A few people mentioned that they were suprised about my move to Stanford after leaving Voltage. This post should be a lot less suprising: I am joining Morgenthaler Ventures as a part-time Entrepreneur in Residence. Spending a day a week at Morgenthaler Ventures is a very synergistic combination. The exposure to bleeding edge technology in Stanford helps understanding entrepreneurial opportunities. Vice versa seeing the hard technical problems that portfolio companies face helps define meaningful new research areas. And while some of you may not have heard of them before, Morgenthaler is a great firm to work with.
Morgenthaler Ventures is arguably one of the more low-key venture firms on Sand Hill Road. When I originally met Ken Gullicksen at Stanford, I had not heard of them before. Once you start talking to people in the venture industry, your perception of Morgenthaler rapidly changes. They are not only well known, but they have been so for a while. When David Morgenthaler became a founding board member of the American Venture Capital Association in 1973, I was still a few years away from Kindergarten. In the 40 year history of the firm, Morgenthaler has been one of the few funds that has not only strived in the rapidly changing venture industry, but actually helped transform it to the modern venture capital industry it is now. They have also had their string of home runs including Apple, Verifone and NexTag. Today, Morgenthaler has three separate teams investing in information technology, life sciences and buyouts.
For the founding team at Voltage, Morgenthaler was a reliable partner and incredible help while building Voltage Security. Ken turned out to be a great and very active board member. In the early days we were joking that we should give him (and Prashant from HumWin) Voltage name cards because they were around so much. Beyond Voltage he has done alright as well, with IMEEM being ranked the #1 music streaming site on the internet and #85 internet site overall, and Nominum becoming the de-facto standard for carrier DNS.
So if you are at Stanford, and are looking for funding or you just want feedback on an entrepreneurial idea let me know and I am happy to help. Morgenthaler has traditionally a good relationship to the Stanford Community, and if I can help it this will only get better.