How Venture Capital Sees Social Media Archives

On September 23, 2009 at the San Jose Convention Center’s Engage Expo held a panel discussion on”How Venture Capital Sees Social Media” SDForum’s Susan Lucas-Conwell moderated panelists Timothy Chang of Norwest Venture Partners, Stewart Guenther of Venture Capital-Private Equity Roundtable, Shai Goldman of SVB Capital and Michael Kim of Rustic Canyon Partners. Text from DJCline.com

So what are the rules of engagement for social media? One-way boxed media like books and CDs are dead. Social media is about community, conversations and content. Theoretically social media is a platform-independent web service targeting customers who want to spend as much time as possible in your space. Revenue streams are shifting from advertising to subscriptions. The buzzwords are Media-As-Service (MAS), Free-To-Play (FTP) and metagames. If you are developing for the Apple iPhone you have good chance at funding because of the market and the distribution channel. Text from DJCline.com

If you want start a company think about how you are going to end it. Are you going to build it to be bought? What is your business plan and revenue stream? Do you know many venture capitalists want fifteen times their 2.5 million dollar investment back? Can you bootstrap it with angel investors? Talk to your potential acquiring company about who would be interested in investing. Text from DJCline.com

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