The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘director’

Ankeena Networks, a Santa Clara, CA-based provider of new media infrastructure solutions, has raised approximately $16 million in new VC funding, according to a regulatory filing (via peHUB).

No word about who backed the company with this third round of financing, but Ankeena Networks was listed by one of its main business partners, Juniper Networks as one of their investments when they announced their $50 million fund recently, so that’s one name at least. Ankeena had previously raised $15.2 million from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures, so this brings its total to a healthy $31.2 million.

Ankeena Networks’ flagship product is a content delivery platform dubbed Media Flow Director, which enables mobile operators and other service providers to take advantage of rising consumer demand for mobile content and other rich media content across mobile devices, PCs and televisions.

MFD aims to ensure users receive a smooth viewing experience without buffering or stuttering despite of varying network conditions, regardless of the viewing device, over mobile as well as wire-line broadband networks. Ankeena does this by dynamically detecting the available bandwidth and varying the delivery bit-rate.

Ankeena Networks was born under another name, Nokeena, back in 2008. The company was co-founded by CEO Rajan Raghavan, chief strategy and technology officer Prabakar Sundarrajan, chief strategy and technology officer, VP of Engineering Kumar Narayanan and Jaspal Kohli, chief architect, along with Deepak Srinivasan, VP of Business Development.

Collectively, this team brings leadership expertise from companies like Akamai/Speedera, Cisco, Citrix/NetScaler, Exodus Communications, HP, IBM, InSilicon/Virtual Chips, Intel, Level 3 Communications, Mirapoint and Yahoo.

One to watch closely.

This year’s MIX 2010 was led by Scott Guthrie, who has emerged from Microsoft’s rank and file to own just about everything developer-related. Where last year’s MIX and PDC conferences were spearheaded by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Guthrie’s keynote appearances focused on the progress Silverlight has made in driving the company’s 3 Screens and the Cloud approach to the disruptions going on in mobile, television, and the Web OS desktop. I spoke with Scott after his opening day keynote in Las Vegas:

Andover, MA-based website conversion company SeeWhy today launched Conversion Manager, an automated web analytics service that allows publishers and e-commerce companies to optimize website conversion rates through real-time ‘remarketing’ campaigns.

The company claims that their solution can recover up to 50 percent of website abandoners (i.e. people who start but never complete a sign-up or payment process) by triggering automated campaigns using email and social media.

The company fences with study results that highlight the importance of real-time follow up with website abandoners, citing research from MIT that says 90 percent of e-commerce leads go cold within the first hour. SeeWhy CEO Scott G. Silk compares such leads with fine wine, stating that unlike the latter e-commerce leads don’t get better with age. Cute.

SeeWhy’s new product builds upon the functionalities of its predecessor, Abandonment Tracker Pro, which we wrote about earlier. With added support for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, Conversion Manager is able to track individual visitors’ behavior on e-commerce and other websites and trigger automated, real-time messages to shopping cart, online form, and other abandoners by email and social media the moment abandoners leave the site.

Conversion Manager is available now at an annual fee of $15,000.

SeeWhy has so far raised $6.5 million in venture capital: $4.5 million in May 2009 and another $2 million from the same investors in December 2009. SeeWhy’s CrunchBase profile doesn’t list any competitors and a Web search doesn’t immediately turn up potential rivals – if you know alternative services feel free to share their names in comments.

My last post triggered some interesting debates in the blogosphere about whether entrepreneurs were a product of nature or could be nurtured. It’s not black or white. People are a product of their upbringing and education. Average humans can achieve extraordinary feats when they really try. I’ll concede that, like some great athletes, some great entrepreneurs may have something different about them that gives them a special advantage (this is a topic that I am presently researching). But not every entrepreneur needs to reap the same fortune as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to qualify as a success. You can build a good lifestyle business that pays the bills, or that does good for the world, and be considered a successful entrepreneur. (And you’ll probably be happier and gain more respect than most billionaires do.) Entrepreneurship isn’t all about the IPO.

I hold steadfast to my belief — based on my experience in building two great technology companies and in mentoring around 200 entrepreneurs over some years and on what I’ve learned from my academic research into the background and motivations of entrepreneurs — that entrepreneurs can be made. People born into entrepreneurial families may have the advantage of knowing the ups and downs of business, and, all else being equal, people from entrepreneurial families are certainly more likely to become entrepreneurs than others are. But the skills required to build, manage, and grow a business can be learned, and this education can level the playing field. VCs who judge entrepreneurs based on age, sex, ethnicity, or family background are doing their limited partners, and society, a great disservice.

