot get anything approaching service from the above
Another (motley?) bunch of local home network/cable/ethernet/wireless (quasi-licensed) most of whom are cf positive - they have to be. But none of whom are really growing that quickly. A bunch of them just received investment from Oligarchic groups. A favorite of mine just got funded to the tune of $50mn.
Three principal cellular networks and a WCDMA player in the 450 band trying to break in.

The incumbents are profitable though I would bet that the Sage of Omaha would contend that as free cash flow is less than depreciation that they aren't really. The 2-3 incumbents and successful CLEC's are wildly profitable/cf positive - albeit with crap service. The motley crews are substantially all cf positive but until very recently w/o the capital to grow and capture the opportunity. The mobile guys are an interesting group. Growing rapidly in the regions the main markets are rapidly approaching/have reached the point that customer acquisition costs produce ever lower returns on investment. They really need the wealth to grow in to them rather than reaching down to acquire unprofitable subscribers. Meanwhile, GPRS is only really a reality in Moscow (Blackberrys don't work in St. Petersburg - roaming issues related to billing infrastructure rather than lack of network). But you can already see trial UMTS networks in Moscow with the right equipment. In addition an also run network is the first to trial WCDMA (I think) in Russia in an attempt to break in to data markets. It's an interesting play in Russia but I'm not sure what roaming capabilities it will have.

So that's the preview I wasn't going to give. What's the opportunity in creative destruction?

The cable guys aren't selling cable TV but high-speed internet and quasi-IP telephony. The PSTN's won't invest in local access, except in "elitny" housing and cannot provide business services. Cable TV is an add on sale (I'll go into this more some other time - think German cable in the meantime.)

Voice is free in the local loop - all of Moscow's 8mn inhabitants plus calls to all local mobile numbers call each other for free, so its difficult to disrupt a model where you will be charged the same for interconnect - which leads to a thought; is SkypeOut just a discount calling card with a fancy GUI?

I have always struggled with the opportunity to disrupt mobile companies from a business model point of view. I just don't buy in to mobile operators providing a pipe to better-than-Skype's. Put another way - the big mobile companies intend to keep the walls around their gardens very high. I also understand that Vodafone is not going to use a true VoIP solution when they launch UMTS. Which would suggest that they have not solved packet hierarchy issues. So they can lock in a lot of their value. Don't get me wrong - technology advances will eat away at/destroy roaming charges, lowest cost routing savings will be passed on to the customer. Data will at best keep ARPU's where they are. Single number plans will do further damage. However nothing is as fundamental as the pain that fixed line providers are going to face.

My conclusion is that in addition to creative destruction in applications we will also need to see alternative delivery methods. I don't believe that Intel's WiMax push will be part of the creative destruction. I was bamboozled today by a Professor talking about Russia's efforts in DAB/DVT in conjunction with GSM - is this it?

Anyway my takeaway is that I failed to be controversial because Russia is still getting used to what already exists and does not want to see a disruptive future - more importantly it does not care less about the disruption to its PSTN's.

Watching TV

Brad Feld lays out some good thoughts on the future of watching programming. I am currently lugging around a 100 page presentation by one of the Big 4 on the future of media. Based on a series of interviews with CEO's of Disney, Viacom, BSkyB etc they try to get to the bottom of how they view the future. Let me say at this point that I am on page 50-something but my big takeaway is that they all have different views of the future - except they all know that the 30 second add is dead.

I sat for a while on the boards of 2 TV network / station groups in Russia, am an investor in Russia's largest producer of Russian language content for TV, and are currently selling a media-selling agency, but feel all at sea in this business. As I don't spend much/any time in Beverly Hills I can't say whether medialand spends much time talking to VC's like Brad - they need to. Innovation is about to eat them up. What will be left is some of the least profitable parts of their business (gross margins at less than 40%).

Martin Geddes put in a great post on creative destruction in the telecom industry from VON. I have not seen the same introspection in the media industry.

