Cyriac founded Shopkick in 2009, while an entrepreneur-in-residence at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.
FORBES: How Shopkick Built Its Brand By Making Something We Already Do More Rewarding
Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures, a venture-capital firm, has argued that the answer is yes.
Few understood why he funded 3Com at the time, laughs Richard Kramlich of New Enterprise Associates, a venture-capital firm.
His Boston-based venture-capital firm, Polaris Partners, typically invested in biotech and Internet companies.
Sometimes, in fields where they have experience, they can advise managers on the nitty-gritty just as well as a venture-capital firm would.
There are local funds aimed at high-tech companies, and 3i, Britain's best-known venture-capital firm, has its biggest office outside London in Cambridge.
Atlas Venture, a leading international venture-capital firm, is the project's main backer.
Like a venture-capital firm, they are seeding a number of small causes in a style that has come to be called venture philanthropy.
"Facebook's got a great run ahead of it, but things keep moving, " said Deepak Kamra, a general partner at venture-capital firm Canaan Partners.
In Germany seed money has roughly quintupled in the past five years, says Hendrik Brandis of Earlybird Venture Capital, a venture-capital firm in Munich.
Jacob Mullins, a senior associate at venture-capital firm Shasta Ventures, shot rifles as a Boy Scout and picked it up again some four years ago.
"They're all quite interested in talking to the tech industry, " said Mr. Wilson, whose venture-capital firm was an early backer of social-media companies like Twitter Inc.
"We are just about to take a piece of rock and, maybe, etch it into the first wheel, " Patrick Chung, a partner at venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates.
More fundamentally, collecting small sums from millions of users is expensive, says Simon Levene of Accel Partners, a venture-capital firm that has investments in both Gameforge and Playfish.
John Thornton of Austin Ventures, a local venture-capital firm, says his company financed as many Austin-based high-tech companies in 1996 as in the previous five years taken together.
In the autumn of 2008 Sequoia Capital, a big venture-capital firm, produced a presentation for the companies in which it had invested that included a slide with a picture of a gravestone.
It's not a new phenomenon: Zuckerberg is known for his ever-present T-shirt and sandals, and in Facebook's early days, he once showed up for a meeting with a venture-capital firm in his pajamas.
Five years after Al Gore joined the prestigious venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins to back environmentally correct companies, the collaboration has yielded few successful exits for Mr. Gore and his partners, along with some spectacular disasters.
WSJ: Review & Outlook: Silicon Valley's Green Energy Mistake
Flipkart, an online-commerce site in India founded by two former Amazon employees, has received funding from Tiger Global, a New York-based hedge fund that specialises in this kind of investing, and Accel Partners, a venture-capital firm.
ECONOMIST: Making money by bringing old ideas to new markets
While such an arrangement is similar to a big venture-capital firm or hedge fund with many investors pumping money into a company at a pre-public stage, it has the potential to include many more investors in the pool.
"Whether it was squeezing the fat out of NatWest or not overpaying for silly deals in America, which every Brit bank seems to do, Goodwin has always managed to deliver, " says Michael Denny, the chairman of Northern Ventures Managers, a venture-capital firm.
Douglas Leone of Sequoia Capital, a big venture-capital firm, reckons that in emerging markets like China around 50% of start-ups backed by foreign venture capitalists in the internet and mobile sectors are copycats, and in markets like Brazil it is closer to 70%.
ECONOMIST: Making money by bringing old ideas to new markets
Real estate brokerage Realogy sought to skirt defaults on some of its bonds by launching a debt exchange but CarlIcahn'Carl Icahn's venture-capital firm, High River , threw a wrench in its plans by slapping Realogy with a lawsuit and accusing it of delaying the inevitable.
Moda investors like Tony Florence, a general partner of venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and a Moda board member, see great promise and future profit in the trunk show model, which limits risk by passing up-front costs on to customers, who pay a 50-percent deposit for their purchases during the trunk show, with the other 50 percent paid at time of delivery.
WSJ: The Ladies Behind Moda Operandi | WSJ. Magazine May 2013
Lou Volpe is a managing general partner for Kodiak Venture Partners, a Massachusetts-based venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments.
In yet another sign of the growing influence of the secondary markets, Alex Ferrara, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, is leaving the top-tier venture capital firm to join Millennium Technology Value Partners, a firm that buys private shares from employees and venture investors in companies like Facebook, Twitter, and eHarmony.
FORBES: Partner at Bessemer Ventures To Leave For Secondary Shares Firm
Jules Maltz is a Principal at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), a late-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park.
Dany Farha, CEO of Dubai-based venture capital firm BECO Capital, says such obstacles are merely business opportunities.
Not surprisingly, she was glowing, abuzz with excitement over her new relationship with the big-name venture capital firm.
FORBES: Love And Marriage...And The Courting Ritual Of Financing Startups
应用推荐