Now he’s hired a chief financial officer to help prepare the company for the next stage of growth: a possible initial public offering.

Ned Sizer was named YouSendIt’s CFO.

Ned Sizer, a former finance executive at Ancestry.com, is joining YouSendIt as CFO, Garlinghouse said in an interview this week. Sizer previously joined two startups as they prepared for IPOs — Omniture, which went public in 2006, and Silver Spring Networks, which has scheduled its IPO for March. He sees a similar opportunity for YouSendIt.

“I bring a lot to the table around capital markets, IPOs and acquisitions, because I’ve been in the Valley,” Sizer, 47, said in an interview. YouSendIt is “an undervalued asset with the right team in place.”

Most of that leadership team has joined since the arrival of Garlinghouse, a veteran of AOL and Yahoo who has poached former colleagues to fill his management bench. Eric van Miltenburg, senior vice president of interational, business and corporate development, and Matte Scheinker, chief product officer, are both Yahoo alums. Communications chief Kiersten Hollars and human resources head Lynne Collins worked with Garlinghouse at AOL. These managers, along with marketing chief Mike Trigg, all joined YouSendIt in the past year.

Garlinghouse said YouSendIt will benefit from the experience his deputies have in building and marketing consumer Web applications as he attempts to create easier-to-use tools for businesses. Of the 40 million customers who use the site’s tools for storing and managing data, about 60 percent are businesses, he said.

“We started life as a consumer-centric tool to help you send files and now we have Fortune 100 customers,” Garlinghouse said. Offering simple software that works as easily as an online app “will be a critical success component to any company going after the enterprise market.”

The CEO has more changes in store. He plans to relocate the company’s 200-plus employees from their current headquarters in Campbell, California, to an office that’s closer to San Francisco and easier for commuters to access. And sometime this year, he’ll christen the company with a new name — YouSendIt sounds too much like a consumer file-sharing product, he said.

While Garlinghouse sees an IPO as a strong possibility, he’s learned a lesson from technology startups in recent years that have gone public too soon.

“We as an industry have witnessed companies that might have gone public prematurely,” Garlinghouse said. “We are going to learn from that and be in a better and stronger position to deliver for our current investors and future investors.”

Original post is YouSendIt Hires Finance Chief With IPO Track Record by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

Esther Dyson is still excited about the possibilities with collecting data, and health devices that can give real-time feedback.

Angel investor Esther Dyson continues to spread her wings. The former technology analyst found success as an early backer of photo-sharing service Flickr and bookmarking site Delicious, both of which sold to Yahoo. She’s on the boards of high-profile sites such as online note-taking service Evernote, local groups creator Meetup and Russian search engine Yandex NV. And she has her sights set on opportunities beyond Earth: Dyson is involved with Golden Spike, which is planning missions to the moon.

So what is she investing in now and why? I caught up with Dyson on Dec. 21 and asked.

Q: Where do you see opportunities right now?

A: A lot more in health. One of my investments is Omada Health, which is a combination of online and offline. It’s a theme, to use the technology to help humans to communicate just like Meetup. Omada helps to treat diabetics, to deliver a curriculum of diet and exercise, with a counselor, in therapy groups of 10 people. It’s doing very well in pilot studies, and it’s made a huge difference. And it leverages people in a nice way. A lot of people who go through this end up being healthier and end up being counselors themselves. I made the investment some time in this past year, and then I re-upped this summer.

Q: Where do you see opportunities for next year, in geographies and sectors?

A: In the end, I don’t invest in geographies and sectors, I invest in individual companies. Where does one look? I am still very excited about all the possibilities of collecting data. If you look at health, sleep is becoming a big issue. Timing of physical activity. Timing of administering drugs, how you tie doses of drugs to minimize their toxicity. There are a lot of interesting things that are going to become more apparent as we get more data about usage of drugs, how your own behavior affects your health. With new devices and sensors, you get a lot more real-time feedback. The big challenge is not just giving people information, but motivating behavior change.

Q: Last year, you were talking about a “venture bubble.” What’s happening now?

A: Right now, there’s definitely a startup bubble. It’s too many startups, all of whom have good ideas, many of which are redundant. All these kids are trying to do a startup, but they can’t scale it: They can’t find the CFO, they can’t build a team. The challenge isn’t doing a startup, the challenge is going and scaling a company. It’s the team, and the whole company that matters, it’s not simply one 24-year-old Harvard kid.

