mobile，data mining，energy。。。。。。

原文如下：

I’m at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose tonight, for the Churchill Club’s annual Top 10 Tech Trends Dinner. This is the club’s 10th annual tech trend panel. Making the picks:

• Steve Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
• Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures.
• Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital.
• Roger McNamee, Elevation Partners.
• Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners.
• Tony Perkins, of Always On, is the moderator.

Perkins, McNamee, Jurvetson and Schoendorf have done this before. Kopelman and Khosla are the panel newbies.

Apparently, you can watch this live at ustream.tv.

Or you can read along. Here’s the pundits’ list of trends, with some responses from their fellow panelists (It’s going to be a l-o-o-n-g post):

• 1. From Steve Jurvetson: “Demographics are destiny, creating opportunity.” Baby boomers are an opportunity, including an “eBay for information” that exceeds the market for physical goods. This is a U.S./Canada/U.K. trend. Baby boomers as the first Internet savvy seniors. Smart, active, group, entering AARP age. 75 million of them, half the U.S. workforce. In 2025, the entire country will look like Florida does today. Nothing will change that. Demographics are destiny. Over have of businesses and franchises are started by people in this group. At home, educated and Internet savvy. Services online will exceed market for goods online. Another market: the mental exercise market. If you are 35 or older, cognitive decline is at the same pace as 80 year olds. Khosla said he agrees on demographic trend, but not the opportunity; he doesn’t think it deserves to be in the top 10. McNamee says it could be an opportunity if you can package it. Schoendorf notes that people may be in retirement as long as they worked. He says it will create opportunities.
• 2. From Vinod Knosla: The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer. With built in projector. Authentication. Credit cards on SIM cards. ID cards, passports, drivers licenses. Any information you need. Khosla says he keeps pictures of his passport electronically on his phone. He says people will be less likely to carry their laptops. Come near a computer, and physical hard drive will be yours, including half-sent email message you left at home. Lose the phone, and all the information is on the network. Imagine what you want to do, and it should be available anytime. Projectors in cell phones in next two years. More than one camera per cell phone; high priority for Texas Instruments. Critical ingredient is high speed networks, which we will have in next 2-3 years. Jurvetson says the trends are already playing out, other than the projector piece, particularly in Europe, where cell phones are 8% of credit card payments. McNamee says Asia is where most of that functionality is already embedded; he says the carriers and the government puts this projection further out in North America. Schoendorf says he believes the trend; he says a good way to lose money is to bet against Vinod. “I’ve learned to listen when Vinod says something might change,” Schoendorf says.
• 3. From Josh Kopelman: The rise of the “implicit” Internet. Today your permanent record exists; you create a trail of data exhaust, digital bread crumbs. Implicit data that exists in silence. Movie rentals, restaurant reservations, books purchased, Web sites visited, etc. All of this data existed in silence. No easy way until now to benefit from the data; but the silos are coming down. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Mozilla collecting data. Trend is that big wave will come to companies that are able to novel and new ways to deliver information by crossing these silos, with implicit data on the Internet. Use social networking data to improve search. Conversion of data exhaust will create value in new and interesting ways. All of the panelists seem to agree that this is a key trend. McNamee says he hopes Kopelman is not right, given the privacy concerns that are involved. The issue is providing implied consent to follow the bread crumbs, McNamee says. Schoendorf says this is an under 25 issue. McNamee notes that the trouble is that not only does Facebook know what I’m doing, but the Chinese government also knows. Khosla says it is an opportunity, not a problem. “Privacy is a red herring,” Khosla says. “There are rules and laws and ways to address the privacy issue.” Data reduction is an important need, Khosla says. He has a secretary to do it. Khosla says it is a critical need and huge opportunity.
• 4. From Roger McNamee: Betting on smart phones: The mobile device migration to smart phones from features phones will produce even greater disruption than PC industry moving from character mode to graphical interface. Used to be just Palm and Research in Motion. (Note that McNamee’s firm is a large investor in Palm.) What you are really doing, is put in real software environments, with applications layer that separates network from physical device. Phones far more pervasive than PCs. Will take out Motorola. One of LG, Samsung or Sony Ericsson as well. Will be intensely disruptive. And it will hurt Microsoft. You can not make a great consumer product with unbundled operating system. It will be incredibly disrupted. In five years, half of what we think of as phones will do something far more profound than what we think of a phone as doing. Design centers will fragment. An Amazon Kindle is a smartphone, with 3G network behind it. A life changer for people who use it. Will turn billion unit a year industry on its head. Assume Nokia, Apple, RIMM will do really well. (And Palm will do great, he says.)
