So when you as a consumer want to buy something; whether it’s a car or something else you want it to be perfect. You want it to work the way you want it to work and Apple, over the years has just discovered what does it mean to build a wonderful operating system whether it is Mac OS X or build an ipod or build an iphone. So they’ve got people there who truly understand why details matter and why the consumer would be happy with the final product.
Kamla: What was your experience like working with ClarisWorks?
Yogen: Well, you know Claris Works was an integrated application. We had some brilliant software engineers who wanted to take things like word processing, drawing, and painting and just combine them into one application. And today, ClarisWorks is often, is called I believe, Apple Works.
Kamla: It died in the last year.
Yogen: It died last year? Well, I think the reason it probably hasn’t survived the new era is that today people are quite comfortable with many of the applications from Microsoft for Macintosh but also the internet and the web has come to play where people are able to get some of these simple applications through their browser.
So if you wanted to write a simple document, you don’t even need Microsoft word. You could use Googledocs or a number of other applications straight from your browser. So that need- that people want is being satisfied in just as simple ways from State-of-the-art methodologies.
Kamla: What prompted you to become a venture capitalist?
Yogen: As I often tell people, by accident. I was in between careers so to speak after the Claris’ experience and I had known the Mayfield partners and they asked me to come hang out at their offices and help them think about where the world was going and this was in ’91 when Windows had just come world was ready for client server computing which is what I had spent many of my years doing at Xerox and at Metaphor. So I was able to help them think through their strategies and we made some superb investments and eventually they asked me whether I truly wanted to be an entrepreneur and go back out or whether I wanted to cross the line and help entrepreneurs; I didn’t know whether I’d like it or whether I’d be any good at it and I said yes and something I’ve done many times in my life, sort of gone with my instinct on where I think the world was going and what role I might play in it and I’ve never regretted that decision.
Kamla: What you didn’t mention was what were these companies that you invested in?
Yogen: Ah! The companies that I invested in, in those early days along with my partners were Vantive Systems, which was one of the first companies to do customer resource management, Arbor Software, companies like Pure Software or further down the road companies like TIBCO, BroadVision; these are all what I would call infrastructure software companies that continue to march along the path from client server to web services.
Kamla: You have deep knowledge of the network space. IPv6 is round the corner. What that means is, there’s going to be IP addresses available for billions of devices. What that means, I’m guessing is proliferation of devices and experience then becomes the focal point. How are you looking at IPv6?