Q: Does it make your work harder?

A: Yes. Getting ideas presented to you is not that interesting. What’s interesting is finding and developing a team. It makes it harder, there’s a lot more fluff. They take money, and disappear after a while.

Q: What’s the outlook for initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions right now?

A: It’s not that great. It’s definitely more M&A, because you have a lot of interesting products that are not companies. There’s also a lot more attention to business-to-business companies, as opposed to business-to-consumer. It’s about not more efficient video-sharing between people, but about logistics.

Q: You invest in startups in Russia. Lately, there seems to be a surge in anti-American sentiment there. Does that affect you at all?

A: There is some anti-American sentiment in some parts of the government. In the tech community, it’s not there. What the Russian government should be doing is explaining it’s not about selling startups to rich foreigners, but creating services that make life better. This year, I invested in VitaPortal , which is a health site.

Q: Any other countries you invested in this year?

A: Nomanini, in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s sort of like “Avon ladies,” but for cell-phone airtime. If you know the market in a lot of emerging countries, they sell a code on scratch cards, and it’s very ineffective: The cards get lost, they stay in inventory. What Nomanini does is give people little printers that print out paper (with the airtime code). The users are often van drivers, or they have little kiosks.

Q: You are involved with a number of space startups, and you’ve trained for potentially going into space. Are you making any new investments in this area?

A: I am not making new investments, but I am very active. I am on the board of XCOR Aerospace, and I am an investor in Space Adventures. That’s fun, and when we do suborbital flights, I’ll be on one of them. And I am also involved with Golden Spike, which just announced its plans to take someone to the moon by the end of the decade – I am an investor, and I am on their board.

Original post is Angel Investor Esther Dyson Increases Dosage in Health Startups by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Francis Specker/Bloomberg

Former McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt is taking the helm of FireEye, which may go public next year.

Dave DeWalt, the former chief executive officer of antivirus software maker McAfee, has taken the top job at security startup FireEye and plans an initial public offering in the first half of next year.

DeWalt, 48, left McAfee in July 2011 after Intel agreed to buy the company for $7.68 billion. Since then, he has been considered as a CEO contender at other security companies, including Palo Alto Networks, which had an IPO in July.

He joined the board of Milpitas, California-based FireEye in June as chairman. DeWalt said he was attracted to FireEye because its technology, which runs incoming threats through “virtual” computers to assess the risk, is “radically different” than traditional security options such as antivirus software. Watching Palo Alto Networks gain more than 30 percent since its IPO helped lure DeWalt to FireEye.

“I’ve had other CEO opportunities, but what I see in FireEye is a revolutionary change in the way intrusion detection works,” DeWalt said in an interview. FireEye has more than 400 employees and more than $100 million in annual bookings, DeWalt said. Sales are doubling annually, he said.

Customers include financial services provider Equifax, student loan company Sallie Mae, the U.S. Department of Defense and Internet infrastructure provider Juniper Networks, according to FireEye’s website.

FireEye raised $51 million in venture funding from firms including Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

DeWalt said his top priority now is an IPO.

“The company is ready,” he said.

Original post is Former McAfee Chief DeWalt Named FireEye CEO, Aims for 2013 IPO by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Joho/cultura/Corbis

Thomas Foley's next act is a new company called CapRally that is backed by venture capitalist Tim Draper.

When Thomas Foley started Xpert Financial in 2009, he had a simple thesis: Going public was too costly for most companies, and the private fundraising process was overly opaque. So he created an electronic exchange for private companies to raise capital or let early shareholders and employees sell some of their stake.

Xpert hasn’t panned out. The San Mateo, California-based company needed too much capital to comply with regulatory rules and was unable to create a vibrant marketplace of buyers and sellers. The private exchange business also suffered after secondary investors in Facebook and Zynga got burned when the companies’ stocks plunged on the public markets.

Courtesy of CapRally

Thomas Foley

Foley, at just 28 years old,  isn’t giving up. The last thing he worked on at Xpert was a product to help companies keep track of their capital raising, from the time they begin reaching out to investors until they consummate a deal. Think of it as customer relationship management (CRM) software for fundraising. He recently rolled that out into a new company, called CapRally, and is backed by venture capitalist Tim Draper, the principal investor in Xpert.