20 October 2004

Popular Telephony

Tom Keating has more interesting coverage of Popular Telephony's global numbering efforts ("GNUP"), also from James Enck on Popular's global numbering. I don't like this, read what someone else wrote blogging style but a comment and subsequent response from Peerio (the name of Popular's product) is worth covering;

In order to implement peering between disparate networks, this would need a media wrapper (or gateway) to exist between protocols, wouldn't it?
Posted by: Andrew at October 18, 2004 11:35 PM

Not really... There are no networks really... SIP or H.323 or whatever... it is all on the user machine isn't it?
Posted by: Peerio at October 19, 2004 10:52 AM
As a Mac user I have yet to check out their claims but it seems to me that they are way ahead of the crowd.

Update: Martin Geddes posts from VON with some great thoughts including why we should all be scared about communications. Key take aways;
  • Too many border session controllers = trying to make the IP network resemble the current TDM network
  • Popular are "hijacking and subverting" the global numbering plan (this was meant in a good way)
  • A lot of money will be lost in VoIP - see point 1 to understand the coming crisis - So if you’re putting your pension savings into the VoIP business, tread very, very carefully. This boom going to hurt as bad as the .com explosion. One way or another, there’s going to be a lot of roadkill, and a lot of get-rich-quick money from inflated promises.
  • VoIP is a classic separation of application from carrier and more importantly the financial relationship between the two - someone astutely commented that a key aspect of IP was not just decoupling of the applications from the service. It is also the decoupling of the financial relationship between the connectivity and service provider.

All this should apply to the mobile network as much as the fixed. However I recently saw a line in a RFP to a global service provider that said in effect that GPRS and 3G are not yet robust enough to support true VoIP connectivity - bomb shell. Put another way voice is going to continue to have its own protected piece of bandwidth until QOS issues can be resolved.

Timely Insights Into the Arrogance of Power

In today's FT (subscription required) is a fascinating review of Seymour Hersh's new book - Chain of Command - the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by David Scheffer. Scheffer was apparently US Ambassador at large for war crimes issues (1997-2001). He finishes his review:

Chain of Command shows the critical need for evidence of illegal conduct by US forces to reach high levels quickly and elicit rapid responses. The White House needs a special prosecutor on international law to brief the President honestly and rein in officials who might forget or deliberately derail what the US stands for as a nation.
A nation at war, with itself?

07 October 2004

Packed Full of Information

Jeff Nolan has two excellent posts on the Vortex conference Day 1 and Day 2.

I'm not really going to comment on the specifics of the posts other than to say that his additional notes and commentary provide way more insight than the blog it as it's said stuff. This is super intelligent reporting that its impossible to buy. No journalist would ever know this much about a subject. I have printed them off and am reading more slowly for greater insight in to an area I understand only a little.

06 October 2004

As If It Really Matters

Copied below in its entirety is a research piece from UFG (40% owned by Deutsche Bank) on the legal games being played around Yukos. What murder being a sell-side analyst trying to paint a positive picture of what is clearly a mess;

An article in today's Vedomosti draws attention to speculation in the market about the possibility of Yuganskneftegaz passing automatically into state property. Such speculation should not be taken seriously in our view. Unless you should want us to pay us to short the stock - unfortunately you are likely to be using RenCap to do that.

The grounds for this scare are a provision in the relevant law (the Law on Enforcement Proceedings) that if an asset selected for the purpose of debt recovery has not been sold by the selling agent two months after being frozen, the creditor has the right to simply keep the asset in question. Yukos' 100% stake in Yugansk was first frozen on 14 July. A court decision of 6 August released the asset from the freeze, which was then re-imposed on 9 August by another court decision (procedurally dubious, as it turned out, but such details have long since ceased to matter). It follows that the two-month deadline expires next Saturday. We are quoting the law in the off chance that it makes a difference - we know it doesn't and our last sentence shows as much but we are like lawyers and paid by the word.

Our discussions with legal practitioners in the debt recovery field suggest that the standard practical application of the law is that the two month period begins from the moment the bailiffs hand an asset over to the selling agent. That moment has been on hold for weeks while DKW has been valuing Yugansk. Actually what our legal advisors said was; this is the law but given that the President couldn't give a damn for the constitution you might as well vote for the democrats in Florida.