There was one criticism of my last post that caused me to do serious introspection.  The question: was Bill Gates’s dad an entrepreneur? I cited Gates Jr. as an example of an entrepreneur who didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family. A number of readers, including Jason Calacanis, pointed, out that Gates Sr. was a partner in a law firm, and so an entrepreneur, arguing that my citation was therefore faulty.

I’ve debated and written about this issue before. The broader question is whether anyone who starts a business, whether it is a law practice, a computer consulting firm, or a dry-cleaning store, is an entrepreneur. Management guru Peter Drucker would have answered with a definitive No. He wrote, “Not every new small business is entrepreneurial or represents entrepreneurship… entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” Drucker didn’t mince words.

When I told this to some of my friends, I heard loud protests. Murali Bashyam, who started an immigration-law practice, insisted he was as much an entrepreneur as Bill Gates and his dad. Murali threatened, “if you decide that I’m not an entrepreneur, I might decide that the daily stress of growing and running a business, financial risks involved, and all the other headaches that come with creating something out of nothing is just not worth it. Maybe I’ll close up and go work for someone, where I can earn a steady and high salary and go home at 5 pm”.

Similarly, Sue Drakeford, who was Miss Nebraska 2001, had started a production company to host its own pageants and teach other African American women like her to gain the confidence and skills to compete in the real world. She wanted to provide a wholesome alternative to what she called the “cold-blooded cutthroat world of modeling and beauty pageants”.  But Sue was working full-time at a bank and ran this business on the side. Was she an entrepreneur?  Sue insisted she was.

After agonizing over this for weeks, I went to my friends at the Kauffman Foundation, and they referred me to their book titled “Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism”. Carl Schramm and Bob Litan wrote that all who take the risk are entrepreneurs, but that there are two types of entrepreneurs: “Replicative entrepreneurs”, who constitute the vast majority of small businesses (such as restaurants and dry cleaners), and “innovative entrepreneurs” — the rare few who bring new products/services to market or who pioneer new production methods (such as Walmart, eBay, and Dell).

Under the Kauffman definition, Sue would qualify as an “innovative entrepreneur”, because she is developing new services and pioneering new methods. In contrast, Murali would be a “replicative entrepreneur”, because he delivers a standardized service in a field that charges primarily by the hour for its time. Murali could well end up running a huge law firm and be worth many millions, but that doesn’t make him particularly innovative in his business model.

So Bill Gates Sr. was a “replicative entrepreneur”, and Gates Jr. was an “innovative entrepreneur” — whom Silicon Valley calls an “entrepreneur”. TechCrunch founder, Mike Arrington, who used to be a lawyer for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, would qualify as an “innovative entrepreneur”, because he created a new product (a blogging site) and was a pioneer in the new-media world.

You can bring innovation to “replicative” fields as Arrington did. Take the example of SunRun. The company installs solar cells — which is as mundane or “replicative” a business as you can get. But its CEO, Edward Fenster, developed a new business model under which his company installs solar panels on a customer’s house for little to no upfront cost and only charges for the power that customers use.  SunRun also insures, maintains, repairs, and monitors the system, and provides a money-back guarantee on the system’s energy production. This has made solar power available to the masses at an affordable cost and the company has become largest residential solar company in the country, operating in five states, and growing at more than 400% per year.

Another great example I’ve seen of an entrepreneur who has innovated in a replicative industry is Nand Kishore Chaudhary. He brought automation, supply-chain management, and professional business practices to the mundane process of carpet weaving and distribution in the desert state of Rajasthan, India.  By implementing modern production practices and ERP technology, he was able to grow a small business, Jaipur Rugs, that he’d run from his home into a world-class production and distribution company, which employed 40,000 workers and generated $21 million in revenue in 2008. This is in a land where PCs were, until recently, as scarce as rainwater.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t listen to the naysayers who are simply defending their informed views and biases by telling you that it’s nature or some special DNA that makes entrepreneurs or leads to entrepreneurial success. Don’t even be discouraged if you’re in a mundane, replicative industry. You can learn the skills needed to become a successful entrepreneur, and you can innovate.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes?  Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.  That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups.  After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs.  This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Running on just sugar and caffeine, 32 teams of students worked non-stop for 18 hours to develop applications that they hoped would blow the judges’ socks off. This was at the UC-Berkeley Hackathon, last weekend. Indeed, many teams succeeded in their mission. They built some amazing software: to provide server-side rendering of games, convert website mockups to HTML/CSS, create sophisticated playlists for Youtube videos, and to analyze Twitter streams. One team even built a gaming interface for a neural headset.

