LearnUp & NEA
In the oasis that is Silicon Valley, it is often forgotten that the USA isn’t a place where your employees are constantly being poached by other employers who offer more lucrative compensation packages and growth opportunities. As this Wired piece on LearnUp states, the USA is really a place where “the unemployment rate has shot above the national average, employers are flooded with applicants, and education must result in immediately marketable skills”. But the USA is also a place where there are many job openings that aren’t getting filled.
Enter LearnUp, a startup building a platform where employers can create video content, tutorials, links to certifications, and other resources for applicants to get highly relevant, targeted vocational training for open positions. For example, Staples’ trainings for a manager position include a YouTube tutorial on QuickBooks, a Harvard Business School “Working Knowledge” article on “Making the Move to General Manager,” a Buzzle.com article on “Retail Store Management Tips,” and a TED talk on the “Eight Secrets of Success.”
We at NEA are excited to partner with Alexis Ringwald, CEO of LearnUp and a good friend, and Kenny Ma to help launch a company that solves the skills gap that exists between many employers and job applicants. As Alexis says in the Wired piece, “We’re not launching a start-up, we’re launching a movement. We’re on a mission to re-skill America.”
Decreasing unemployment, one position at a time.
This Wired article is terrific and was the source of some of the above content.
An Unreasonable Group
I spent the past week in Boulder, Colorado at the Unreasonable Institute. It’s a six week incubator, an accelerator, and a one-of-a-kind life-changing experience for some of the most inspirational and courageous entrepreneurs solving big problems in some of the toughest places around the world. It was founded by three visionary people—Dan Epstein, Teju Ravilochan, and Tyler Hartung—and supported by an army of volunteers, staff, mentors, and capital partners. It is based on George Bernard Shaw’s quote about the unreasonable man:
“…the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man [and woman].”
This batch had 22 companies. Here is a quick snapshot of 6 of them:
1) Aquaphytex (Spain) – purifies wastewater through plants; have generated $4 million in revenue, employs 45 people, and currently provides clean water for 300,000 people in Mali, the Bahamas, Kenya and Spain. Pedro, the CEO, didn’t speak a word of English a few months ago but was nonetheless the most popular Spaniard in Boulder.
2) Liberation Chocolate (Liberia) – Reinvigorating the once abandoned practice of cocoa farming due to civil war, Liberation Chocolate empowers Liberian farmers to take back their fields and provides former child soldiers jobs by supporting production and bringing their products to market. Founded by a man who fled Liberia during the war then returned 14 years later.
3) Musoni (Kenya) – Making microfinance cashless for the first time in history, using mobile payments to disburse over $5 million to 7,500 clients.
4) Own Your Own Boda (Uganda) – Establishing a pathway out of poverty for Ugandan moto-taxi drivers by providing loans in the form of a new motorcycle, eliminating dependence on indefinite renting. In two years they have dispersed over 70 loans, with 22 of them already paid back in full.
5) Mobile Agribusiness (Congo) – Run by a former Congolese child soldier turned entrepreneur, Mobile Agribusiness connects farmers, who make up 80% of Congo’s population, to vital information via mobile phone that enables them to prepare, produce and price their crops effectively and competitively.
6) Quetsol (Guatemala) – Quetsol brings light to the poorest homes in Guatemala through a solar powered box. They’ve sold over $500,000 worth of solar home systems in 16 months, illuminating over 3,000 homes and benefiting around 16,000 people.
I’m absolutely blown away by what the entrepreneurs have accomplished, and by what Unreasonable has become. I can’t wait to keep supporting them and am so proud of the Unreasonable founders & team.
On Cue 2012
Hats off to Tony Tjan, Tony Pino, Richard Harrington, and the rest of the Cue Ball team for an amazing On Cue 2012. On Cue is “a private salon gathering of leading thinkers, creators, business and cultural luminaries – coming together for one day of shared conversation and connectivity.” It reminded me very much of a TEDx conference, except more mingling, cooler entertainment, and shorter & fewer talks. There were a little less than 300 people at the event held at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Aston Martin, Fisker Karma, Lamborghini, and other exotic cars parked outside as we walked in was quite the entrance.
Here are my highlights:
– Listening to Michael Bronner unveil his new company Unreal, which aims to start a health revolution through junk food.
– Watching mentalist Gerard Senehi perform his amazing tricks, including bending a metal fork in my hand without touching it, with the CEO of NPR on my right and former CEO of Ticketmaster on my left!
– Hanging out with Elliott and Jeff from Summit Series, Nico and Fabian from Sandbox, Stephanie from Her Campus, my brother Sujay, and many more.