• 5. From Joe Schoendorf: Water tech will replace global warming as a global priority. The world is running our of usable water and will kill millions more in our lifetime than global warming. Darfur could go down as the first water war of the 21st century. And with 2 million deaths, might not make the top 10 list. One billion of 6 billion people do not have healthy water. We’re losing close to 1 million people a year under 5 years old due to dirty water. Imagine a 60 year drought in this state. Within 15 years, will be up to 3 billion people with a water problem. 70% of water used for agriculture; 90% for developed countries. If nano technology can work, and can figure out desalinization, can prevent many wars over the next 30 years. Missing the Al Gore for water. Khosla agrees it is important, but not that it is more important than global warming. Global warming is causal, Khosla says. In 25-30 years, will be rarer commodity than oil, and more valuable. Khosla says he is invested in two water companies, and looking for more. Schoendorf notes that T. Boone Pickens is selling oil companies and buying water companies.
• 6. Jurvetson: Evolution trumps design. Many interesting unsolved problems in computer science, nanotech, and synthetic biology require construction of complex systems. Evolutionary algorithms are a powerful alternative to traditional design, blossoming first in neural networks and now in microbial engineering. Near-term trend: year or two, components of microbial engineering products will involve some form of evolution. Design for evolution. Has been used in neural networks. In microbial work, cripple a microbe, so it can do the one thing it does better and better. To make industrial chemicals. Applied to analog circuit design. In the future, artificial intelligence. Most of the panel seem to have no idea what Jurvetson was talking about, really.
• 7. Khosla: Fossilizing fossil energy. Oil and coal will have trouble competing with biofuels. 99% of discussion on the topic is completely irrelevant to the topic. In 4-5 years will have production proof that can sell biofuel at well below $2 a gallon at today’s tax structure and no subsidy. Can’t imagine how big oil can stay in business if that is an alternative. Zero land needed to replace 100% of our gasoline. The other major issue is electrical power generation, which is coal and natural gas. One of his companies signed deal for 175 MW solar plant at costs below natural gas. Cheaper and less subject to commodity pricing. All of the panelists agree on that one.
• 8. Kopelman: Venture Capital 2.0. Venture capital has underwritten most of the transformative software and Internet companies over last 20 years. Changing economics will have dramatic impact on the venture capital industry, in particular for software and IT. Typical $400 million fund, to get 20% return, have to triple, and return $1.5 billion. Hitting point where we are seeing larger fund sizes. What happens: some real changes as the institutions see the returns. Wonder how much of expansion into green tech, nano, is people running to something, not from something. Khosla agrees on software specifically, but not innovation generally. McNamee agrees with the thesis; the issue for software and IT is very real, but does not have anything to do with “venture.” The opportunities - IT is an enterprise thing - not going to make kind of investments in IT that would them to be interesting businesses. VC industry is diversifying away from industry where returns are poor. Schoendorf says “he could not be more wrong.” About 90% of all venture returns made by about 5% of the people; global supply of capital has kept pouring in. Returns come from a very small set. He says we are going to have a renaissance in software, with new billion-dollar companies created. More opportunity for great kinds of business plans.
• 9. McNamee: Within 5 years, everything that matters to you will be available to you on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse. Massive shift in Internet traffic from PCs to smaller devices. You should all get a Kindle, and study this thing, Roger says. Apple has it in the long run, wrong. Won’t be about watching created content, it will be about creating content. Within 10 years, more Internet traffic from your person than all other locations put together. Maybe actually more transaction, as opposed to bits, he corrects, given HD video traffic over the Internet at home. Khosla thinks the trend is already here. He does agree that the device will be transformative. McNamee says he is astonished how surprised people were by the iPhone and the Kindle. “Imagine all the other stuff you aren’t thinking about,” he says.
• 10. Schoendorf: 80% of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within 5-10 years. Dial-tone is going to be gone. By next year, people will put micro cells in your house. China Mobile has 500 million billable lines. Within 5-10 years will hit 5 billion global wireless phones. Jurvetson thinks 80% is simply too high; he noes that a quarter of the world’s population has no electricity. They will concentrate in the richest nations, Jurvetson says.