There were so many cool tools that the seven judges, who included representatives from Zynga, Facebook, Y-Combinator (and me), had a hard time picking a winner in each category. The exception was the “social good” category. There was only one team worthy of receiving this prize. The team built a system to enable villagers in developing countries to send SMSs to volunteers across the globe who provide emergency medical advice. But the Silicon Valley judges couldn’t see the value of this technology. One commented, “If the villager has a cell-phone, why doesn’t he just call 911? This is really dumb”. (Most of the judges didn’t understand that 911 services don’t exist in most places in the world, and that SMSs have become the internet of the developing world). Instead, the panel awarded the prize to a team that developed a polling technology for university classrooms and for conferences. The rationale for this decision? “Helping universities is a social good.”

This brings me to the point of this post. What if we challenged these students and Silicon Valley to build businesses that do good for the planet and make a healthy profit doing so? Today, the world faces more problems than perhaps at any point in recent history. The economy is on the brink. Greenhouse gases threaten to turn Earth into a giant steam room. Scarce resources such as food, water, and oil have already become international flashpoints as the developing and developed worlds jockey for position to sustain or improve their standards of living. Drug-resistant bacteria threaten us with doomsday plagues. Yet we have the greatest minds and the deepest pool of investment capital in the world focused on building Facebook and Twitter apps.

Yes, I know that some in Silicon Valley are solving important problems. But these are the tiny minority.  Out of 32 teams at UC-Berkeley, only one was focused on a social cause. That’s probably the same proportion of do-gooders as in the Valley. I’ll bet that most Berkeley students would do anything to better the world if they knew how.  But like the Hackathon judges, they don’t know what problems need to be solved and what they can do to solve them.

There is a way. In 2008, Charles Vest, the president of the National Academy of Engineering brought together a group of prominent deans of engineering schools from around the country to create a list of Grand Challenges that can be solved by engineers, in our lifetime. These were in several broad realms of human concern — sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living. Dr. Vest believed that “the world’s cadre of engineers will seek ways to put knowledge into practice to meet these grand challenges. Applying the rules of reason, the findings of science, the aesthetics of art, and the spark of creative imagination, engineers will continue the tradition of forging a better future”.

Here is the list of the 14 Grand Challenges the deans created:
Make solar energy economical
Are you ready to go solar?
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Reverse-engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Advance personalized learning
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Some of these may sound far afield for typical Silicon Valley TechCrunch readers and Berkeley students, but they are not.  I asked Duke University’s dean of engineering, Tom Katsouleas, to help me translate some of these into tangible business ideas. Here are three examples:

1.  Engineer better medicines. You might think this is the purview of the medical researcher or biomedical engineer, and it is, but it is also an electrical-engineering (EE), computer-science and information-technology challenge.  For example, one of the big drivers here is the need to predict and prevent future pandemics of highly resistant diseases.  So a concrete grand challenge is to provide early detection of diseases from a saliva swab.  It turns out that the human body when exposed to diseases such as H1N1 responds with elevated gene expressions almost immediately.  Picking out the protein signal from such an event and distinguishing it from the noise of normal metabolism turns out to be amenable to the same techniques EE’s develop to pick out a weak cell-phone signal.  Duke Professor of EE, Larry Carin, has teamed up with genomicist Geoff Ginsburg and shown that this approach allows disease prediction up to 5 days in advance of symptoms.  Photonics researchers are busy trying to develop rapid on-chip diagnostics that are optical or based on electrical resistance rather than on lab chemistry and that work on saliva instead of blood.  This information can then be fed into dynamically steered computer models of disease propagation and guide both vaccine developers and public-health officials.

2.  Make solar energy economical.  It is that one extra word at the end of the sentence that changes everything.  Without the word economical, this is a physics challenge that we know how to meet: to convert energy from photons to a flow of electrons.   But with the extra word, the challenge cannot be solved without addressing business, policy, human behavior, and of course a spectrum of technologies far beyond the basic physics.  For example, nano-scale plasmonic structures could be critical to making solar cells as “cheap as paint” as well as coating roofs that are as reflective as white paint but still aesthetic.   Wireless technology could assist the adoption of electric vehicles.   Imagine using metamaterial lenses to make wireless chargers in the floor of garages highly efficient.  The leapfrog from EVs’ being less convenient vehicles that have to be plugged in to never having to stop to refuel turns one key obstacle to adoption into an incentive to make a better product.