My only qualm was that the event was too short. There were so many amazing people there – like the President of MSNBC, the founders of ZipCar and Palantir, and the former President of Ann Taylor – but I didn’t get to meet even 10% of the attendees given that we only had ~8 hours together, with only ~3 hours for real mingling. However, you know it’s a good event when the only problem was that it was too short!
Very much looking forward to next year’s event as this was one of the best events I’ve been to all year.
My Next Move
A lot has changed over the past month. I bought a gym membership in New York, then had to cancel it. I made some really great friends in the city, then had to have quick good bye dinners over the span of a week.
I have decided to join New Enterprise Associates, or NEA, in Menlo Park. It all happened really fast; in fact, it happened over the course of essentially 72 hours and most of it in New York, over Skype, and phone calls. And I’m really excited.
The past two years that I’ve been a part of the Bessemer family have been an absolute blessing and privilege for me. I started in Summer of 2010 as a Summer Analyst in New York and never really left. I stayed involved during the 2010-2011 school year while working for BVP’s portfolio company, Skybox, and coming into the BVP Menlo Park office multiple times per week. I was running around the bay area and on my phone all the time speaking with companies, and the day after my graduation from Stanford, we issued an investment recommendation for Snapdeal. I spent just as much time outside the country (mainly Asia) as in the USA while at BVP, and ended up being actively involved on a number of deals that went through (Matrimony.com, Skybox, and Black Swan Solar) and even more that didn’t.
The more time I spent at Bessemer, the more in awe I became of the people and the firm’s history. A hundred years is a LOT of time in the venture business, an industry known for its risky investments and high turnover & churn. And it has everything to do with the type of people that Bessemer hires. They are some of the most genuine, down-to-earth, caring people in the industry. They also happen to be really, really good investors. I wish I could tell you some of their numbers, but all you need to do is look at some of the acquisitions, IPOs, or massive financings from the last year to get a taste: Yelp (IPO), Pinterest (Series A), Millennial Media (Seeded & Series A before IPO), LinkedIn (IPO), Traffix (acq. F5 Systems), Vertica (acq. HP), OMGPOP (acq. Zynga), Verastem (IPO), and the list goes on!
Leaving wasn’t easy. I know everyone at the firm, and I have a close personal relationship with a majority of the investment professionals. It’s never easy to leave a place you love.
Still, every once in an a while, an opportunity comes along that you feel like you have to take. Something in your gut tells you that the people are something special. That was the case with NEA. I’ll be a part of the US tech team (specifically the consumer team, led by Scott Sandell and Tony Florence) and the India team, while continuing to look at other emerging markets. NEA is an investor in Groupon, Bloom Energy, Workday, and many others. And they are a really great, welcoming bunch of people. I could go on about the NEA people and their investments, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
I’m excited for a wild ride ahead.
Millennials & Risk vs. Upside
I felt compelled to write this post for two distinct reasons:
1) I am worried about the low level of risk tolerance in some of our generation’s most well-educated and promising students and future leaders.
2) I have been asked over the past few months on job thoughts from students at universities and people <5 years into their career.
I read a piece by Priya Parker who recently completed a study on “the values and behaviors of the world’s next generation of leaders – the most talented, educated, capable Millennials”. These include those from the best institutions, at the most prestigious firms, and with the greatest ambitions. What Parker finds is spot on:
“What I found was a rising generation of elite leaders who bring wonderful new gifts to the table – more empathy than their predecessors, more worldliness, more pragmatism for an angry, ideological age. But I also found my generation of young leaders paralyzed, hesitant, and unwilling stick their necks out and lead on the big questions of our time: how to build a more equitable and sustainable capitalism, how to manage the transition to a post-Western world, how to extend prosperity to developing countries without pushing the planet over the brink.”
She said our generation effectively has a FOMO syndrome, or ‘fear of missing out’. It’s perhaps the biggest reason why our top institutions’ graduates seem to migrate towards consulting and investment banking at higher rates than ever before: it’s prestigious, it’s broad in terms of skillsets acquired, it pays well, and, most importantly, it keeps our options open.
When I was in my second year at Stanford, I wanted to go work for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. They were the two firms that some of the smartest upperclassmen I knew were joining post graduation. After I went through the interview process myself, I ended up receiving offers from both of those firms.
Then, I received some great advice. A professor emeritus, David Abernethy, asked me to design my ideal job assuming monetary considerations were thrown out the window. We eventually arrived at the conclusion that often the most exciting jobs have to be designed yourself since hardly any job description can possibly contain all that we wish. I wanted to invest and work with many entrepreneurs that are building technologies to change the world, so I thought I should try and do everything to found my own venture or get into venture capital, an asset class known for high risk investments in budding startups, with the intention of carving out an emerging markets niche. And, although my ultimate choice of VC isn’t as high risk as starting your own company, I do think I took the “less safe” route.