Secondly, if the tax authorities did claim a right to appropriate Yugansk under the two-month rule, this would contradict another law - namely, the Tax Code, which states that tax liabilities (which is, of course, the nature of the debt being recovered) can only be settled in cash. As if they think that the law applies to them. A real estate report in the English language Moscow Times today reports that the most attractive Moscow real estate is owned by Government employees. Try this maths. "Golden Mile" real estate $5-7/km2, suburb real estate $500k-1.5mn. Average salary of government officials $100 - $2k month ($k applications are correct.)

On this basis alone, the authorities can be expected to at least proceed with the planned sale of Yugansk, rather than short-cut the whole process in what would be a scandal to put the whole of the Yukos affair to date into the shade. In any case, the law simply states that the creditor "can" appropriate the unsold asset as such. It does not oblige the creditor to do so. Apparently we can still be shocked by the application of power (sorry the law) in the Yukos affair.

05 October 2004

Pulver 100

Own investment promotion time. Congratulations to Tom Martinson and the team at jNETx on being chosen to the Pulver 100.

Also well done to Mera on also being chosen. Mera are very high on my would like to invest list - if I could come to a conclusion about value in the telco universe.

Whilst I am at the praising Russian-originated companies game; I would like to claim Dmitry Goroshevsky from Popular Telephony.

Softphones - but where's the value?

Andy Abramson posts pretty convincingly on the benefit of Softphones. All well and good so far. Then I have to link to this not quite outstandingly good post on GigaOm from Aswath Rao - an Open Letter to Steve Jobs. If the connection has to be pointed out Andy Abramson is praising the ease of configuring a piece of pure software rather than messing with a piece of hardware and software. Aswath is saying the technology exists - package it with a GUI and make it a universal communication device.

All of which I'll buy never having owned an ATA and clogging up my PC with softphone clients - my all time winner if you can get past the engineer's interface is SJ Labs. Native SIP and H.323 stacks make a real difference.

However, where is the value in engineering a great softphone? An OEM deal with Apple would be nice, but as an investment strategy is a little on the risky side.

I've seen plenty of soft-PBX's on PC's (all with engineer GUI/MMI's) so theoretically all of us could have all the "intelligence" we would ever need at the end point. Somehow feel that someone called David Isenberg got here before me.

I struggle to see the value in the engineering though. There will be some in hosting the always-on services (voice-mail etc) but if I can co-ordinate multiple sessions on my end point (PDA, laptop, etc) and the cost of my connection to mobile/PSTN reverts to the absolute cost of that service then there is little value in being a service provider.

I can see the IBMGS making $'s out of this at the enterprise level....

Thank goodness an all IP world is so far away and interoperability will maintain the ability to make $.

01 October 2004

Applied Tech Investing

Interesting piece on building VC communities. What struck me most was the thought somewhere down the page that:

First, technology VC is moving from turning science into products (core tech investing) to turning technology into businesses (applied tech investing). That's a trend that started 10 years ago but is now gaining steam across the technology and venture capital industries. In the emerging new world of technology, being located in Silicon Valley and Boston is less of an advantage and we are seeing more early stage venture capitalists locating themselves in places like NYC, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and a host of other business centers that have not been on the venture capital map until recently.


Add Russia to that list.
VC Syndicates

Great post on VC types from Jeff Nolan. Jeff Nolan: Pick Your VC Carefully.

Everyone has followed up on it so no more comment from me.

25 October 2004

Sistema Triple Play

It's pretty difficult to get overly enthused by anything Sistema does or says its almost a direct copy of the countries bureucracy. James Enck posts on the announcement that Sistema and Alcatel are partnering for a DSL triple play. With ARPU's in this market at $20 and heading toward $14 pretty rapidly, with 13 free-to-air channels broadcasting all the meaningful content and with still crappy pulse dial up I cannot see DSL being a winner. Having said that Sistema has access to the best new "elitny" houses which is where pricing is fairly inelastic - maybe there they have a chance. My bet is with the Ethernet home LAN's being aggregated.

22 October 2004

Creative Destruction in Emerging Markets

No this is not another rant about the stupidity of people in Russia's government - though I will take the opportunity to have a go later on.