And that’s it. Lots of mobile phone predictions. Green energy. Water. And more phones.

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目前好像多是个人站长在小打小闹

当然，也和国内还没有更重视搜索引擎推广有关。

Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online.

The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million.

In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).

据外电报道，马来西亚国库控股国民投资有限公司（Khazanah Nasional Bhd，下简称国库控股）正在评估中国基础设施建设、环境保护、金融及医疗保健领域的投资情况，这一掌握着250亿美元规模资金的投资机构刚刚在北京开设了其于本国以外的第一个办事处。

　　“与传统的私募股权投资人相比，我们的投资期限更长，并且在新兴市场经验丰富”，国库控股的董事总经理阿兹曼·莫达（Azman Mokhtar）在京表示，“我们也希望为中国公司投资第三国提供我们的经验与关系网络”。 国库控股拥有分布于5个国家的50余家公司的股权，价值高达1万亿美元，而今它也加入淡马锡和卡塔尔投资的行列，致力发掘中国及其他新兴市场的投资机会。

　　国库控股在其对中国最大的零售企业百盛商业的投资中受益颇丰。2005年国库控股以7000万美元（2亿2750万令吉）认购百盛商业5465万股新股，取得9.9%股权。这是其首次涉足中国市场。今年3月，国库控股以9700万美元（3亿1525万令吉）脱售百盛零售集团1.9%股权。此外，发行总值5亿5000万美元（17亿8750万令吉）的5年伊斯兰债券（Sukuk，又称回教债券），可转换为百盛普通股。阿兹曼·莫达（Azman Mokhtar）透露，这批在香港交易所及纳闽国际金融所上市的伊斯兰债券，有半数卖给中东投资者。“上述计划实现了超过900%的回酬”。 阿兹曼·莫达（Azman Mokhtar）说，这项交易进一步加强马来西亚作为伊斯兰金融先锋的地位，在中国与中东之间建立了新的“丝绸之路”。

计越的一个简单框架说明

从中国网络经济的规模来讲，06年的增长速度大概40%，逐渐的变为30%，到了2007年可能只有20%的增长速度。对于新经济领域的投资不会像过去03、04、05年一样有爆发性，可取得非常巨大的回报。相反的，这个领域会慢慢趋向平稳发展，但发展速度跟其他的行业相比还是比较高的。

　　接下来中国一段时间内，红杉资本会比较关注的项目：

　　第一个，移动增值。随着3G的到来，无线上网的速度越来越快。互联网跟无线产生融合，会产生一些新的应用。中国的这个现象会更加普遍，即便中国部分用户群第一次上网用的终端不是PC，更多是用手机。但是这些用户随着收入的增加，以及网吧数量的增长，慢慢会有一个融合。尽管随着运营商对于整个产业链的控制越来越强，传统的SP，像空中、TOM等等由于移动运营商的挤压收入已经是很大的下降，但是在这个过程中，一定会有两条路。一个是传统的SP，另外一方面是互联网公司往这个方面走。通过这两方面的结合之后，我觉得提供服务的运营商对于电信运营商的依赖会相对减小。

　　第二方面，我们很看好网络游戏。网络游戏并不是已经到了诸侯割据的局面。很多的新兴公司有很大的发展，3年以前基本上国内的游戏格局都是从韩国拿游戏过来进行运营，从去年开始，很多的本土游戏开发公司开发游戏，在国内运营取得了很好的效果。用户的认知度也非常高。在今后的几年，网络游戏将越来越趋向于本土开发和运营，会在游戏的产业链占一个很重要的地位。

　　互联网广告会产生一些投资机会。由于互联网内四大门户的广告收入下降，从过去的60%多到现在的40%，今后几年还会下降，整个产业链给很多的社区和中小门户带来了机会，广告这方面无论是从事广告的公司，还是能够带来广告价值的内容公司，都会产生一些投资的机会。

　　中国的B2B电子商务收入是超过搜索引擎的，这个在美国是不可思议的。2000年2B电子商务非常热，随着互联网泡沫崩溃之后，B2B在美国很难经营，远远落后于搜索引擎带来的收入，甚至可以用“天壤之别”来形容。而中国在05、06年，B2B产生的收入超过搜索引擎，这个是中国的一个特色。某种程度上意味着中国的很多小企业对搜索引擎的认知度还存在差距，可能是他并不觉得这能够带来多大的价值，或者是对他收入有多大的提高，反而认为像阿里巴巴反而可以帮他找到客户，给他带来更多的收入增。所以在B2B领域，企业用户更愿意付钱。但是，中国迟早会走美国的路，搜索引擎会占绝大部分用户以及企业入口。当用户越来越觉得搜索引擎能够给他带来价值的时候，支付的意愿会随之越来越提高。

　　电子邮件不存在任何投资机会，社区博客前景看好。现在的博客不是简单地早期博客中国或者是BLOGC]HINA，更多地是一个社区，是个人的展示以及社交，产生了新的社区的形态。随着社区的应用起来之后，用户上网的时间会越来越分散。拿门户来说，用户上网浏览的时间比例已经降低了12%，其余的很多时间，网民更愿意到自己喜欢的社区去获取信息，和大家交流。

　　另外，从个人需求来说，个人娱乐的互联网应用服务、视频、网络金融等等都领域产生的新兴公司，都会有一些投资机会。

I am a sole founder of a company in the medical device arena. The company has raised some angel money is looking for Series A. One potential Series A partner has made an assumption of what the ‘ultimate’ level of founder equity would be at an exit. This is being used to drive a calculation involving assignment of some additional ‘founders’ shares for interim managers- closely related to the venture fund. I see this as a technology accelerator relationship. The company would likely need $10-12M in total with the first $3-6M being committed soon and the remainder in about 2-3 years.

