Episode 38 of the PodLeaders show - 40 mins 06 secs
My guest on the show this week is Jeff Clavier. Jeff is the founder and managing partner of SoftTech Venture Consulting. Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff was the President of RVC Capital, the corporate venture arm of Reuters which invested USD560 million in 82 companies since 1994, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com and Infoseek.
Jeff and I had a wide-ranging discussion on topics as diverse as angel vs. VC investors, to the cultural differences between living and working in the valley vs. living and working in Europe.
Jeff was a great interviewee and my only regret is that I had to cut the interview when I did, so I could go and collect my son from the creche!
Here are all the questions I asked Jeff along with their times during the interview:
Jeff, welcome to the show. Can you give us some background on yourself first? - 0:56
Jeff, I know nothing whatsoever about the world of investing. What is it that an angel investor does that a VC doesn’t do or do they differ? - 3:15
So if you are investing that much earlier in a company are the risks that much greater? - 5:19
Typically what kind of percentage of companies give you a positive return on your investment? - 6:12
Does that apply to angels as well or is that a VC specific breakdown? - 7:10
With all the Web 2.0, or after the events of the last few weeks, maybe I should say, with all the social software that is emerging and all the buyouts and acquisitions, do you think we are heading into another bubble? - 8:06
Again Jeff, for someone who is a complete novice in this area, say I have come up with a fantastic idea and I have a great management team, what do I do next? - 10:41
What is the process then? You write a cheque, you take a lump of equity. What happens next? - 13:27
Audience questions
Can I have some money to start a data centre in Cork City please? We’re a bit short of competition down here and I have some servers I want to co-lo, plus a few more I can pull in with the right network and power setup. Just EUR20k should get me started, but I’ll happily budget for more if it’s going. Be happy to host reuters.ie, wink wink, what with it being Temporarily Unavailable an’ all atm.
(Hey, you asked. Actually, now I come to think about it, I seem to remember reading somewhere recently that if you had the opportunity to ask a VC something, you should ask for advice, because the advice will often lead to an investment; whereas if you ask for money, what you’ll invariably get is advice. So there you go, there’s a real question, ask him if he finds that is the case.) - 16:23
1 - How crowded is the consumer mobile photo space, and what companies does he think will win in that space (and why)? - 19:35
2 - What three areas does he think have promise in Web 2.0? - 22:07
3 - The VC model seems to be in trouble given the low G2M cost of building companies today. Does he agree and what happens to traditional VCs if that happens? SoftTech seems to be adapting to fit this trend, but is it deliberate or accidental? - 24:41
4 - Can he fill in the following blank… “english pig-dogs… I ____ in your general direction” - 28:52
Ask him, how does he manage to gather all the confidence for investing so much money in insecure as well as secure areas? - 29:52
Cartoon - I’m not a VC, I just happen to like eating babies! - 32:39
My Questions again
What would your take be on O’Reilly’s trademarking of the term Web 2.0? - 33:05
And finally, you are a European working in Silicon Valley. What are the most striking cultural differences you see between Europe and the Valley? - 38:17
Download the entire interview here
(18.4mb mp3).
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