3.  Reverse-engineer the brain. As brain researcher and Palm inventor, Jeff Hawkins, at Numenta pointed out, there was a time when computer scientists thought they could create artificial intelligence algorithmically.  That hubris is giving way to a recognition that understanding the structure and function of biological neural networks may be essential to achieving applications as mundane as navigating a car down the freeway to as grand as helping individuals optimize their own learning.

If you review the list of challenges, you may be able to develop some great business ideas of your own. Olin College and the Kauffman Foundation have created a competition for students who have completed science and engineering projects that tie directly to the 14 Grand Challenges. Several universities, including North Carolina State University and Duke University, are also holding a series of summits to bring thinkers together to solve problems. I encourage you to participate. My hope is that rather than run business-plan contests and hackathons, our universities will start competing to solve the Grand Challenges. Maybe the excitement and sense of purpose will seep through to my fellow judges and others in Silicon Valley… and maybe we’ll even help save the world.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

I had a chance to see the Thermaltake Level 10 case at CES, and it looks as good in person as it does in the pictures. Of course, the design is intended to provide excellent air cooling, but it looks like iBUYPOWER is taking it one step farther and providing a liquid cooling for it as well.

See the rest here: 
iBUYPOWER announces liquid cooling for the hot Level 10 tower

“People in technology businesses are drawn to places known for diversity of thought and open-mindedness”, is what Professor Richard Florida concluded after studying the growth and success of 50 metropolitan areas in the U.S. The most successful regions were those with the most gays, bohemians, and immigrants. These groups flourish in Silicon Valley, and its diversity has undoubtedly provided it with great advantage. But after attending the recent Crunchies Awards, I realized that something important is still missing — women entrepreneurs.  I was shocked that the only woman CEO on stage during the entire event was TechCrunch’s own Heather Harde. Nearly all the companies that competed in the event (other than the PR firms) had males at the helm. This dearth may be one of the reasons for which the Venture Capital community is in such sharp decline, and why the Valley isn’t achieving even more success.

An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley’s tech firms – minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco, you won’t find any women CTOs. Look at the management teams of companies like Apple – not even one woman. It’s the same with the VC firms – male dominated. You’ll find some CFOs and HR heads, but women VCs are a rare commodity in venture capital. And with the recent venture bloodbath, the proportion of women in the VC numbers is declining further. It’s no coincidence that only one of the 84 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded list of top VCs was a woman.

Is the background or motivation of women that prevents them from becoming entrepreneurs? I just completed a project with National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) to find out (Kauffman Foundation will be releasing our research paper this spring). Our analysis of 549 successful startups showed there was virtually no difference in motivation between men and women entrepreneurs.  Just like men, women started companies because they wanted to build wealth, capitalize on business ideas they had, liked the startup company culture, and were tired of working for others and wanted to be their own boss.

Women entrepreneurs were as highly educated as their male counterparts, had the same early interest in starting their own business, and learned the same valuable lessons from their work experience and from prior successes and failures. The only real difference was that women put a higher value on their business partners and on their personal and professional networks.

Is it that women are less competent than men? Quite to the contrary. An analysis performed by Cindy Padnos, managing director of Illuminate Ventures, showed that women are more capital-efficient than the norm and that venture-backed companies run by a woman had annual revenues that were 12 percent higher and used an average of one-third less committed capital. Women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. And organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management achieve 35% higher return on equity and 34% better total return to shareholders than do their peers.

Padnos points out that the tide is turning in favor of women in education. Girls are now matching boys in mathematical achievement.  In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men.  Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates. Women’s participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women grew almost 10-fold.

So what holds women back from starting companies? Shaherose Charania, of Women 2.0, thinks it is because women have had few role models and mentors. Additionally, it is harder for women to obtain funding than for men. She notes that historically, women-led companies have received less than 9% of venture capital investments; in 2007, the proportion of funded female CEOs dropped to 3%. And there is another problem which her group works hard to overcome: some old-time VCs won’t give women the time of day. Her group members recount examples of VCs and angel investors interrupting pitches to ask questions and make comments like:

• When are you planning to have kids?
• Why isn’t “he” the CEO?
• So you moved here because your husband lives here? What if he has to move for work one day? Will you go with him?
• You should cut your hair, dress a bit more manly if you want to be CEO.