Our 20s are the time where we can, and should, be the most risk-seeking. We’re free of familial obligations and are used to a relatively lower quality of life having been stuffed in dorm rooms. We may, however, have considerable student debt that we need to pay off (a whole different subject), which is a very valid reason for going into guaranteed low risk, high paying jobs straight out of school.
I would implore anyone graduating soon or considering an early career change to do something slightly riskier, but with greater upside. Upside can be monetary (say: early stock options in a company), measured through diverse experiences (for example, traveling to countries or places outside your comfort zone), or even personal fulfillment/growth (for example, always wanting to do XYZ, like work for X organization, rally for Y cause, or start Z nonprofit, etc). I have nothing but respect for an institution like McKinsey and if two years there increases your confidence, network, and appetite to dive into something higher-risk, then it is a tremendous option. But, if you have even the slightest inkling as to a high risk, high reward job or career path that you would find fulfilling, assuming financial obligations are not too crazy (which is not a safe assumption anymore) then you should go for it.
I think we would all be surprised by how much we learn, how much we can impact, and maybe even how much we can personally gain for ourselves when we take the higher risk, higher reward option.
Skybox – TR’s 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2012!
A hearty congratulations to Skybox, a cutting edge, atypical Silicon Valley company for being recognized by MIT’s Technology Review as a Top 50 Innovative Company in 2012. And congratulations to co-founder and current Chief Product Officer Dan Berkenstock, one of the most high energy and thoughtful founders I’ve had the privilege of working with, on being named a Top Innovator under 35 by the same publication. I joined Skybox in 2010 as a “consultant” right after Bessemer led Skybox’s Series B, working 45-50 hours a week as one of two non-engineers in our small team of less than 20. And now, the team is 50+ people (with many rocket scientists!) and ready to disrupt a stodgy industry.
Skybox is a company building low cost satellites that provide timely high resolution imagery and video. Imagine being able to see the protests of the Arab Spring in high resolution video, get timely imagery of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina so FEMA can more effectively act, plan construction sites without ever making a visit, or monitor and defend your national borders with video or imagery feeds. It’s pretty amazing stuff, and use cases go on and on. It’s a company built on transparency with the belief that critical information should be available in high quality and low cost to many government agencies and the masses.
CEO Tom Ingersoll (a remarkable, almost paradoxical combination of an aerospace executive and entrepreneur), Dan, and the rest of the founding and broader team are going head on in an industry defined by its staidness. And they’re attacking it with the zeal, mobility, and leanness of a Silicon Valley team.
The sky is the limit…except in this case.
Article on our SE Asia Trip
I didn’t realize this was being written, but a well-written post by SGEntrepreneurs on my colleague & my recent trip to Southeast Asia. The article, taken from some of the things we spoke about at HackerSpace, highlights some of the reasons I’m excited about the region.
5 Emerging Market & US Predictions for 2012
This week is my favorite time of the year. An abundance of food, plenty of football, and precious memories with loved ones. For the Tyle family, this is the first time since June that my brother, our parents, and I have been together for more than 24 hours, and the first time in 2+ years that we will have been together for more than a week.
Yet, this holiday season, as I spend moments of peace and contentment with family, I reflect, rather in awe, on a revolutionary—literally, revolution-filled—2011. This last year brought us the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the European debt crisis, the explosion of internet company valuations, the end of the US war in Iraq, the death of Bin Laden, and the even more pronounced rise of emerging economies. It has been a singularly turbulent and exhilarating year, leaving the door wide open for new ideas, now possibilities, new “innovations and inspirations” in 2012. So, as everyone preps to play Jay Sean’s “2012″ this New Year’s Eve, I thought I would make several predictions about what we can expect for the emerging markets and the U.S.
Emerging Markets
1. Investing in urban infrastructure—roads, airports, and railroads in particular— will increase at the national level with unprecedented zeal, as some of the world’s most thronged cities become congested to the point of paralysis. In November, I was in Jakarta, Indonesia, the city known for the worst traffic in the world, and remember traveling—in a car, though I probably should have walked— two kilometers in one hour at a time that was supposedly off-peak. That pace is unsustainable. This past August, I was in a similar jam in Mumbai, India, where the traffic frequently can become similarly unbearable. Yet in India, the government has announced a plan that will help address this issue, committing to spend $90 billion to build 24 cities between Delhi and Mumbai by 2030. This move will help to distribute the population, foster more sanitary urban environments, and generate millions of jobs in manufacturing and energy. I’m hoping Indonesia catches on and am betting that more countries to attempt massive programs like India’s.