“Xpert is regulated and has chicken and egg issues,” said Draper, whose son, Adam, was an Xpert co-founder. “Companies, their boards and investors all have to say yes to the new platform. CapRally is a much easier sell to most of these companies because they are already using spreadsheets or CRM software to track and manage their deal flow.”

The software is currently helping manage 127 deals for a group of companies and investment firms that are testing it, and has been available since mid-October for anyone to use for free at CapRally’s website. Foley said the basic product will be free and he’ll start charging for more advanced features in the first half of next year. For investors, the price will range from $25 to $300 a month per user, and for companies and investment banks, monthly licenses will range from $150 to $5,000 a month per deal.

Companies can use the service to find recommended investors, correspond with them, record meeting dates, and keep track of who has committed to a round and who’s declined. Foley compares CapRally to tax software in that it’s highly useful for specific transactions and the information is then stored for future deals. He’s playing into the larger trend towards cloud-based software, which enables users to access data via Web browsers and smartphones.

While the company is targeting startups, the product is also being used by investment banks and venture capitalists, Foley said. He’s actively using the product as well.

“We’re in the middle of our capital raising process and we have 60 investors that we’re dealing with at any stage in the process,” said Foley, who worked in investment banking before starting Xpert. “Some are in due diligence, some we have meetings with, some have just responded and we’re scheduling meetings. We need to know exactly where we are across all those different things and very quickly.”

If CapRally catches on in the startup market, Foley expects to go after real estate investors, while Draper says the product will be useful for non-profits and film financing groups. Within the non-profit sector, CapRally would compete with companies such as Blackbaud and DonorPerfect.

As for the future of Xpert, Foley and Draper are in the process of working it out.  Of the 28 employees the company had at its peak, only three remain. The company still has its broker dealer license, allowing it to execute trades. Draper said he hopes to restart the project and get a group of top venture capitalists to become members, pushing to “ensure that all the best companies would go to Xpert to do private IPOs.” He said the business needs about $5 million to work, and he’s willing to invest if he can get others on board.

Foley is cautiously optimistic.

“There’s a real need there, but who knows if the market is ready,” he said. “Or if we’re the ones to execute it.”

Original post is Entrepreneur Tries Second Act After Secondary Market Fizzles by Tech Deals.

Photograph courtesy of SugarCRM

SugarCRM Chief Executive Officer Larry Augustin took another open-source company, VA Linux, public in 1999.

SugarCRM, which provides customer management software that competes with Salesforce.com and Oracle, may try to ride the wave of enterprise computing IPOs and go public as soon as next year, Chief Executive Officer Larry Augustin said.

“Our goal is to be a public company,” Augustin said in an interview at Bloomberg News’s San Francisco bureau yesterday. “There’s a chance we can get there in 2013.”

Before testing the IPO waters, Augustin did say he wants to make sure the company gets to the right size and “metrics.” After a cash-flow positive 2011, “we’ll burn some cash this year,” he said.

Cupertino, California-based SugarCRM is growing quickly. Billings, or the amount invoiced to customers, rose 23 percent for the third quarter ending in September compared with a year ago, and are up 54 percent over the first nine months of this year, according to the company. It plans to announce those results next week.

SugarCRM has raised a total of $79 million from New Enterprise Associates, Silicon Valley Bank, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and others, including a $33 million round in April.

The company has an unorthodox business model for CRM software, which lets companies’ sales teams track leads and deals. About 800,000 users run a free, open-source version of the product and nearly 200,000 pay for versions that cost $30 to $100 per user each month, Augustin said.

In addition, customers can pick from versions that run on their own computers, in a “private cloud” managed through a partnership with IBM, or an online version hosted by SugarCRM. The arrangement gives customers flexibility, but costs SugarCRM more to support than a pure software-as-a-service model, said Augustin. The company has about 6,000 paying customers, including paint maker Sherwin-Williams and clothier Men’s Wearhouse.

Augustin has been through an IPO run-up before. He took another open-source company, VA Linux, public in 1999. In one of the biggest examples of dot-com froth, the stock soared nearly 700 percent on the first day of trading.

