Delayed posting due to vacation and hurricane. Earlier this month we held our 8th installment of Catch the Wave, our summer party in Kennebunkport, ME, where friends from the startup world congregate for a weekend of family fun and embarrassment in the form of a costume party.This year?s event was epic - the theme of the Saturday night costume part...

A quick post about my newest investment - JouleX - the emerging leader in Enterprise Energy Management solutions. JouleX is off to a great start and I am very excited we have the opportunity to be part of the team. It?s a bit of back to the future for me, as the CEO of JouleX is Tom Noonan, founder/CEO of Internet Security Systems (ISS) and many of...

I recently met with an entrepreneur who posed a seemingly innocent question to me: ?Can you tell me how your firm is structured and how you make group decisions on new investments?? In response I described how we do things at Flybridge, and he commented that he had heard and observed different processes at other firms. This got me to thinking about...

Note: This post is from my occasional contribution to the Global Semiconductor Association (GSA) quarterly newsletter, which can be found at http://bit.ly/iiKsuwIt is difficult to succinctly characterize Q1 of 2011 regarding the semiconductor sector; perhaps "a cold listless winter with signs of a vibrant spring" does the trick. The numbe...

Just joined a great startup community - vYou. It allow you to ask me (or any other member) a question and get a video response. I instantly fell for this service; easy to use, very intimate communications that allows for virtual 1:1 conversations. Go ahead ... ask me something!

I have been observing the back and forth rants on Vivek Wadhwa?s MIT visit last week and decided I just couldn?t be a bystander. The fact is that I agree with the fundamental assertion of Vivek?s session, that Silicon Valley is so far ahead of Boston in tech entrepreneurship and that Boston entrepreneurs can help improve the situation. But I take o...

This is the second part of my year end wrap up and thoughts on where the opportunities may lie for 2011 Tablet Computing ? It?s hard to believe that the iPad was only announced in January 2010 and released in April. In 9 short months it has become a phenomenon. As a major Apple fanboy (I ?may? have a poster of Steve Jobs on my bedroom door) it?s n...

I took part in the second AOL Ventures/Betaworks VC demo day last week at the AOL HQ in NYC. It was a hoot to be on the other side of the podium for a change, pitching Flybridge to a large group of entrepreneurs. The venue was great and Mike Brown and Andy Weissman did a great job organizing and managing the event. We each had 4 minutes to pitch ou...

2010 was a busy crazy weird year. I?ll wrap up some thoughts and themes in this post and a second part next week.The economy continued to bump along and most signs point to a slow recovery. US stocks had their best September in 71 years - and the Dow its best quarter since 1998 - but for the third quarter in a row, the US economic recovery continue...

I?ll be in NYC tomorrow and Friday and hosting open office hours from 10a-12p. Still deciding on location. Please email me at dba@flybridge.com if you are interested. I?ll have six 20 minutes slots.

Our latest investment, SmoothStone, was announced today. (See below this post for links to press on the company)By changing the fundamental power economics at the server-CPU level, SmoothStone has the chance to lower energy consumption in data centers by orders of magnitude. At the same time, by leveraging ARM?s industry leading architecture, Smoo...

Here is the link to photos from our summer party last weekend, Catch the Wave version 7.0. Another great weekend of sun (no rain!) and company. The theme of our costume party was ?Alter Ego? - see for yourself.http://risephotography.smugmug.com/Events/Flybridge/13162265_ cQTKL#954892601_FjBBgAnd here is the rather embarrassing video:

I am a member of the Global Semiconductor Association (GSA) and was asked to write a commentary on the current state of VC funding of the sector for their June 2010 newsletter. If you are a startup or established company in the semiconductor ecosystem, you should absolutely join the GSA, as the member benefits including industry data and networking...

I helped judge a panel American Idol-style Monday night at the monthly NY Video Meetup. Six great startups in the video space, but the standouts to me were SundaySky and Interlude. SundaySky has a platform that automatically creates context relevant videos based on policies that can be very valuable for commerce businesses (and I hear are already d...

Amazing. I know there has already been and will be more written about the iPad; some will love it, some will hate it. I am in the former category from two different perspectives as both a user and investorAs a UserAs usual, the Apple out-of-box experience was tremendous. The packaging is terrific - gorgeous and simple simultaneously. Having been ac...