2. Internet penetration will finally begin to catch up to mobile penetration, growing 30%+ each year in most countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. Brazil (currently at 75mm internet users and 175mm+ mobile phone subscribers) will grow to over 100mm internet users. India (currently at 50-100mm internet users and 800mm+ mobile phone subscribers) will reach 150mm internet users. Indonesia (the 4th most populous country in the world with 240mm people, ~90% mobile penetration, and 30-40mm internet users) will hit 50mm+ internet users to bridge the country of islands.
3. The Middle East, specifically Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, and 3-4 other countries that we wouldn’t guess, will experience increased violence as clashes continue to erupt and spread over governance. The citizens that expected positive change after toppling various regimes will be maddened by the lack of it.
4. Most African countries, with the exceptions of some of the ones in the Middle East and those in civil war, will experience 6-8% GDP growth. It will become the new place venture capital firms begin looking by the end of 2012.
5. Brazil—an already sexy destination for investors—will become an even sexier place to invest as money pours into the country in anticipation of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. A longer term prediction: a bubble in most industries (especially real estate) will form in Brazil and come crashing down after the Olympics.
US
1. The unemployment rate (currently at around 8.6%) will dip to 7% or less as Democrats focus a majority of their attention on stimulating job creation before the 2012 election.
2. Mitt Romney will win the Republican nomination as Newt Gingrich goes out of fad, and then will win a very close general election.
3. Cleantech investing will come back into fashion as the (few) companies that got funded in 2011, when cleantech investing was less popular, begin becoming successful. The memory of Solyndra will fade as the industry braces to compete against China.
4. LSU will win the BCS National Championship rematch. And, finally, the BCS gets overhauled after 2010′s conference shake-ups make it so that the automatic qualifying system makes no sense.
5. The US, and the world, ain’t gonna end.
Happy Holidays and best wishes for a prosperous new year!
Singapore’s Government & Dollar Leverage
Singapore is an eclectic array of cultures, a dynamic business hub, a free port, and the least corrupt country in Asia (and maybe the world). Last week, I was having coffee with an entrepreneur at Fusionopolis, a government planned, built and supported massive 21st century tower that houses science and technology innovation. Part of our conversation went something like this:
Me: “I’m amazed by all that the government is doing here. How do they have so much money?”
Him: “Every government has money. It’s just that Singapore’s government isn’t corrupt. It actually uses it for it’s people.”
One of the most interesting pieces of information I learned is the way government officials are compensated. While Obama makes $400,000/year, the President of Singapore makes $3,355,270 in US dollars. The government benchmarks the salaries to slightly below the mean of public company CEOs, thinking that government should attract the best talent and such salaries prevent (or, more realistically, reduce) the need for corruption. When students from the best universities are polled in Singapore, their ideal jobs are either in the government or for a large MNC. Government jobs are seen as very prestigious.
On the entrepreneurial side, the Singapore government created the Technology Incubation Scheme through the National Research Foundation to jumpstart seed investments into startups. They will invest up to 85% of the total investment (up to a maximum of $500,000 Singaporean dollars). And, the NRF offers an option for its shares in the investee company to be bought out at a price of 1.1x the capital in the first 2 years or 1.15x the capital in the third year. It effectively means private investment leverage of greater than 4:1.
As I leave Singapore tonight, I marvel at what an efficient, highly skilled, and uncorrupt government has been able to achieve.
Bessemer, BharatMatrimony, and 9:44 AM
I’m excited to announce Bessemer’s investment in Consim, the holding company of two tremendous assets: BharatMatrimony.com (India’s leading match making site) and IndiaProperties.com (India’s leading property listing site). 98% of Indians get married and one’s son or daughter’s wedding is often the biggest expenditure of a household, even more than the house itself, and BharatMatrimony is helping facilitate these marriages both online and through offline centers. Property values are booming and the real estate market is moving from being fragmented to more centralized, a trend that IndiaProperties is leading. We’re very much looking forward to working with the whole team led by someone who we think is one of the best entrepreneurs–and grinders–we’ve seen: Murugavel (Muruga) Janakiraman.
I could give a number of anecdotes about Muruga, but I’ll give one which should show the type of leader he is and why we’re so thrilled to back him. Every morning (note: every morning, rather than only every Monday morning like most companies), Muruga holds an executive team meeting where all the key managers of Consim get together to chat about the previous day’s accomplishments, the current day’s goals, the various challenges that may have arisen, and any progressive topics that may require a collective brainstorm. The meeting isn’t meant to be a full-on brainstorming session – after all, it only really is a 15 minute update meeting – but it sets the tone and makes sure everyone is on top of their game each and every day. Culturally, it keeps the company sprinting to beat any competition in the space and set their targets higher and higher.
But perhaps the most impressive part of this whole ordeal is the time the meeting starts. It’s the same every day and, if you’re one minute late, you can’t enter until the next day.
9:44 AM
Love it.
Innovations & Inspirations 