I caught the train to St. Petersburg on Wednesday night to speak at InfoCom 2004's wireless forum. Not quite as prestigous as speaking at VON. I took the opportunity to try out my how creative destruction in the telephony world will affect Russia. If I was a good writer I would now set out the state of the telecom industry in Russia. That would take too much time and isn't as much fun as trying to determine where its going.

In short;

Substantially all residential is still on pulse dial-up
Large corporations are well covered by a mixture of politically-connected incumbents who have aggregated CLEC's and the one or two CLEC's that made it, such as Golden Telecom - now NASDAQ listed and one of my previous investments.
A motley band of smaller CLEC's trying to service SME's and SMB's who cannot get anything approaching service from the above
Another (motley?) bunch of local home network/cable/ethernet/wireless (quasi-licensed) most of whom are cf positive - they have to be. But none of whom are really growing that quickly. A bunch of them just received investment from Oligarchic groups. A favorite of mine just got funded to the tune of $50mn.
Three principal cellular networks and a WCDMA player in the 450 band trying to break in.

The incumbents are profitable though I would bet that the Sage of Omaha would contend that as free cash flow is less than depreciation that they aren't really. The 2-3 incumbents and successful CLEC's are wildly profitable/cf positive - albeit with crap service. The motley crews are substantially all cf positive but until very recently w/o the capital to grow and capture the opportunity. The mobile guys are an interesting group. Growing rapidly in the regions the main markets are rapidly approaching/have reached the point that customer acquisition costs produce ever lower returns on investment. They really need the wealth to grow in to them rather than reaching down to acquire unprofitable subscribers. Meanwhile, GPRS is only really a reality in Moscow (Blackberrys don't work in St. Petersburg - roaming issues related to billing infrastructure rather than lack of network). But you can already see trial UMTS networks in Moscow with the right equipment. In addition an also run network is the first to trial WCDMA (I think) in Russia in an attempt to break in to data markets. It's an interesting play in Russia but I'm not sure what roaming capabilities it will have.

So that's the preview I wasn't going to give. What's the opportunity in creative destruction?

The cable guys aren't selling cable TV but high-speed internet and quasi-IP telephony. The PSTN's won't invest in local access, except in "elitny" housing and cannot provide business services. Cable TV is an add on sale (I'll go into this more some other time - think German cable in the meantime.)

Voice is free in the local loop - all of Moscow's 8mn inhabitants plus calls to all local mobile numbers call each other for free, so its difficult to disrupt a model where you will be charged the same for interconnect - which leads to a thought; is SkypeOut just a discount calling card with a fancy GUI?

I have always struggled with the opportunity to disrupt mobile companies from a business model point of view. I just don't buy in to mobile operators providing a pipe to better-than-Skype's. Put another way - the big mobile companies intend to keep the walls around their gardens very high. I also understand that Vodafone is not going to use a true VoIP solution when they launch UMTS. Which would suggest that they have not solved packet hierarchy issues. So they can lock in a lot of their value. Don't get me wrong - technology advances will eat away at/destroy roaming charges, lowest cost routing savings will be passed on to the customer. Data will at best keep ARPU's where they are. Single number plans will do further damage. However nothing is as fundamental as the pain that fixed line providers are going to face.

My conclusion is that in addition to creative destruction in applications we will also need to see alternative delivery methods. I don't believe that Intel's WiMax push will be part of the creative destruction. I was bamboozled today by a Professor talking about Russia's efforts in DAB/DVT in conjunction with GSM - is this it?

Anyway my takeaway is that I failed to be controversial because Russia is still getting used to what already exists and does not want to see a disruptive future - more importantly it does not care less about the disruption to its PSTN's.

Watching TV

Brad Feld lays out some good thoughts on the future of watching programming. I am currently lugging around a 100 page presentation by one of the Big 4 on the future of media. Based on a series of interviews with CEO's of Disney, Viacom, BSkyB etc they try to get to the bottom of how they view the future. Let me say at this point that I am on page 50-something but my big takeaway is that they all have different views of the future - except they all know that the 30 second add is dead.