My potential partners have benchmarked this final (exit) founder equity (my share) against other companies in the space. However, this number is dependent on how much money was raised to reach the goal and thus benchmarks may not be particularly accurate if this is not taken into account. More money taken in results in a lower founder share.

These could be good partners and may certainly add value. I believe that those who create value should be compensated but it does seem odd to assign new founder shares after initial investors have come in- I plan to talk to counsel about that.

Any thoughts on this topic? Thank you

Are serial entrepreneurs any better than first time entrepreneurs?

FT的报道显示了不同的一面。

Until this morning my answer to this question would have ‘Yes, absolutely’, but new research reported today in the Financial Times casts doubt on that assumption:

In the UK, the evidence is that novices are neither more nor less likely to have a business that either grows or survives than experienced founders. In Germany, where much more extensive statistical work has been undertaken, it is clear that those whose business had failed had worse-performing businesses if they restarted than did novices.

They postulate that the reason experience doesn’t seem to make a difference is that luck plays a huge part:

One reason for this is the role of chance in determining whether a business prospers. In spite of volumes of airport lounge books identifying simple recipes for success, the reality is that starting a business is risky. The outcome depends heavily on luck - whether parking is suddenly banned outside your hairdressing shop, whether you or a member of your family become ill, or whether your Great Aunt Mabel dies and leaves you an unexpected legacy. This unpredictability means that it is difficult for entrepreneurs to learn. The best analogy is with a lottery: it is not possible to learn to win a lottery.

When I read this I started thinking about the serial entrepreneurs I know and who I’m working with and quickly came up with a bank of anecdotal evidence that seemed to run counter to this research. Then I remembered a blog post from Dick Costollo, founder of Feedburner where he was lauding Marc Andreessen, saying that Ning was looking like it would become his third billion dollar business, and that nobody could be that lucky.

So I started to doubt the research. Specifically I wondered if the same conclusions would hold if the sample of companies was limited to the sorts of businesses we invest in. They are (in general) less exposed to the sorts of risks outlined in the paragraph above (not least because the money we invest gives them the ability to survive a bit of bad luck).

But then I started to hear the voice of Taleb in my ear. Of Andreessen’s success he would doubtless say ‘given the number of people starting businesses these days an someone was bound to build three billion dollar businesses eventually, based on luck alone’. Then I realised I was falling for what he would describe as the Platonic Fallacy - i.e. looking for order, structure and predictability in the world (experience makes an entrepreneur better) where the available evidence points to the fact that randomness prevails.

It is also worth repeating a fact that my Californian colleagues at DFJ like to point out - many of the most successful tech businesses have been built by young, first time entrepreneurs - e.g. Bill Gates at Microsoft, Larry and Sergey at Google, Larry Ellison at Oracle, and Yang and Filo at Yahoo!

To wrap up, I guess I’m not ready to ditch the belief that experience helps, but it feels uncomfortable going against the research, even with the concerns I mention. It would be great to see the research done again to answer the more specific question “do serial entrepreneurs outperform first time entrepreneurs in venture backed companies?”

Finally - this is also a reminder on the importance of judging people on process rather than results. It is better to back the second time entrepreneur who did everything right in her first business but narrowly failed because she was unlucky than the guy who hit a home run solely because he was fortunate. Not that it is easy to tell.

Michael Butler is chairman and CEO of investment bank Cascadia Capital. He is writing a book titled Financing the Future and the Next Wave of 21st Century Innovation, and is serializing it here at peHUB. What follows is an excerpt from the fourth chapter.

A decade ago, every ambitious and analytical business-school student dreamed of becoming a rock-star venture capitalist like John Doerr or Jim Clark. And why not? The returns were robust, the headlines and magazine covers were positive, and the personal wealth just piled up.
There’s a very different kind of pile up today on Sand Hill Road, however. And it looks more like a car crash than a personal cash stash. Very few venture capitalists are crying poverty, but the VC industry is undergoing a wrenching and major restructuring that will cause unfamiliar pain and dislocation for a long time to come.

To put it bluntly, the venture capital model is broken and even the smartest VC’s aren’t sure how to fix it – or if it can be fixed at all.

While they’re looking for elusive answers, the venture business is being partitioned into two sub-segments – the winners, who represent 20 percent of the firms, and the also-rans, who account for the remaining 80 percent.