Sharon Vosmek, CEO of venture accelerator Astia doesn’t think that VCs have an overt bias against women. Instead, it’s the way the venture-capital industry operates.  Vosmek says that these “systematic or hidden biases” include:

1. that VCs hold clear stereotypes of successful CEOs (they call it pattern recognition, but in other industries they call it profiling or stereotyping.)  John Doerr publicly stated that his most successful investments – and the no-brainer pattern for future investments – were in founders who were white, male, under 30, nerds, with no social life who dropped out of Harvard or Stanford (2009 NVCA conference).
2. VCs invest in people they know. If women aren’t in their natural networks, they won’t get through the door.  We know that still today, men and women network in separate business networks.
3. VCs want to invest in serial entrepreneurs. (This further reduces the chance for woman entrepreneurs.)
4. The VC community is obviously male dominated, and it just got worse…after the cold freeze VCs experienced over the past 24 months, many women partners exited the industry. As the Diana Project research shows, a firm with women General Partners is more likely to invest in women entrepreneurs.

So, it is clear we have a problem here: we’re holding back the most productive half of our population. What can we do to fix this problem? NCWIT’s CEO, Lucinda Sanders, Shaherose Charania, Cindy Padnos, and Sharon Vosmek have all given me their suggestions. I also have some ideas of my own. I plan to write a follow-up post that details some of these, but I’d like to get your input first. After my recent BusinessWeek column on the dearth of women entrepreneurs, I was deluged with angry emails from men who disagreed with my conclusion that the problem isn’t a failure on the part of women but rather a societal failure. Some were really angry about my comparison of Wall Street firms to their counterparts in India. I’ve heard from the angry men, now I’d like to hear from the women. Please post your comments below.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

(Editor’s note: Centralized Web job boards are in decline. Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite, explains why in this guest post. Previously, he was Senior VP at Yahoo and GM of HotJobs, and before that a Director on CareerBuilder’s Board as CEO of Knight Ridder Digital.

Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo HotJobs signals a significant landscape change for a job board industry facing significant economic pressure and I believe the deal also marks a “new normal” in how companies are hiring talent. Online recruiting is transitioning away from “the Big Three” job boards. The Internet is becoming the job board.

Of course, unloading and closing properties that are not part of Yahoo’s strategy going forward is smart. (Though selling a job advertising board smack in the middle of this downturn and extreme unemployment must have been as hard as selling an empty, foreclosed home in Las Vegas right now.)

But more importantly, this acquisition is an indicator of a rapid evolution as more hiring takes place online. Venture-backed startups are transforming this industry as new technologies begin to change how companies find and attract talent.  The elephant in the room is that the economic jolt of September 2008 has permanently altered the job market and dramatically accelerated labor trends underway for many years, such as the growth in job turnover throughout a person’s career.

Increases in unemployment, under-employment and turnover are boosting traffic to nearly all job boards and job search engines – and the number of online applications to resource-depleted recruiting departments. Companies are spending more money sifting through unqualified applications, so they are naturally spending less on job boards and taking advantage of free sites, like Indeed, to post and distribute their jobs.

To combat the influx of poor-fit applications, companies are turning to new technologies and online services to target talent and search across the open Web for people who may not be actively searching for a job on a board. This is possible because 42% of working adults in the US now maintain a profile somewhere online—most notably on LinkedIn and Facebook, but also on Twitter and services like Jigsaw, an SF-based, user-generated database of professionals. And the downturn is growing this number.

The more innovative recruiters at growing companies like Zappos and Dell are now are using social media to engage prospective candidates in a genuine and inexpensive way: building candidate communities in their career site and blogs, search engine optimizing job listings, distributing jobs through social networks to dramatically drive referrals, and tracking web analytics by job to determine their best sources of talent.

To me, the more interesting acquisition was Monster’s purchase 18 months ago of Trovix, a Bay Area startup that built a behavioral algorithm for matching jobs and resumes to help recruiters sift through applicants and jobseekers through jobs. But, the irony is that they will be “unveiling” this new technology, dubbed 6Sense, on this weekend’s (expensive) Super Bowl, the annual marketing battleground of the big, horizontal job boards.