“There are lots of lessons from that,” Augustin told Bloomberg West in a TV interview slated to air this month. VA’s market cap was $12 billion to $15 billion on quarterly sales of $12 million $15 million, he said. “You saw that valuation come down very quickly.” Underlying performance is more important now, he said.

Today’s crop of business computing IPOs — including online software maker Workday, Splunk, ServiceNow and Palo Alto Networks — is setting the stage for Augustin’s second act as a public company CEO.

“What the Workday IPO does is just reinforce that the market is good for enterprise software companies,” he said.

Shares of Workday have soared 75 percent since their Oct. 12 debut and closed at $48.92 in New York yesterday. Splunk, whose software helps manage IT system performance, has surged 68 percent since trading started April 19.

Original post is Salesforce.com Competitor SugarCRM May Shoot for IPO in 2013 by Tech Deals.

Photograph Courtesy of Palo Alto Networks

Greylock Partners is reaping rewards from business software companies such as Palo Alto Networks and Workday.

Greylock Partners has gained accolades – and bundles of money — in the past 15 months from early bets on consumer Internet brands Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora. Now, it’s reaping rewards from investments in the lesser known but still lucrative arena of business software, where Greylock backed some of this year’s biggest winners.

The Menlo Park, California-based venture firm is the top outside investor in Workday, which yesterday filed to raise $400 million in an initial public offering. Workday makes Web-based software that handles tasks such as payroll and human resources. Greylock also owns 19 percent of Palo Alto Networks, a maker of Internet-firewall technology, and 2 percent of ServiceNow, which provides human resources and financial services software. Those companies have gone public in the past two months.

As of yesterday’s stock market close, Greylock’s stake in Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow was worth a combined $860 million, according to Bloomberg data. While Workday’s valuation isn’t yet set, should the company trade for eight times revenue, the average among software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers tracked by Bloomberg, Greylock’s stake in the $1.6 billion company would be valued at around $180 million. Including its stake in firewall software maker Imperva, which went public in November, the paper value of Greylock’s stake in those four companies is about $1.1 billion.

That adds to the roughly $2.5 billion Greylock made from investments in Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora, including shares the firm has sold and those it still owns.

“The consumer names are better recognized at a mass market level,” said Asheem Chandna, a partner at Greylock and board member at Palo Alto Networks and Imperva. “But there’s a growing recognition among public market investors that many of these enterprise companies have real businesses. They’re sustainable, high-margin businesses addressing markets that are very large.”

They’re also performing better on the stock market. Palo Alto Networks has jumped 51 percent since going public, and ServiceNow and Imperva have gained more than 65 percent. LinkedIn, which serves the consumer and business markets, has outperformed them all, surging 139 percent since debuting in May 2011.

While Greylock was among the earliest investors in Facebook and LinkedIn, the firm got to Groupon late and is losing money on the daily-deal site. Greylock invested in Groupon at a $4.75 billion valuation. The stock was 42 percent below that price as of yesterday. Pandora, meanwhile, is down 28 percent and Facebook has lost half its value since first selling shares three months ago.

Chandna, who joined Greylock in 2003, said the firm established its focus on business technology a decade ago and was able to find early innovators in SaaS, cloud computing, mobile and big data. Until recently, Chandna was one of two Greylock partners concentrating in those areas, along with Aneel Bhusri, who is also co-founder of Workday. Last month, Greylock hired Joseph Ansanelli, who previously started a company that was acquired by Symantec, and brought in Dev Ittycheria from BMC Software in April.

Greylock has about 30 companies in its enterprise technology portfolio. Chandna said some of the fastest growing are data-mining software maker Cloudera; AppDynamics, whose software helps companies monitor the performance of applications; and Zenprise, a provider of mobile device management technology.

Chandna wouldn’t say which company was poised to file next — only that they’re each chasing multibillion-dollar markets, and “we’re in a wave right now where enterprise IPOs are happening.”

Original post is Greylock Follows Facebook Win With Business Software IPOs by Tech Deals.

Source: SecondMarket.

Data as of June 30, 2012.

A greater percentage of startup employees are choosing not to wait until after they leave the job to cash out their shares, according to SecondMarket, a popular online private-equity exchange.

In the first half of the year, 59.8 percent of private stock sales on SecondMarket came from current employees, while 24.1 percent came from former workers, the report said. During 2011, current staff made up only 11.1 percent of share sales, while those who left accounted for 79.3 percent, according to an earlier report.