Snow stayed away yesterday and I was able to present to the Free Lunch Friday crowd at the Rosetech Incubator. Some great questions were asked and hopefully my answers were reasonably coherent. The full slide deck, minus some licensed content that I don?t have either the permission or the stones to post!Please let me know what you think ... (click ...

WIth thanks to David Rose and Bo Bell, we have rescheduled my pitch to the FLF for noon on March 26th and the RTV incubator.I?ll be talking about the state of VC, not so much in a rebuttal to Ryan Janssen?s economics lesson but an extension to my business. Excerpts from my deck are here, but I?ll plan on showing more data about the VC business and ...

I was heading to NYC today for a few meetings and to lead a discussion for a Free Lunch Friday session at the Rosetech Ventures Incubator - and another storm has cancelled the trip.We?re rescheduling now, but wanted to solicit some feedback on my presentation ahead of time, since it may take a while to get on the calendar.Below are some of the slid...

Too many people have already chimed in about the iPad - mostly negative. My favorite of course is the old MadTV commercial, but the graphic above is a close second. I?ll be quick today - I was right about the device?s name, iPad, but really missed it it terms of my expected feature list. And while I am going to buy an iPad, I will do so with the sa...

My love affair with Apple officially began in 1994 when I was starting business school and obsessing over the forthcoming Apple Newton. I romanticized it to be the solution to surviving my MBA, a one stop note-taking and calendaring device that would vault me into the forefront of learning. I found out the handwriting recognition was poor and the N...

Most startups need to be first in their category, particularly in uber-competitive segments where customer acquisition becomes a barrier to entry. So it stands to reason that VCs would want to be the first in line to engage with a promising new startup. This is not always the case. In fact, the pole position often means we are the first to give a f...

In New York,Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,There?s nothing you can?t do, - Jay-Z, Empire State of MindCompletely amazed. That?s the best way to describe my recent two days in NYC (Dec 17th and 18th) with Nate Westheimer. As a die-hard Red Sox fan (although born a New Yorker as my Manhattanite wife is always quick to point out) it somew...

The response to my partner Chip's office hours on Dec 9th was very strong and we couldn't meet everyone who expressed interest. So ... I am jumping in as well and will be holding open office hours from 1-430p on Dec 15th at Flybridge.If you are an entrepreneur who is hinking about starting a new technology focused company, already working on a tech...

The conventional wisdom about the venture capital business is that 1 of 10 investments ?really? make money; 2 or 3 of them do ?ok;? 2 or 3 return the money invested and the rest fail. The reality over the past few years is much worse - more like 60-70% of venture-backed startups fail to return at least the capital invested. Why do these companies f...

At the NewTeeVee Live conference in SF today. Very interesting mix of tech and media players, showing their stuff and making predictions for the future. Some observations:Avner from Boxee presented - less specific about the move to Beta and the Boxee ?box? to be released soon. He was very good, promotional, but in a good way. I still worry they are...

Now that Labor Day has passed, the perennial question is being asked: ?What did you do for your summer vacation??I spent the bulk of my summer immersed in the video economy, talking with a lot of well-informed and interesting people, evaluating several startups (5), culminating in the investment in two companies in the space (sorry no details yet)....

For the past several months as I have been meeting with entrepreneurs and company executives, I have been asking them the same question: What is the key quality that makes a company great?In my unscientific survey with a statistically insignificant sample size (N=~20), answers varied to an extent, but summing to a single word, would be commitment. ...

In September 2007 I posted (see it here) a suggestion that the locals stop whining about how bad the startup economy in Boston is relative to Silicon Valley. This inferiority complex continues to be fueled by all the whining whirling around - about which company has moved to CA or shutdown, and which VC firm has shut down or moved or not invested ...

I was a panelist at the CDN Summit at Streaming Media East in NYC May 11. My pal Jonathan Seelig was on the panel as well.

My little world of venture capital is under siege - not asking for your sympathy at all - I am simply acknowledging the situation. The data is not encouraging: 1. VC investments are WAY down (50% down yr-over-yr, according to the most recent Price Waterhouse survey). This means that there is a substantial overhang of capital sitting on the sideline...