Funding News: Yuzoz

November 16th, 2006 • Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology, Venture Capital
Tags: entrepreneurship, startups, Venture Capital

I read this in the November 15, 2006 PE Week Wire (they have the URL for the site wrong) and I’m not sure that I “get” it:

Yuzoz Ltd., an UK-based developer of a random number generator using data derived from space phenomena such as solar flares, the Northern lights, and the movement of the clouds on Venus, has received $500,000 in first-round funding from DesCap.

At first I wasn’t even sure if Venus had clouds (it does, although Mercury doesn’t). I know true random number generation is important for things like cryptography but doesn’t this sound like a hoax? Their website claims that they’ll give away prizes based on the random picks of “the stars”. Given that the whois information for the site is hidden, I think this might be a hoax. If it isn’t, what the heck is the point of this technology/service/whatever?

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts that could shed light on this?

VC Lingo I Hate: “Adult Supervision”

November 9th, 2006 • Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Venture Capital
Tags: adult-supervision, entrepreneurship, relationship-building, VC-lingo, Venture Capital

I was recently talking to a friend of mine and a VC term came up in the conversation: “adult supervision”. I really, really, REALLY hate that phrase. If you don’t know the context of this phrase - it is often used to imply that entrepreneurs need someone from outside of the company to make sure they aren’t messing up. I agree with the thought, just not the terminology.

Why? The modifier “adult” implies that those being “supervised” aren’t adults. So if you aren’t an adult, what are you? You’re a child. There are very few entrepreneurs that I know of who are children (lemonade stands aside). Would you ever go into a corporate setting and call a head of a division an “adult supervisor”? Perhaps the “adult” part implies that the person is supervising other adults (like an “office supervisor”). But in that case, the person would just be a “supervisor”, wouldn’t they?

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New VC Blogger

November 7th, 2006 • Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Venture Capital
Tags: Charles-River-Ventures, gaming, Venture Capital

My good friend Susan just started blogging about startups and venture capital (she used to blog on the Apache Software Foundation’s marketing blog). Susan recently joined Charles River Ventures as an associate and has a rock star background. I’m looking forward to reading her thoughts on the industry which, hopefully, will come more often than I’m able to accomplish (that shouldn’t be hard). Reading Susan’s posts about gaming should be interesting since she used to be a competitive Quake player (actually, one of the top ranked Quake players). Do you know any VCs who were top ranked competitive FPS players? Yeah, I don’t either.