Venture capitalists predict wins
By Dawn Yoshitake
January 29, 1998, 6:10 p.m. PT
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SAN FRANCISCO--Venture capitalists at the NationsBanc Montgomery Securities 15th annual Technology Week conference here today are placing their bets on broadband and infrastructure as among the most promising technology investments of the future.
"Broadband access will be a great market," said Geoffrey Yang, a general partner with Institutional Venture Partners. Yang also pointed to cable, satellite, and digital subscriber licenses as growth markets.
Yang was joined on a panel at today's investor conference by John Doerr, partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and Michael Moritz, a general partner with Sequoia Capital .
Doerr, whose firm is an investor in @Home predicted that cable would dominate in the race to bring broadband service to consumers in a big way. He cited one instance, however, in which his firmed guessed wrong in its effort to predict the next great technology victory.
"We were way early on pen computing and we were way wrong," Doerr said of his company's expectation that pen devices ultimately would replace the mouse.
Moritz, for his part, also pointed to broadband as a technology with great revenue potential, but said merchandising on the Internet is the area investors should be watching most closely.
"It's all about merchandising," Moritz said.
Venture capital hit a record $3.57 billion in the third quarter, with high-tech companies attracting $2.3 billion of the total amount, according to a Price Waterhouse survey. As usual, software and communications companies attracted the bulk of VC investments.
Internet infrastructure also will play an important role in future investing, Yang said, as more corporations come to depend on the Internet to run their operations, and to facilitate customer and vendor relations.
He noted that his firm has taken a holistic approach toward selecting infrastructure deals, meaning that it looks simultaneously at core network technologies, like routers, switches, peripherals, and network access, rather than waiting for one aspect of the equation to catch up with the others. |
