Yogen: Well I know but you know, I think there are so many ways to find that out and deliver digital life style but I’m also just a big believer that you’ll have to let your kids grow up and not be what people often call “helicopter” parents where you’re hovering around them all the time.
Kamla: How has your focus changed? What changes have you made when you assess companies or opportunities compared to the dot com boom and the early 1990s when you joined Mayfield?
Yogen: Well in the early 1990s we were all technology investors. That’s really what we were about. We were about building the infrastructure for today’s technological marketplace and so you really looked for entrepreneurs who have the entrepreneur drive but have the technological savvy to pull it off. As the technology foundation has become well established, we’re now looking at business innovation. How do you take all that technology that’s out there and innovate from a business model point of view in order to satisfy market needs. For example- today software, the service means that you rent the capabilities that you want rather than buying the software package. So that’s not technological innovation. It is- requires technological savvy but it’s a business model innovation.
But more importantly, Internet is the new form of media so most of us have to now think about what does it mean to invest in businesses that are satisfying consumer needs as opposed to business needs. And that’s a whole different game because as you know Kamla, you can’t guarantee that the new movie is going to be a hit or the new restaurant that is opened on the corner of the street is going to be a true success. Everybody wants to satisfy the needs of consumers, but you get flops too.
Kamla: Where are you going today that you’ve not gone before?
Yogen: Where are we going today- I think that you know, green tech is certainly the big buzz word of today. But it’s a long term market so what we’re looking at is not alternative fields or anything of that nature but how can computing technology that we’re very comfortable with in now somehow make a difference. We’re basically looking at, in the whole green phenomena that’s going to take over the world, where does information technology fit into that? There are other people that can do very successful things, like ethanol and all the variety of other bio-fuels. That’s not our expertise. Our expertise is to playing this market place by encouraging entrepreneurs to know what they do well in communications and computing and apply those methodologies to making the world more green.
Kamla: What about the India option? You know, I’ve come across a couple of places where you’ve mentioned that India is a place where companies should set up a development centre.
Yogen: Well, it clearly-we’ve always believed that having some cross border activity enable start ups to be more successful because there’s a load amount of talent not only here in Silicon Valley but also in China and in India and other parts of Eastern Europe.
So virtually all companies are going to be global not only in their structure but in their market. I think start-ups are not just looking for customers in the US but looking for customers world wide.