Captora: Solving the Marketer’s Dilemma

May 20th, 2014|Categories: WRITING|Tags: |

Scott Sandell, Ravi Viswanathan, and Rick Yang Today we are thrilled to announce our investment in Captora, which is revolutionizing demand generation with its cloud marketing solution. The role of marketing within enterprises has become more expansive and more critical than ever before, and marketers are under growing pressure to increase lead pipeline while lowering customer acquisition cost. Yet these two forces are largely opposed to each other, with increasing volume leading to higher incremental cost.  Marketers are [...]

How to Value a Revolution

October 3rd, 2013|Categories: WRITING|Tags: |

Ravi Viswanathan (ENG’90; WG’98) and Daniel Axelsen (W’10) It’s an exciting time to be a venture capitalist. As an investor at NEA in Silicon Valley, I’m seeing some of today’s greatest technology and business revolutions up close: Software-as-a-Service: the new model for business applications Cloud computing: enabling unprecedented infrastructure performance and flexibility Payments: now being integrating into mobile devices and apps Education: democratized and globalized for the first time ever But these revolutions also present [...]

$800M Gorilla: eBay To Acquire Mobile Payments Disruptor Braintree

September 26th, 2013|Categories: WRITING|Tags: , |

Today we are excited to report that eBay has agreed to acquire Braintree, a payments company that processes more than $12 billion in transactions a year, for $800 million. It’s one of the year’s larger M&A transactions so far, also notable as an early exit in a sector where investors have placed some big bets—more than $800 million over the last year alone in mobile payments. NEA made one of those bets on Braintree because we [...]

Recent Lessons for a VC

November 5th, 2012|Categories: WRITING|Tags: |

At my firm, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), we think a lot about the ingredients to creating huge companies – disruption, great entrepreneurs, big markets.  The disruption aspect is interesting as this has evolved over the years – in the 80’s and 90’s, much of the disruption was really technology based (a new molecule, a new piece of code, a new piece of hardware).  Now, disruption comes in a lot of ways – business models, go-to-market, value chain, [...]