I sat for a while on the boards of 2 TV network / station groups in Russia, am an investor in Russia's largest producer of Russian language content for TV, and are currently selling a media-selling agency, but feel all at sea in this business. As I don't spend much/any time in Beverly Hills I can't say whether medialand spends much time talking to VC's like Brad - they need to. Innovation is about to eat them up. What will be left is some of the least profitable parts of their business (gross margins at less than 40%).

Martin Geddes put in a great post on creative destruction in the telecom industry from VON. I have not seen the same introspection in the media industry.

20 October 2004

Popular Telephony

Tom Keating has more interesting coverage of Popular Telephony's global numbering efforts ("GNUP"), also from James Enck on Popular's global numbering. I don't like this, read what someone else wrote blogging style but a comment and subsequent response from Peerio (the name of Popular's product) is worth covering;

In order to implement peering between disparate networks, this would need a media wrapper (or gateway) to exist between protocols, wouldn't it?
Posted by: Andrew at October 18, 2004 11:35 PM

Not really... There are no networks really... SIP or H.323 or whatever... it is all on the user machine isn't it?
Posted by: Peerio at October 19, 2004 10:52 AM
As a Mac user I have yet to check out their claims but it seems to me that they are way ahead of the crowd.

Update: Martin Geddes posts from VON with some great thoughts including why we should all be scared about communications. Key take aways;
  • Too many border session controllers = trying to make the IP network resemble the current TDM network
  • Popular are "hijacking and subverting" the global numbering plan (this was meant in a good way)
  • A lot of money will be lost in VoIP - see point 1 to understand the coming crisis - So if you’re putting your pension savings into the VoIP business, tread very, very carefully. This boom going to hurt as bad as the .com explosion. One way or another, there’s going to be a lot of roadkill, and a lot of get-rich-quick money from inflated promises.
  • VoIP is a classic separation of application from carrier and more importantly the financial relationship between the two - someone astutely commented that a key aspect of IP was not just decoupling of the applications from the service. It is also the decoupling of the financial relationship between the connectivity and service provider.

All this should apply to the mobile network as much as the fixed. However I recently saw a line in a RFP to a global service provider that said in effect that GPRS and 3G are not yet robust enough to support true VoIP connectivity - bomb shell. Put another way voice is going to continue to have its own protected piece of bandwidth until QOS issues can be resolved.

Timely Insights Into the Arrogance of Power

In today's FT (subscription required) is a fascinating review of Seymour Hersh's new book - Chain of Command - the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by David Scheffer. Scheffer was apparently US Ambassador at large for war crimes issues (1997-2001). He finishes his review:

Chain of Command shows the critical need for evidence of illegal conduct by US forces to reach high levels quickly and elicit rapid responses. The White House needs a special prosecutor on international law to brief the President honestly and rein in officials who might forget or deliberately derail what the US stands for as a nation.
A nation at war, with itself?

07 October 2004

Packed Full of Information

Jeff Nolan has two excellent posts on the Vortex conference Day 1 and Day 2.

I'm not really going to comment on the specifics of the posts other than to say that his additional notes and commentary provide way more insight than the blog it as it's said stuff. This is super intelligent reporting that its impossible to buy. No journalist would ever know this much about a subject. I have printed them off and am reading more slowly for greater insight in to an area I understand only a little.

06 October 2004

As If It Really Matters

Copied below in its entirety is a research piece from UFG (40% owned by Deutsche Bank) on the legal games being played around Yukos. What murder being a sell-side analyst trying to paint a positive picture of what is clearly a mess;

An article in today's Vedomosti draws attention to speculation in the market about the possibility of Yuganskneftegaz passing automatically into state property. Such speculation should not be taken seriously in our view. Unless you should want us to pay us to short the stock - unfortunately you are likely to be using RenCap to do that.