For the most part, the winners are big, established brand-names like Kleiner-Perkins, Sequoia and NEA, or geographic and/or industry specific funds like OVP and Technology Partners. In both cases, these winners are still generating attractive risk-adjusted returns on capital. And because of their strong and proven track records, these blue-chip firms will almost certainly continue to get the best access to the best deals and best entrepreneurs. This means, of course, that the best pension funds and endowments will keep investing in these elite funds, accentuating and perpetuating the emerging two-tier structure of the venture capital industry.

By almost any measure, the VC business is shrinking today in the wake of the unprecedented Internet market collapse of a few years ago. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, the amount of venture capital invested dropped from $105 billion a year to $29 billion; during the same time period, the number of annual deals fell from nearly 8,000 to just under 4,000. Perhaps more telling is the fact that the number of venture capital firms in the United States contracted by 49 percent between 2000 and 2006.

I believe there are five reasons why the contraction will continue for the foreseeable future in the venture capital industry.

First, the technology and telecommunications sectors, which have been responsible for so much VC growth over the past decade, are slowing down. There are still interesting situations in wireless software, and the SaaS model is intriguing, but for the most part innovation seems less compelling in IT right now. In addition, many of the opportunities that currently exist in new media and on the Internet require very little capital compared to software development and, thus, may lend themselves more to angel investing than venture capital.

Second, it’s unclear whether most venture capital firms can successfully diversify and migrate from information technology and telecommunications into new segments like clean technology, alternative energy or healthcare. It’s true that $3 billion of venture money was invested in clean technology last year, but generating meaningful returns in these still-emerging businesses requires specialized expertise, and many of the tech and telecom focused VC funds don’t seem to have that knowledge base readily available at this point in time.

Third, there is intensifying competition from European venture capital firms, which have sophisticated talent and experience in several of these new and growing sectors, including the clean technology space. Their experience and expertise, combined with the favorable exchange rate, puts U.S. VC’s in a bit of a box – and this probably won’t let up anytime soon. Right now, we’re involved in a number of deals that have come from solid and successful European VC’s.

Fourth, an increasing number of entrepreneurs are seriously questioning whether venture capital mentoring is all it’s been cracked up to be – particularly in light of the start-up carnage that was left in the wake of the Internet revolution earlier this decade. More and more fledgling companies associate a double negative with the venture capital experience: expensive money and ineffective counseling.

Fifth, angel investors are squeezing venture capitalists out of a number of small but potentially lucrative deals. This represents quite a turn of the wheel, because venture capitalists had the upper hand during the last cycle and frequently crammed down on the angels. There is definitely some bad financial blood here – and, quite simply, this is pay-back time. The angels’ increasing significance was demonstrated recently when CleverSet – a software company that recommends online products – relied on them for a good chunk of financing.

So, the once-vaunted VC model is broken – now what? How does it get mended? And how long will it take?

I’ll answer the second question first by saying that, given the long lifecycle of VC funds, it’s going to take some time for the venture capital community to fully adjust to the new reality that has befallen it – maybe even a full decade of true transformation.

And during those 10 years, the VC’s who survive will likely have to become one of three types of funds:
•    Regionally focused funds – Funds that are sized appropriately and are focused on a geographic region can be very successful. By bringing local market insight, a network of local relationships and on-site mentoring, geographically focused funds can gain access to the highest quality deals and generate attractive returns. Madrona Venture Group, for example, has done a good job of sizing its fund to the opportunity at hand. Madrona has focused on the Pacific Northwest and has generated attractive returns for its investors.

•    Specialized or industry focused funds – VC’s will have to be nimble over the next few years and go where the dynamic companies are – the alternative energy, clean technology and healthcare sectors. These emerging segments are complex – and combine science and sociology; building a new Web browser, for instance, is not the same thing as saving the world from the impact of climate change. Technology Partners is a wonderful example of a fund that has changed its focus and emerged as a leader by focusing on life sciences and clean tech.

•    Fund Complexes – The funds that don’t downsize and/or specialize, the ones that remain large, will likely need to become multi-asset class and global to be able to generate the required returns on their capital. Funds such as Sequoia, Summit Partners and Ignition Partners are offering access to some or all of the following: seed, early-stage VC, late-stage VC, growth equity capital, PE, mezzanine debt and public equity capital. And they are making investments not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also in China, India and Israel.

The VC community will likely end up looking much like the commercial banking and investment banking industries – some very large and global players with broad product offerings, and a lot of smaller focused boutique firms that have specialization as their competitive differentiations. The large funds will be more than $1 billion, and the small funds will be between $200 million and $250 million. We’ve learned from the commercial banking and investment banking experience that large and small firms can be very successful, but firms that fall into the middle – that are neither large nor small – won’t be able to generate attractive returns on capital.

The VC world looks extremely dark right now – and we haven’t even seen the worst fallout from the current financial cycle yet. But venture capital will somehow find a way to revive and renew itself.

It always has.