Employees at closely held companies have become more comfortable with the idea of selling some or all of their stock while continuing to work there, according to the exchange. Startup executives tell SecondMarket they are encouraging this behavior in order to give employees the option of cashing out without feeling pressured to leave, said Aishwarya Iyer, a spokeswoman for the company.

“It’s a great way to say thank you to your employees,” she said. ”It’s a morale booster.”

Facebook’s rocky IPO, which took place in May, likely didn’t instill confidence in employees weighing whether to wait until after their companies go public to sell shares.

Startups listed on SecondMarket choose to participate in the exchange and can set their own terms, Iyer said. They can set windows for when shareholders may sell stock, which typically last between a week and a month, she said.

Original post is Startup Employees Selling Shares Now Instead of Later, Study Says by Tech Deals.

The company cited “unfavorable market conditions” in withdrawing its prospectus on July 13. Chief Executive Officer Charles Nooney said yesterday that MobiTV has plenty of capital to invest in the business and is expanding its offerings for TV in the home as well as on smartphones and tablets.

“For us, the markets were too choppy,” Nooney said in an interview. “To be going out after the first of the year and examine the market with a couple announcements under our belt was certainly part of the consideration.”

As of Dec. 31, Emeryville, California-based MobiTV had cash, equivalents and short-term investments of $25.4 million, and Nooney said the company will be profitable by the end of this year after recording an $11.8 million loss in 2011. While he doesn’t expect to need additional cash, the private equity markets are “pretty wide open” should an opportunity arise that brings strategic value, he said.

MobiTV, which started as a provider of technology for carriers to deliver live television on mobile phones, has more recently focused on a service called “TV everywhere.” In January, the company announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom that allowed the German phone company to deliver content to phones, tablets, computers and set-top boxes. Nooney said other partnerships will be announced this year, including one in Asia.

To expand the product portfolio, MobiTV said yesterday that it will be licensing digital video recorder technology so cable providers, satellite companies and wireless carriers can let users record shows from any device, pausing on one and picking up on any other.

“The world is changing,” Nooney said. “To really play in the space, you have to get multiple screens.”

Last year, 97 percent of MobiTV’s revenue came from Sprint Nextel, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA unit, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Live mobile television has proven to be a challenging market, because consumers can access free on-demand services such as Google’s YouTube and subscription offerings from Netflix and Amazon.com.

As MobiTV pulls away from the public markets, other technology companies are going forward. Business software maker ServiceNow has jumped 33 percent since its IPO last month, and Palo Alto Networks and Kayak Software debuted today. Companies are expected to raise more than $700 million this week as the market recovers from a drought after Facebook’s offering in May.

For MobiTV, the concern surrounding the European debt crisis and uncertainty around the U.S. presidential elections are more significant, Nooney said. Because his company has cash, almost no debt and is coming off a year of 27 percent sales growth, he’d prefer to wait.

“The company is extremely healthy, we have resources in the bank and we’re virtually debt-free,” he said.

Original post is MobiTV Boosts Product Line, Plans to Revisit IPO Market in 2013 by Tech Deals.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Palo Alto Networks and Kayak Software are both scheduled to sell shares next week.

Facebook didn’t kill the tech IPO market after all.

Following the debut of ServiceNow at the end of June, Palo Alto Networks and Kayak Software are both scheduled to sell shares next week in offerings that are expected to raise more than a combined $310 million.

And we’re just getting started, according to Scott Cutler, co-head of U.S. listings at NYSE Euronext. While Facebook’s disappointing offering in May led to a brief lull in the market and hurt overall confidence in the IPO process, investors still want growth, and there are plenty of technology companies that fit the bill, he said.

Cutler estimates that in September and October, several billion dollars will be raised in IPOs, with tech accounting for a big percentage of that. Last year, those two months were a dead zone, as sluggish job growth and the debt ceiling fight weighed on the stock market. Ubiquiti Networks raised $106 million in the only offering during that stretch.

“Assuming the market stays the same as it is right now, it will be a very busy time,” Cutler said.

Navin Chaddha, a venture capitalist at Mayfield Fund, said the pipeline of IPOs has even more longevity. Around a half dozen companies in his firm’s portfolio could go public in the next 12 to 18 months as long as U.S. and European economies hold up, he predicted.

