My good friend Dan and I were talking shop about our recent business challenges. He works for Omniture (OMTR), the leading Web analytics software company, and is one of the top sales guys there. As an aside, we were both at the University Venture Fund when I sourced our Omniture deal and we had the privilege to co-invest with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners in one of Utah’s shining technology successes. Every quarter, my friend handily beats his quotas and makes good money doing so. Life ought …

A few months ago I came across a piece by Jeff Nolan, titled Incrementalism and “The New New Thing,” which struck poignantly at a raw nerve. He called attention to the incrementalism gripping Silicon Valley despite the flush amount of capital available for startups. Much of the attention and hype has surrounded social networking and Web 2.0 startups but each new entry is a slight improvement over the previous. But only discontinuous, quantum leap innovations create disproportionate value. So what’s next?
Umair Haque’s An Open Challenge to Silicon Valley put it …

A few days ago, I wrote about the commoditization of social networks or rather the social networking feature sets that currently make Myspace and Facebook so unique and neat. Pioneers in social networking like Friendster and Myspace introduced a new data and software architecture that, at the same time clumsily and elegantly, met Internet users’ desire to interact and share content with each other. Finding old friends, connecting with new friends, sharing music and videos, playing collaborative games, and expressing oneself to virtual audiences of thousands all were groundbreaking features …

The market takes a breather after several weeks of blistering recovery from last winter’s doldrums. Commodities all around saw amazing advances. Crude oil rose 8.3% last week and has more than doubled over the last year. I remember taking my first car, a Honda (HMC) Civic, out for the first time and pumping gas for about $1.18 per gallon. This was also in the notoriously gas-expensive San Francisco Bay Area. Base commodities and gold continue to follow oil’s lead in going the opposite direction of the U.S. dollar. Will the …

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my pessimism regarding the technology sector. The market had seemed to interpret the surprisingly good results reported by Big Blue (IBM), Google (GOOG), and even Yahoo! (YHOO) as reasons for unleashing optimism and a bargain hunting shopping spree for stocks of publicly traded technology companies. Maybe the recessionary environment and the woes faced by banks and the American consumer would not negatively impact corporate budgets for technology. My skepticism rests on the ability of secondary technology companies to weather the economic slowdown. In …

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has a very informative piece on the credit crisis and its effect on startups. Apparently, many startups are putting their venture cash in Auction Rate Securities, financial instruments that are normally very liquid and provide better yields than typical bank savings/checkings accounts. Unfortunately, the perfect storm of the current credit crisis has put a freeze on the ARS market and startups are finding a difficult time to access their cash.
What really surprised me from the article was that many startups were putting their cash in …