Ever since ADR, the first U.S. venture capital firm, was formed by Georges Doriot in 1946, innovation has been efficiently energized and capitalized in this country. The stagflation of the late 1970’s severely challenged VC’s and the Internet Bubble almost wiped many of them out. Now the industry is a much diminished version of its turn-of-the-century self. Yet when I look ahead, I see the top-tier VC firms – the winning 20 percent – continuing to pick winning companies with winning ideas. That’s more than comforting and sure to stimulate the economic growth this country needs to keep pace in the relentless global marketplace.

注：Softbank的DD框架，和软银中国不太一样

DUE DILIGENCE REQUEST LIST

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[Company].

[Date]

In order to facilitate the due diligence investigation to be conducted in connection with the proposed investment by SOFTBANK Capital Technology Fund III L.P. (“SOFTBANK”) and certain affiliates of SOFTBANK (the “Investors”) in [Company] (the “Company”), we request that you provide to SOFTBANK the documents listed below. If any of these documents do not exist, have already been provided or are not applicable, please so indicate. In all instances, requests for documents or information regarding the Company extend to similar documents and information regarding subsidiaries and affiliated entities of the Company. We may ask for additional documents or information as our review proceeds. Please forward the documents and information to [Contact], SOFTBANK Capital, 1188 Centre Street, Newton Center, MA 02459. Please forward the documents as soon as they become available rather than delaying until all have been collected. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call [Contact] at [Phone Number].

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

1. Corporate and Organizational Data.

1.1 Charter documents and by-laws of the Company, as amended since the formation of the Company.

1.2 Minutes or other records of all meetings and actions of the stockholders, board of directors and committees of the board of directors.

1.3 A list indicating each state or jurisdiction in which the Company is qualified to do business, conducts business, or owns, leases, or licenses real property.

1.4 A list of subsidiaries and other entities in which the Company has an equity investment.

1.5 An organizational chart setting forth the name, age, stock ownership, title and compensation of each officer, director and key employee of the Company.

1.6 List of material open positions.

1.7 List of at least three references for each member of the Company’s management team.

1.8 Biographies and resumes for each member of the Company’s management team.

1.9 List of at least four references which are customers of the Company.

2. Securities Information.

2.1 Specimen of all securities of the Company presently outstanding (including options, warrants, and other rights) and the number of shares, units, or principal amount thereof outstanding.

2.2 A list of all stockholders of the Company, indicating the class and number of shares held by each security holder.

2.3 A copy of the stock transfer ledger of the Company showing all transactions in its securities.

2.4 Copies of all documents and agreements relating to the Company’s securities, including subscription agreements, options, warrants, preemptive rights, pledges of securities, proxies, voting agreements or other agreements relating to the sale or voting of the Company’s securities, rights of first refusal and first offer, and all agreements relating to registration rights with respect to the Company’s securities.

2.5 A summary of the Company’s funding history and a current capitalization table.

3. Financial Data and Materials.

3.1 Copies of the Company’s financial statements since inception and any auditors’ reports to management and any management responses thereto.

3.2 Year-to-date financials.

3.3 Detailed projections with assumptions.

3.4 Reports to security holders.

3.5 Copies of all credit agreements, loan agreements, security agreements, mortgages, guarantees of third party obligations, lease agreements, notes, and any agreements relating to financings of the Company.

3.6 All Federal and state tax returns filed by the Company since inception.

3.7 Any market research summaries or reports.

3.8 Sales pipeline summary and detail report.

4. Material Agreements.

4.1 All significant documents relating to any major acquisitions or dispositions by the Company or currently proposed acquisitions or dispositions.

4.2 All material agreements to which the Company is a party.

4.3 All significant leases of real property and personal property to which the Company is a party, either as lessor or lessee.

4.4 All material employment and consulting agreements to which the Company is a party, and all documents representing any bonus, retirement, profit-sharing, incentive compensation, pension, change in control agreements and all other employee benefit plans or agreements of the Company, as amended to date. A list of all material transactions involving the Company and any current or former stockholder, officer, key employee or director of the Company.

4.5 Non-competition, confidentiality, non-disclosure, assignment of invention and similar agreements with employees, officers, directors, or consultants of the Company. Please indicate any employees not covered by such agreements.

4.6 A list of all patents, registered and material unregistered trademarks, service marks and trade names and all registered copyrights and all applications for any of the foregoing. Copies of all material royalty, technology and licensing agreements, franchises and conditional sale contracts to which the Company is a party.

4.7 All records maintained by the Company relating to customer complaints.

4.8 List of insurance policies, including “key man” policies.

4.9 All material contracts and instruments to which the Company is a party and which are not otherwise covered on this list.

5. Governmental Compliance.

5.1 Any and all filings and correspondence with state or federal government agencies or other authorities pertaining to compliance and regulation matters connected with the Company’s business (including, without limitation, all FCC filings).

