Celebrating Entrepreneurship at Wharton – The Wharton Entrepreneurship Alumni Dinner (10/8/14)

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

A couple of years ago, I joined the Advisory Board of Wharton Entrepreneurship (WE), which is one of the Wharton Boards and is focused on stimulating and advancing entrepreneurship in the Wharton & Penn communities.  I joined for a few reasons: (1) loyalty to Wharton (i got my MBA there but also went to Penn undergrad and really enjoyed my time there); (2) the cause - I’m passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship and really wanted [...]

Read More

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 [...]

Read More

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, [...]

Read More