Married Inc. Author
John
April 12th, 2006

Charles Chi @ TVG Breakfast

I enjoyed my first TVG Breakfast this morning, which featured Charles Chi’s broad survey of venture financing.

First, I’ve never seen anyone handle a projector meltdown with more grace. Charles was up there hanging for ten minutes without his slides (which were necessary for him to start) but easily kept us entertained. Well done Charles!

Once the slides were up, Charles exposed some interesting trends though a series of graphs. Two observations stuck with me.

  1. Right before the bubble burst, valuations for companies with shipping products (but not yet profitable) were higher than that of profitable companies. I assume the mindset of the time was that if you were profitable, you weren’t growing fast enough. Nice try.
  2. Over the last three years, the total amount of VC investment has doubled, but the number of new investee companies has remained the same.

Charles took on a myriad of topics after the graphs, including an interesting nod to India as the economy to watch. (While making this point, he put up a slide that showed that Canada is set to get bumped from the top ten economies by 2010. I for one plan not to move to the States like Charles!)

But there was one thing, beyond all else, that really resonated with me all day. Charles went over some leasons for entrepreneurs and VCs–here’s the bullet that got me:

  • Thought Leadership

Charles expounded that promising companies need to demonstrate “thought leadership” by taking a forward stance in their industry; to be able to “see around corners”, and be first.

Once articulated, I guess it seems easy to understand or even obvious, but it hit me like a bucket of cold water. For Nuvvo, I see it as a call to action to be (still) more active & vocal in leading the broad elearning community with our vision for the future.

4 Responses…
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4 Responses:

[…] I shared a table with John Philip Green of Savvica, whom I seem to keep bumping into all over the place. He nicely summarizes the main presentation by Charles Chi of Greylock Capital here. […]

Posted at 9:43 am on April 13, 2006 by My Own Pirate Radio » TVG Breakfast

I guess being a thought leader at Mesh isn’t where you should rest your laurels. Albert talked about thinking big and thought leadership a while ago. It might be a fun exercise to either compare Nuvvo to Blackboard and WebCT or even Moodle, and to figure out where you are the same and where you are different. It would also be interesting to think about what’s next in the eLearning space from a management/administration perspective and from a delivery perspective.

Posted at 9:15 am on April 15, 2006 by David Crow

David,

I certainly hope you don’t imagine us ‘resting on our laurels’ after success with mesh or anything else!

We have a very long way to go.

Regarding a comparison with other learning systems, we’ve had a comparison with Moodle up for several months now right here. (Its probably a little out of date now.)

Nuvvo is in a state of major transition–we are moving further and further away from the traditional style of elearning system, and adopting a lot of the social principles of the Web 2.0 thrust. Lots on the way.

Posted at 9:35 am on April 15, 2006 by John

Sorry John,

Didn’t mean to imply you were resting on your laurels, we really do need semantic markup for sarcasm.

It’s interesting to read the differences between Nuvvo and Moodle. What strikes me about participatory/social tools is their revenue model, there has been a recent push towards a traditional media and advertising model with the valuations for MySpace and Weblogs, Inc. based on eyeballs or unique users. Does this same model hold for Nuvvo? Does it make more sense in a non-North American centric view of the world, i.e., where educational resources are more participatory or oral in tradition. I have always thought of eLearning in very traditional sense - production, distribution, management and administration. Is the way to aggregate attention and eyeballs to provide the distribution, management and administration functions. Let the community create and share using Nuvvo.

Looking forward to seeing the evolution of Nuvvo. And the revolution you cause in the eLearning space.

Posted at 10:31 am on April 15, 2006 by David Crow
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