6. Litigations and Disputes.

6.1 A schedule of all suits, actions, litigations, administrative proceedings or other governmental investigations, or inquiries, pending or threatened, relating to the Company, its business or its operations.

6.2 All consent decrees, judgments, other decrees or orders, settlement agreements and other agreements to which the Company is a party or is bound, which require or prohibit any future activities.

6.3 All reports, notices, or correspondence relating to any violation or infringement by the Company of government regulations or the rights of third parties, including, but not limited to, the areas of securities regulation, proprietary rights, tax, equal employment opportunity, occupational safety, and health and environmental protection, antitrust and RICO, and copies of any other material correspondence with federal or state regulatory agencies.

6.4 Any and all filings with state or federal government agencies or other authorities pertaining to environmental compliance and regulation as well as a description of any hazardous materials stored, manufactured, or located at any facility of the Company, either now or in the past.

• AndroidScan - Use your phone to scan a barcode, get pricing information from dozens of stores, product reviews and more. Never make a bad purchase again! (by Jeffrey Sharkey)
• Beetaun - Social network around geographical content created by people and for people (from your neighborhood, from your city, from your country, from all over the world). By Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov
• BioWallet - A biometric authentication system for Android. This application features iris recognition and can act as a password safe and provide single sign-on for other Android apps. Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez
• BreadCrumbz -Navigate your route using pictures instead of a map (there’s also a map, if you like). Easily record routes using your smartphone. Share them with your friends, share them with the world. By Amos Yoffe
• CallACab - Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger
• City Slikkers - a Pervasive Game (alternatively Location Based Game) which takes place in the real-existing city. It is designed to connect a large number of players through-out the world and change the way the surroundings are seen. The central idea behind the concept is to give people the opportunity to symbolically interfere with the everyday urban environment and come into contact with previously unknown people. By PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems.
• Commandro - Commandro shows where are your friends REALLY are and what they’re doing at the moment. Using GPS location information, it will display 100% true real-life event and location information with regards to you and your friends. By Alex Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha.
• Cooking Capsules -Simply “watch” a very short cooking show, “shop” with the grocery list, and “make” using the handy step-by-step recipe directions. If you are out of your usual neighborhood you can use the ‘find nearest market’ gps feature. If your friend is stopping at the market, simply hit the ’send to friend’ button to text your list to them. By Mary Ann Cotter and Muthuselvam Ramadoss
• Diggin - Daniel Johansson, Aramis Waernbaum, Andreas Hedin
• Dyno - Virachat Boondharigaputra
• e-ventr - The domain is password protected, but a Whois Lookup shows it is owned by the developer named by Google. By Michael Zitzelsberger.
• Eco2go - Reduce your carbon footprint. Eco2go finds and suggests public transit alternatives for your trips - right on your phone. By Taneem Talukdar, Gary Pong, Jeff Kao and Robert Lam
• Em-Radar - Em-Radar is a revolutionary mobile product that alerts you about emergencies and severe weather anywhere, any time. By Jack Kwok.
• fingerprint - Robert Mickle
• FreeFamilyWatch - Navee Technologies LLC
• goCart - Rylan Barnes
• GolfPlay - give support to all the real time necessities of a golf player during a game, using GPS location and an online querying site where it is possible to access to their game statistics, tournament creation and a social network to exchange impressions with other users about the sport that links them: golf. By Inizziativa Networks
• gWalk - Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching, Rene Scholze
• HandWx - Delivers 7-Day weather forecasts to your phone. By Weathertop Consulting LLC.
• IMEasy - Yan Shi
• Jigsaw - Mikhail Ksenzov
• JOYity - Coming soon. By Zelfi AG.
• LifeAware - Mobile Tracking Service formed to help people be aware of where their friends and family are. A quick search on the Internet shows that approximately 700,000 children are classified as missing annually. The intent of Life Aware is to help you be aware of where you family and friends are. Gregory Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar
• Locale - Locale is one of 7 Android applications submitted by MIT students. It enables you to set up location- and time-based profiles for your phone, so you can make it shut up when you’re at work, forward calls to your landline when you’re at home. Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan.
• LReady Emergency Manager - A quick Whois Lookup shows the domain is owned by Chris Hulls, named by Google as a developer of LReady. By Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong Nguyen.
• Marvin - Marvin allows you to publish and browse geo-localized objects around you. Objects can be static or move by themselves and follow you. You publish and browse where you are, based on your current location or where you virtually are on the map. By Pontier Laurent.
• Mobeedo - Mobile Search. By Sengaro GmbH.
• Multiple Facets Instant Messenger - A Whois Lookup shows the website is owned by Virgil Dobjanschi who is named by Google as the creator of this application. By Virgil Dobjanschi.
• MyCloset - Mamoru Tokashiki
• PedNav - an application that helps you plan your activities efficiently when moving around and interacting with an urban environment. Like a good personal assistant, PedNav first inquires about your general plans for the day. By RouteMe2 Technologies Inc.
• Phonebook 2.0 - Coming soon. By Voxmobili.
• PicSay - Eric Wijngaard
• PiggyBack - Christophe Petit and Sebastien Petit
• Pocket Journey - connects your location to the voices of a global community of artists, historians, architects, musician, comedians, and others so you can quickly know everything about anywhere. By Anthony Stevens and Rosie Pongracz.
• Rayfarla - Rayfarla turns your phone into a musical instrument as well as providing a variety of mini games that are music related. I’m not saying too much about Rayfarla at the moment as I’m now in competition with 49 other semifinalists but suffice to say there will be some interesting twists when it is finally released on hardware. By Stephen Oldmeadow.
• Safety Net - Michael DeJadon
• SocialMonster - Ben Siu-Lung Hui and Tommy Ng
• SplashPlay - SplashPlay offers the next generation in musical tuition and learning to play the guitar just got a whole lot easier. Simply attach the pod and light panel to your guitar and start strumming to your favourite songs in minutes. Songs are sent to the pod from a mobile phone or computer using a USB or Bluetooth connection, giving total portability. Other features include a guitar tuner, guitar metronome and a hands free, Bluetooth foot pedal. The product will provide an easy, portable and fun method of learning music.
• Sustain- Keeping Your Social Network Alive - Niraj Swami
• SynchroSpot - Shaun Terry
• Talkplay - Sung Suh Park
• Teradesk - José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini
• The Weather Channel for Android - The Weather Channel Interactive Inc.
• TuneWiki - Our goal is to have the lyrics always on, always available, always synchronized to music - on any device that can play music back and connect to the internet. By TuneWiki Inc.
• Wikitude-the Mobile Travel Guide - Find points of interest based on your current location. By Philipp Breuss.
• Writing Pad - ShapeWriter is an innovative, original, fun, and highly efficient method of entering text into touch screen mobile phones. ShapeWriter lets the user to simply draw a continuous stroke from letter to letter on a soft keyboard and lift to complete the word. The resulting trace is recognized as the intended word. For example: to write the word “fun”, land the pen (or mouse cursor) on the F key, drag to the U key, continue to the N key and lift up the pen. ShapeWriter recognizes the curso trace F-U-N as the word “fun”.By ShapeWriter Inc.

