Even so, Jurvetson has one early win: In May portfolio company Coatue was acquired by a major computer chip maker.

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Coatue, which has been working on conductive organic polymers for memory chips, has had major support from Sunnyvale microprocessor maker AMD.

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Coatue Management LLC, a New York-based hedge fund whose founder once worked for Mr. Robertson, last year opened a Silicon Valley office.

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Discouraged, the trio took some time off to build Coatue Corp.

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Coatue ended the year with a still sizable 643, 000 shares.

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"There's an emergence of a new type of company that is private but should have been public, with scale and lots of revenue, " said Thomas Laffont, who leads Coatue's new fund.

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To get Coatue going they had to spend more than six months obtaining visas for a group of Russian scientists from Siberia and a couple of years tinkering with the science in the lab.

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