RSS FeedArchive for the ‘Venture Capital’ Category

Digital Media Summit Ends With Mozilla And IAB On-Stage Debate

dmsToday, LUMA Partners gathered together ad tech executives from near and far for its annual Digital Media Summit during New York City's Internet Week.  The agenda featured a content-rich day of discussions on the corporate development and strategy side of ad tech, as opposed to the client side.

Among the highlights was a keynote by Google's Neal Mohan announcing a "real-time" update to their benchmarking tool and foray into engagement metrics. Also, Twitter's Director of Product for Revenue Kevin Weill made an appearance along with Facebook's agency biz chief Blake Chandlee in a high-level fireside chat featuring LUMA's master of ceremonies and founder Terence Kawaja.

At the end of the day-long event, there was time for one last "fireside" chat as Kawaja interviewed (and prodded) IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg. As the IAB chief finished explaining that Mozilla's recent cookie-blocking moves were anything but consumer friendly, Kawaja "surprised" the crowd – and seemingly Rothenberg, too – by inviting Mozilla SVP of Business and Legal Affairs Harvey Anderson to the stage to debate and discuss Mozilla's recent moves.

The transcript follows (MP3 here):

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Lazerow Discusses Buddy Media And "Don't Run Out Of Money" At VentureCrush

ventureThe venture capital community convened for the annual VentureCrush event in New York City today, featuring a gaggle of venture celebrities. Several of the VCs hailed from firms active in the ad tech space, such as Accel Partners (investors in Krux, MoPub, MyThings, etc.), Greycroft (33across, TagMan, Collective) and Sequoia Capital (HubSpot, Drawbridge, Chartboost).

Of note, Yahoo was the top "Platinum Sponsor" of the conference, as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and her corporate development minions likely want to make clear that Yahoo intends to be a buyer of venture firm portfolio companies in the future. "Is the next mobile Facebook or Google in the house?" Or maybe just an acqui-hire or ten will do.

Among the discussions moderated by Ed Zimmerman of conference host Lowenstein Sandler was a panel centered around the acquisition of Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce.com in 2012) with Buddy's CEO Mike Lazerow, Greycroft's Alan Patricof, who was a venture investor in Buddy Media, and Gary Vaynerchuk, who was a Buddy "angel."

As the insights vacillated between entrepreneurship and investment, Mike Lazerow revealed he's an active angel investor himself and that, no surprise, a key to getting any Lazerow greenback is that you'll need to be a great founder — great ideas, passionate, tireless.

Lazerow also claimed that during Buddy's August 2011 $54 million venture round, it never dawned on him that an "exit" might be coming in the form of Salesforce, adding that his job as a founder is always "Don't run out of money." But Lazerow did admit the importance of laying the groundwork through building relationships.

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Early Stage Investing As Hot As Ever, Says Norwest VC Jeff Crowe

nvpAs a member and managing partner of venture capital group Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Jeff Crowe is well-known in the ad technology space with investments ranging from Admeld to Turn.

With several hot topics pulsing in the venture and ad tech spaces, AdExchanger reached out to Crowe to get his views.

AdExchanger: What has been the impact of the Groupon and Facebook stock market flameouts in the venture capital community? Has it given VCs pause?

JEFF CROWE: The challenges associated with the initial public market performance of companies like Facebook and Groupon have not had a big impact on early stage venture investing. The impact has been much more pronounced on late stage private investing.  Both late stage private investors and public investors who previously had been willing to take a risk on private investments are certainly  now more valuation sensitive and often more cautious overall. They had lackluster returns or outright paper losses in 2012 from their pre-IPO investments in hot internet companies made a year or two earlier.  But early stage venture investing is somewhat more insulated from changes in public market valuations, and hot early stage deals in the broader internet sector are usually attracting just as much attention from top tier VC’s today as they have been over the past few years. Maybe the fervor has abated a little, but not much.

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First Round Capital's Chris Fralic On The Billion Dollar Exit

First RoundThe last time AdExchanger spoke with First Round Capital partner Chris Fralic in May 2011, Fralic indicated that "hot deals" were getting done faster and valuations were skyrocketing. He warned, "The negatives to be on the lookout for are down rounds as things cool off – it’s not fun..."

As the innovation of ad technology depends, in part, of the funds flowing from venture capital firms, AdExchanger caught up with Fralic by email recently to get his lay of the ad tech landscape today and the investment industry at-large.

Fralic says First Round remains "aggressive" when it comes to ad tech.

AdExchanger: "The Billion Dollar Exit" - Some VC talk about the importance of their investments aiming for billion dollar exits. Yet, in 2010, Invite Media - an FRC investment - sold for less than $100 million. What's FRC's view on the billion dollar "home run"?

CHRIS FRALIC: There’s been a lot of discussion about VC fund size and returns – most agree on a negative correlation though others don’t, but the real issue is often the difference between company math and VC math.

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Startups Need To Get It Right... From The Start, Says Norwest's Crowe

Norwest Venture PartnersNorwest Venture Partners' Jeff Crowe doesn't believe the shakeout of mergers and consolidation is over for ad technology.  He should know as Admeld (acquired by Google) and Brand.net (acquired by Valassis) were NVP companies, and he and his venture firm remain significantly in the game with ad platform Turn. 

Even though M&A has slowed in 2012, Crowe says, "Every ad tech sector is still chock-full of companies - just look at any LUMAscape. You need a magnifying glass to read all of the logos.  These logos are appearing on the maps just as fast as or faster than they are leaving them.   The M&A levels in ad tech are going to continue to be elevated for some years to come, and the perceived shakeout will continue."

