AlwaysOn Venture Capital Summit: What’s Hot
by Miki Saxon
When possible I prevail on someone I know to attend the major AlwaysOn conferences, usually it’s KG Charles-Harris, but more recently it’s been Chris Blackman.
Last week Chris attended this year’s AlwaysOn Venture Capital Summit at Sand Hill Road in the heart of VCland and got a glimpse into the future investment strategies of that storied world.
From Chris Blackman
A culture of innovation? Customer driven? Family oriented? Work hard play hard? Top down or bottom up?
Do companies still embrace and boast about these corporate attitudes anymore?
Judging from what I heard at the AlwaysOn Venture Capital Summit they have taken a back seat to burnishing a reputation of being a green in many companies—but not all.
Amiel Kornel, senior managing director of the Emerging Technology Group at venture firm Spencer Trask still cares about those values and behaviors.
In particular, he looks for “companies that will define new market categories of business while emphasizing a top down approach to a balanced lifestyle.”
Innocentive is Kornel’s poster child for such values.
It also created the business category known as crowd sourcing.
For example, last week, the US government announced an online challenge with the aim of discovering a process for how the Internet can help with rapid problem solving. How was it won? A group of MIT students used incentive-based collaboration techniques to encourage individuals to share the winning information.
Innocentive is fast becoming the nexus of such competitions. They have the ability to bring together thousands of minds to solve intellectual challenges quickly.
Mr. Kornel reminds us why company culture is important: “Key individuals must be fun to spend time with because at the end of the day, this relationship is like a marriage.”
And to be productive it needs to be a good marriage.
For more from the Summit check out the buzz.
Image credit: AlwaysOn