“We are bullish, pending what’s happening with Europe,” said Chaddha, whose Menlo Park, California-based firm announced today that it raised a $365 million fund. “People are looking for growth stocks. They’re looking for consistency in earnings.”

One Mayfield company that has announced plans to go public is residential solar provider SolarCity. The company is filing under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which means it can keep its plans confidential with the SEC until three weeks before starting its roadshow.

Because businesses with less than $1 billion in annual revenue can file under the JOBS Act, most of the companies that recently registered to go public aren’t known by the public, according to Cutler.  But they’re lining up.

“You don’t see the whole quality of the pipeline,” he said.

Original post is NYSE Awaits Busy IPO Stretch As Investors Get Over Facebook by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Noah Berger/Bloomberg

Doug Leone, a partner at Sequoia Capital, speaks at a conference in San Francisco last year.

Even for legendary Silicon Valley firm Sequoia Capital, which is celebrating its 40^th anniversary this year, venture investing is a guessing game. It requires traversing the globe to meet scores of entrepreneurs working on wacky projects, and placing bets on the most promising people and ideas, often based on little more than a hunch.

That formula has generated fortunes for Sequoia — from the IPOs of Apple in 1980, Cisco and Yahoo in the 1990s, Google in the past decade and more recently, LinkedIn. There have also been plenty of misses. In the Internet IPO parade that started last year, Sequoia was noticeably absent from social-media high-fliers Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Whether it refused to pay up, didn’t see the potential, or got passed up in favor of other investors, Sequoia counts those as just a few of the deals that got away.

But unlike many rivals on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road and a slew of late-stage investors, Sequoia resisted the temptation to invest at inflated prices — the types of arrangements that now have some shareholders facing big losses.

According to 24-year Sequoia veteran Doug Leone, the firm’s not about to start now. The general partner emphasized that point in an interview this week as he reflected on the IPO mania of the past year.

“There’s a number of companies clearly that we wish we had invested in either at the early or at the moderate stage,” Leone said. “And there’s a whole bunch of companies that we’re glad we did not chase at the very high stages, either to buy a poster for our website or because we actually thought that investing in those stages would generate a return that would satisfy our own investors.”

Leone called the long-awaited Facebook IPO a “reality check” for the investors and entrepreneurs who bought into the hype of the $100 billion valuation. While he wouldn’t talk about specific companies, he said those that raised capital at multi-billion dollar valuations prior to Facebook’s IPO have a lot of work to do to prove that those numbers make sense, especially as they look towards going public.

“There are such things as revenue, growth and profitability that the buy side looks for,” he said. “There are still plenty of momentum investors looking for a quick and easy return. That said, there are some exceptional companies that probably do warrant stretching on valuation.”

Leone also sounded off on the banking process, which has come under fire since Facebook saw its stock drop 27 percent in its first two weeks on the market. He’s more concerned about the opposite situation, when a stock jumps too much out of the gate. When that happens, it means the bank mispriced the deal, leaving too much money on the table. He’s right to be concerned, because Sequoia is an investor in Palo Alto Networks and Kayak Software, which are both heading towards the public markets.

“The first trade should be no more than 20 to 30 percent from the IPO price,” he said. “I tell that to the bankers so we have a clear understanding of what success means going in.”

There can be exceptions, Leone said. In LinkedIn’s case, it was the first U.S. social-networking company to go public, making the market more difficult to gauge. LinkedIn shares more than doubled in their debut.

“If it’s the first after a dark period, you have to cut some slack because no one can judge demand,” he said. ServiceNow, another Sequoia company, gained 37 percent in its opening day last week.

As for what’s changed in the venture industry in recent years, Leone said that startups are growing more quickly because Web technology makes it easier to get products to market and build a customer base. Companies have less time to dither, for fear of being surpassed by a competitor or even a clone. So Sequoia is helping its startups hire the most talented people at the earliest stage.

“Being that speed and velocity are very important, we need to help companies locate the first five, six, 10 engineers,” he said. “We need to make sure that we do a whole bunch of things to help companies really get launching in the right trajectory as quickly as possible.”

–Ari Levy and Serena Saitto

Original post is Sequoia’s Leone Talks Hits, Misses and What’s Next on Sand Hill Road by Tech Deals.