Skip to main content
By

Taking the bulldog spirit to the next level



A recent Mercury News article provided inspiring profiles of two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who fought personal adversity to keep their start-ups going.

Here's a short description+extract from one of the profiles:

In February 2002, when San Francisco-based enterprise software firm Determine Software, was in the process of raising its next round of venture funding, its CEO, Scott Martin, was diagnosed with leukemia. Doctors gave him a 14 percent chance to survive.

(Extracts:)

But Martin stayed focused. He worked his laptop and phones from his hospital bed as he received treatment... In October, Buck French of JP Morgan Partners went to visit Martin, who was then undergoing chemotherapy to prepare for a bone-marrow transplant. With Martin's immune system compromised, French was forced to put on a mask, a gown and gloves before he could negotiate terms with the sick patient....

French says Martin's passion impressed him....... Sure, health was a big concern, but on the flip side, said French: "If this guy survives, he's a winner," he remembered thinking at the time. "This is the type of person you want to invest in."

(Extracts end)

Result: JP Morgan joined existing Mohr Davidow and New Enterprise Associates to invest $12.25 million in Determine's new round of funding.

Click Here to read the full Mercury News article.

Popular posts from this blog

How I Raised Funding - Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry

By
You have to be confident and shameless while crowdfunding. Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry shares on how to succeed in crowd funding with Venture Intelligence in this  interview. Priyanka also candidly shares how the team built Wishberry, raised funding from top angel investors like Rajan Anandan, on pivoting, and difficulties in raising capital for entrepreneurs operating in niche spaces not chased by VCs. Q: What does Wishberry do? Priyanka Agarwal : In its latest avatar, Wishberry has pivoted into crowd financing of low budget films (INR 1-5 Cr). We are essentially trying to create an internet platform for investment opportunities for HNIs in films including Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, or films targeting the global diaspora. L-R: Co-founders Anshulika Dubey & Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry Given that you are building a marketplace, how did Wishberry solve the Chicken and Egg problem? Beyond the “all or nothing” model what did Wishberry do to pull in more arti...
Read more

How Vinod Khosla created Sun Microsystems

By
While I knew the one line description "Vinod Khosla was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and was earlier part of the founding team at Daisy Systems", I hadn't come across a more detailed version of Khosla's pre-KPCB exploits before Joe Kraus talked about it on his blog . Here are some extracts from the Harvard Business School case study (by Dr. Amir Bhide) that I found interesting: How a Stanford secretary "linked up" SUN's co-founders: I'm probably more of a conceptual engineer, and I can draw block diagrams for almost anything I can think of, but I can almost never implement them. So I started looking for someone who had done this kind of stuff before. I heard of a project at Stanford called the Stanford University Network, or Sun.workstation project. I called the computer science department, and some secretary who did not want to bother a professor gave me the uame of a graduate student from Germany, Andy Bechtolsheim. Apparently,...
Read more

An Exit Strategy Before I even Enter?! - by Sanjay Anandaram

By
It is often said that in India, as in some other Asian countries, entrepreneurs tend to be extremely control oriented, tend to be very focused on retaining generational ownership of the company, and view investors as necessary evils and not as partners in creating value. Investors usually tend to be viewed as lenders or project financiers and generally receive the same callous treatment as did banks of yore. However, as more and more private equity capital (including venture capital) flows into companies to satisfy the entrepreneurial aspirations of globalization, scale, and market value, the realization that good governance, transparency, investing in business growth and professional management lead to value creation has gained strong currency. For startups therefore it is important to appreciate the role of investors as stakeholders and partners in the creation of a successful and valuable business. And part of the appreciation should manifest itself in the realization that investo...
Read more