Nav

Rich Miner interview: TLH notes from the Nantucket conference

Expect Android to overtake iPhone in sales around the end of 2010 (most analysts’ view)

• based on OEM and carrier anouncements
• more friendly to carriers than iPhone, eg, share app revenue
• openness is becoming more accepted in the mobile industry
  

Google Ventures

• There have been 50 or so investments in the past, need to pull them together
• Larry, Serge, Eric believe in venture, believe we can earn cost of capital
  

Paramters:

• $100m to deploy this year, from a fund of unspecified size
• Goal is to be a significant player in the venture space, to work with “top tier” VCs [said that a couple of times]
• Broad expertise
• Few limits
• Investment is not dependent on LOB support inside Google, and we don’t promise a business relationship with GOOG, but of course we know them well, and GOOG investment might produce a “brand bump”
• Not engaged in spinning things out of GOOG — if employees want to start a bus, then need to work that with their managers and leave before we can engage with them.
• Stage agnostic [but prefer seed and A]
• 2 investments so far; one was Series D in a successful smart grid co [sounds like it was Silver Spring]