As funny as those ads can be, they are not likely to solve the job boards’ bigger marketing challenge: how to convince companies to spend more money “posting and praying” that the best person applies for their job when the broader, open Internet is fast becoming the new, cost-effective “job board” of talent.  This week’s combination of Monster and Hotjobs isn’t going to solve that problem either.

Image via Flickr/Frank Gruber.

In the State of the Union Address last Wednesday, President Obama said “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and America must be that nation.”  At the same time, on the other coast, 75 clean energy investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers were debating whether the U.S. can gain this leadership position.  They agreed that even though Silicon Valley leads the world in technology, it is not clear if it will ever lead in Cleantech. The Valley may develop some breakthrough technologies, but without government help these are unlikely to translate into global leadership. The technology world is rightfully allergic to government assistance and intervention. Cleantech is different, however, and we aren’t dealing with a level global playing field.

The Knowledge Economy Institute Leadership Summit, which I attended, was held at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), in Emeryville, California. The question posed: what will take for the U.S. to achieve global leadership in the clean-energy economy? The group concluded that the U.S., by far, has the strongest innovation platform in the world. But other countries may well reap the benefits of its research efforts. China, in particular, is making massive investments and has a huge advantage from focused policy and large markets.  Even though China is not likely to produce its own innovation, it will continue to appropriate U.S. technology and gain a major advantage by combining this with its manufacturing prowess.  American firms which are increasingly choosing to build design and manufacturing operations in China will provide it with additional advantage.

What will it take for America to lead? Despite decades of dominance in technology innovation, America has a dilemma in the clean-energy economy. Most entrepreneurs aren’t getting the support needed, and we are unable to translate research discoveries in our universities into profitable businesses that attract high levels of investment, make lots of money through manufacturing, and create jobs.

There are two problems with university research – the system for commercializing discoveries doesn’t work well, and there is no clear path-to-market for new technologies which do make it out the door. I’ve written about these problems and I prescribed some workarounds. JBEI is a bold experiment to fix some of these problems the right way. It brings together researchers from different disciplines with business. And it has a practical focus on solving real-world problems.

Centers like JBEI may produce major breakthroughs in technology. But that is when the next set of problems kick in both for university research and for entrepreneurs – clean energy is different than other technologies.  Startups typically need hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and scale up technologies.  Investors don’t see steady, strong and growing markets. So, few are taking the risks and making the big investments.

U.S. policy is not as aggressive as other countries in creating sustainable markets, investing in commercialization, or promoting manufacturing.  Take, for example, Japan’s Sunshine Project and related initiatives that have consistently driven that country’s clean-energy policy since 1974.  Japan has succeeded in building infrastructure, markets, and technology companies that help meet national energy security goals for the long-term.  The U.S. has not.

Contrast this with how U.S. government responded to challenges to its semiconductor industry by rallying behind it and keeping a significant value piece here.  How do we keep our innovative clean-energy companies and their design and manufacturing operations in America?

We need to learn from other countries.  In industries like Cleantech, success depends upon consistent and reliable government policy that links market supply and demand over the long-term.  U.S. policy has been cyclical, unilaterally focused on petroleum, and unrealistic about the value of short-term subsidies and support.  American startups suffer from inconsistent pricing-signals that make investors wary.  As investment cycles wax and wane, small companies lose top talent and are unable to recruit it back when funding begins to flow with the next cycle upturn.

Policy makers need to look at things that affect pricing. Energy is a commodity and it is all about cost.  The energy sector is undifferentiated.  Startups compete with large incumbent firms.  Moreover, clean-energy technology often has a deceptive fit with current industry and markets.  Take biofuels, for example. The high ratio of bulk-to-fuel, distributed biomass sources, and inherent chemical variation dictate smaller-scale and more regional patterns of development and deployment than for petroleum.

Consumers are key.   Consumer perceptions of energy prices have potent effects on the market.   China figured this out.  In addition to subsidizing manufacturing, it is training thirty thousand salespeople to sell new clean technologies to consumers. In the U.S. energy is just too cheap, so consumers don’t see the benefits of Cleantech. Rebates and short-term subsidies just aren’t creating long-term demand. As a result, entrepreneurs trying to build companies on energy efficiency are finding it hard to stay afloat.  The demand and growing markets are just not there.

Will America meet President Obama’s call for global leadership in the clean energy economy?  Not likely if Congress and state governments don’t make it a lot easier for startups to attract investment and a lot more attractive to manufacture here.  Governments need to coordinate comprehensive, long term energy policy – now.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.