The grounds for this scare are a provision in the relevant law (the Law on Enforcement Proceedings) that if an asset selected for the purpose of debt recovery has not been sold by the selling agent two months after being frozen, the creditor has the right to simply keep the asset in question. Yukos' 100% stake in Yugansk was first frozen on 14 July. A court decision of 6 August released the asset from the freeze, which was then re-imposed on 9 August by another court decision (procedurally dubious, as it turned out, but such details have long since ceased to matter). It follows that the two-month deadline expires next Saturday. We are quoting the law in the off chance that it makes a difference - we know it doesn't and our last sentence shows as much but we are like lawyers and paid by the word.

Our discussions with legal practitioners in the debt recovery field suggest that the standard practical application of the law is that the two month period begins from the moment the bailiffs hand an asset over to the selling agent. That moment has been on hold for weeks while DKW has been valuing Yugansk. Actually what our legal advisors said was; this is the law but given that the President couldn't give a damn for the constitution you might as well vote for the democrats in Florida.

Secondly, if the tax authorities did claim a right to appropriate Yugansk under the two-month rule, this would contradict another law - namely, the Tax Code, which states that tax liabilities (which is, of course, the nature of the debt being recovered) can only be settled in cash. As if they think that the law applies to them. A real estate report in the English language Moscow Times today reports that the most attractive Moscow real estate is owned by Government employees. Try this maths. "Golden Mile" real estate $5-7/km2, suburb real estate $500k-1.5mn. Average salary of government officials $100 - $2k month ($k applications are correct.)

On this basis alone, the authorities can be expected to at least proceed with the planned sale of Yugansk, rather than short-cut the whole process in what would be a scandal to put the whole of the Yukos affair to date into the shade. In any case, the law simply states that the creditor "can" appropriate the unsold asset as such. It does not oblige the creditor to do so. Apparently we can still be shocked by the application of power (sorry the law) in the Yukos affair.

05 October 2004

Pulver 100

Own investment promotion time. Congratulations to Tom Martinson and the team at jNETx on being chosen to the Pulver 100.

Also well done to Mera on also being chosen. Mera are very high on my would like to invest list - if I could come to a conclusion about value in the telco universe.

Whilst I am at the praising Russian-originated companies game; I would like to claim Dmitry Goroshevsky from Popular Telephony.

Softphones - but where's the value?

Andy Abramson posts pretty convincingly on the benefit of Softphones. All well and good so far. Then I have to link to this not quite outstandingly good post on GigaOm from Aswath Rao - an Open Letter to Steve Jobs. If the connection has to be pointed out Andy Abramson is praising the ease of configuring a piece of pure software rather than messing with a piece of hardware and software. Aswath is saying the technology exists - package it with a GUI and make it a universal communication device.

All of which I'll buy never having owned an ATA and clogging up my PC with softphone clients - my all time winner if you can get past the engineer's interface is SJ Labs. Native SIP and H.323 stacks make a real difference.

However, where is the value in engineering a great softphone? An OEM deal with Apple would be nice, but as an investment strategy is a little on the risky side.

I've seen plenty of soft-PBX's on PC's (all with engineer GUI/MMI's) so theoretically all of us could have all the "intelligence" we would ever need at the end point. Somehow feel that someone called David Isenberg got here before me.

I struggle to see the value in the engineering though. There will be some in hosting the always-on services (voice-mail etc) but if I can co-ordinate multiple sessions on my end point (PDA, laptop, etc) and the cost of my connection to mobile/PSTN reverts to the absolute cost of that service then there is little value in being a service provider.

I can see the IBMGS making $'s out of this at the enterprise level....

Thank goodness an all IP world is so far away and interoperability will maintain the ability to make $.

01 October 2004

Applied Tech Investing

Interesting piece on building VC communities. What struck me most was the thought somewhere down the page that:

First, technology VC is moving from turning science into products (core tech investing) to turning technology into businesses (applied tech investing). That's a trend that started 10 years ago but is now gaining steam across the technology and venture capital industries. In the emerging new world of technology, being located in Silicon Valley and Boston is less of an advantage and we are seeing more early stage venture capitalists locating themselves in places like NYC, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and a host of other business centers that have not been on the venture capital map until recently.


Add Russia to that list.

VC Syndicates

Great post on VC types from Jeff Nolan. Jeff Nolan: Pick Your VC Carefully.

Everyone has followed up on it so no more comment from me.