You just signed a term sheet for your first round of venture capital. Congratulations! Now what?

While every fund has their own process and each deal works a bit differently, what you can expect between signing a term sheet and closing the round (to which I refer in aggregate as “diligence”) basically falls into four buckets:

(1) Confirmatory due diligence. What this means is the investor is switching gears from “why should I do this deal?” mode to “why shouldn’t I do this deal?” mode. There is a pretty standard set of items the investor will request. You can go to my blog and download the generic diligence request list that Softbank uses (http://tinyurl.com/4t5nud). Depending upon the stage of the company, there are usually a 100+ documents that need to be collected and delivered. I’m a big fan of using Microsoft Sharepoint to manage document delivery. In fact, I recommend using it to deliver documents from the beginning of the fund raising process. For example, when a VC asks for your “financial model” you should point them to Sharepoint instead of emailing the file. One benefit is you can check who’s accessed the file and you can turn off access if they pass. For $40 per month you can buy a hosted version of Sharepoint.

(2) Syndication. For many deals, particularly the first institutional round, the full amount of the raise won’t be spoken for. For example, if the raise is $8MM, the lead investor might be committed to $4-5MM. Syndication is the process of finding one or more additional investors to complete the round. If you had the good fortune of receiving multiple term sheets to begin with (and assuming you like one of the others) the easiest way to complete the syndicate is to invite those folks to participate on your newly signed term sheet. Failing that, you should reach out to the firms with whom you got close, but not all the way. The expectation is that the entrepreneur leads and directs the syndication process. The good news is that having a signed term sheet (hopefully from a reputable firm) makes it a lot easier than getting the term sheet to begin with.

(3) Documentation. Generating about 2-inches of legal agreements codifying the investment. Usually company counsel will take the lead on drafting documents; although it’s not unheard of for the lead investor to do the first draft. You should ask that the syndicate use one law firm, but if they insist on each using there own, plan on the process taking a week or two longer than it would otherwise.

(4) Closing. Signing the paperwork and wiring the money. Yeah! It used to be that closings were held in person at some attorney’s office (at least that was my experience early in my career) but today that almost never happens. The closing is usually held over a couple of days after everything has been agreed and then they sign and fax their signature pages to company counsel. Depending upon how many signatures, it can take a few days to complete.