The impact of Ren’s technology is so fundamental that, if successful, it will completely change an entire market. Photography and imaging will never ever be the same again. What used to be “Ren’s Camera” is now the Lytro camera. Congratulations to Ren, and to the entire Lytro team. It’s been a phenomenal journey so far, and we’re just getting started.

The idea is the seed. It is the kernel that is the start of something new.
Ideas are powerful because they invade the mind. Once you are introduced to an idea, you cannot get it out of your head.
Ideas are what provide that little twist of ingenuity that can make or break a company.
Sometimes ideas are not revolutionary, but they get the ball rolling and without them, that wouldn’t happened. The best ideas are often simple ones. Maybe that is what a revolutionary idea is — an idea so simple that it sparks a revolution.

If you are a tech startup, where the technology is your business and not just supporting your business, then you shouldn’t be relying on any outsourcing, contracting, or distributed teams for developing your core product. I believe that the chance of success of a team is an order of magnitude higher when the entire team is local, in one room and working closely with each other. Bottom line: “When you stick a couple of smart people in a room together good things happen”

In the venture industry, the only way for a venture fund to grow, is to move upstream and start managing a bigger pot of money. It is the natural evolution of the venture business and funds. This is what has happened with a lot of the institutional funds over the past decade. This gradual upstream movement in the venture industry, is what I refer to as the Venture Spiral.

The angels of today, will become the super angels of tomorrow. The super angels of today will be the uVCs of tomorrow, and the uVCs of today, will become the early stage venture capitalists. The institutional venture funds will morph into what we used to call growth funds.

The story of Modista.com — a young startup that was forced to shutdown before it even really got going because of a patent infringement lawsuit by Like.com.

K9 Ventures is pleased to welcome to its kennel, our latest portfolio company, iWalk, Inc. iWalk is founded by industry veterans Caesar Shepherd and Sarah Husky, both of who have 7x the experience in the space compared to any other hot dog. Mr. Shepherd complete his PhD from a top school in Munich, Germany. Ms. Husky recently moved to the Bay Area from Juneau, Alaska, from where she could see Siberia. She is fluent in Russian.

There has been a lot of noise in the Valley lately about how most seed stage deals are now being done as convertible notes. In fact, PG from Y Combinator has proclaimed that that it is how things will be going forward. That might well be so, but I for one am not a fan [...]

CardMunch announced today that it has been acquired by LinkedIn! The CardMunch acquisition marks the debut exit for K9 Ventures. A huge congratulations to the team: Bowei Gai, Sid Viswanathan, and Sudeep Yegnashankaran for having built an outstanding product, service, and team, that attracted the attention of the world’s largest professional network. (Disclosure: I am [...]

Someone on Quora asked me a question regarding my investment criteria for K9. I figured it would be good to cross post the response here as well. I use the following necessary, but not sufficient filters to qualify the startups I look at for investing through K9 Ventures: 1) Technical Founders: Founders with the ability [...]

In 1996, when I started my first company, SneakerLabs, Inc., we began by building chat servers. This was when the state of the art was click-to-refresh HTML form-based chats. SneakerLabs’ first product was a Java-based chat server and client. It worked like a charm since we could create a more interactive experience on the Web. [...]