AdExchanger interviewed Crowe on a range of topics recently, including ad tech and venture capital trends.

AdExchanger: Is Norwest making new investments in advertising technology today?

JEFF CROWE: Yes, we are looking at potential investments in ad tech all the time.  We don’t believe that the investment opportunities in ad tech have played out, as the overall sector continues to enjoy healthy growth and there are innovative teams pursuing new ideas on a regular basis in ad tech.   The result is an ongoing, robust level of new company formation and opportunities for venture firms.

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Former Twitter Product VP Satya Patel Talks Ad Tech Trends

Satya PatelSatya Patel has a long history in the advertising technology world on both the product and venture capital sides, including roles at Google/DoubleClick and Battery Ventures. Most recently, Patel worked at Twitter as its VP of Product until June of this year. Today, he's looking ahead to a startup of his own, offering only a tiny tidbit to AdExchanger: "I'm beginning to assemble a team to pursue a startup idea addressing pain points that I have experienced as both a consumer and business person."

Patel recently shared his views with AdExchanger on a variety subjects related to the ad tech industry and current trends.

AdExchanger: Given your experience at Battery, Google and Twitter, you clearly have interest as a venture investor and a product leader. Can the two mix? Do you have a preference?

SATYA PATEL: Yes, I have an interest from multiple perspectives. My view is that you should find as many different ways of applying your knowledge as possible, as long as you have the time to do all of them well. The knowledge and insights you gain from operating in a particular market can't be obtained as easily standing on the sidelines. My personal preferences and interests lead me to build products and companies while also attempting to leverage that experience to make intelligent investments.

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Ad Format Is The Missing Ingredient In Mobile Ad Tech Says Lightspeed's Sinha

Bipul SinhaBipul Sinha saw the early days of the latest ad tech era when he helped lead investment in ad verification firm DoubleVerify on behalf of Blumberg Capital in 2008.   In 2010, Sinha moved to Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP) where ads remain a focus and companies such as news aggregator Pulse, social ad platform MyLikes, and personalized TV company Peel have become his  investments of choice.

In an interview with AdExchanger, Sinha framed today's Lightspeed investment themes by pointing to mobile engagement, online marketplaces and what he calls a "new enterprise stack." He added that "the socialization of the consumer and enterprise applications are huge opportunities and that the human connected Internet is still in the early stages of its evolution." Given Sinha's pre-VC, enterprise vendor experience, it would seem he should know...

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Redpoint's Moore Reviews The Possibility Of Another Right Media, Ad Tech Trends

Chris Moore is a partner with Silicon Valley-based Redpoint Ventures, a venture capital firm. As his bio states on the Redpoint website, he serves on the board of a variety of ad technology companies including BlueKai, eBureau (owners of TruSignal), Inadco and Intent Media. Moore led Redpoint's past investments in companies such as Right Media (acquired by Yahoo), Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) and Auditude (acquired by Adobe).

AdExchanger spoke to Moore about the investment landscape and ad technology trends recently...

AdExchanger: Is another Right Media possible? -and I mean this not just from a big “exit” perspective but from a transformative business model perspective, too?

CHRIS MOORE: We’re going to see what I'd call “strategic outcomes” for companies that are doing compelling things within the monetization space, broadly defined. I'm not sure where those opportunities will happen, though I have some theses. Mike [Walrath] and Brian [O'Kelley] came to market with a radically different way of thinking about how display ads were bought and sold. If you remember back to that time, it was an ad network dominated world where a network would go to a publisher and say, "Hey, I want 100 million of your impressions and I'm willing to pay a 50 cent CPM."

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Union Square Ventures' Weissman Reviews Investment Trends And Native Ads

weissmanAndy Weissman is partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a "venture captial firm focused on early-stage and start-up investing." Weissman joined USV in October of 2011 after co-founding Betaworks.

Weissman recently discussed his thoughts on ad tech and investment trends with AdExchanger.

From an investment thesis perspective, what's the biggest change for you since you joined Union Square Ventures from Betaworks?

There hasn't been that big a change at all, I would say. But if I had to mark one, it would be that USV, with the latest $200mm fund, has the ability to be a longer term financial supporter, investing in multiple rounds over multiple years, if needed. In fact, I imagine we would prefer, if possible, to not even have a time horizon for any exit at all, instead letting the companies we support grow naturally and organically.

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Foundry Group's Levine On Ad Tech, JOBS Act and Programmatic Guaranteed

Seth Levine Seth Levine is a co-founder and managing director of Foundry Group, an early stage technology venture firm based in Boulder, Colorado.

Levine recently discussed his firm and ad tech trends with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: I realize there's still time, but how are we doing with your prediction for 2012: "the year of programatic guaranteed"?

SETH LEVINE: There's no question that we're seeing a lot of progress on this front. From a handful of start-ups starting to gain real traction in this area to Google opening up better API access through DFx for "programmatic guaranteed" buying, I think we'll look back at 2012 as a key year where programmatic guaranteed really began to take hold.

Overall, I think programmatic buying and selling has increased at a pace higher than most people expected. Add into that Facebook opening up its traffic to real-time bidding (RTB) and in the course of just a few years we've gone from RTB traffic volumes representing a few percentage points of overall display inventory to it covering potentially over half of all display impressions - "potentially" because it remains to be seen how much of Facebook's impression base gets filled through RTB.

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