Ever since Blueprint Ventures’ partners decided in 2009 to wind the firm down, New Venture Partners may be the only venture firm left that invests solely in corporate spinouts—technology projects that are locked inside a company that the company no longer wants, even if it’s already invested millions of dollars in them.
Identifying these projects and turning them into independent start-ups is time-consuming. New Venture Partner David Tennenhouse, a Ph.D. in computing who’s worked at DARPA, Intel Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. and who opened the firm’s Silicon Valley office in 2007, says he talks to a lot of people — corporate chief technology officers, directors of research and sometimes business development and mergers and acquisitions people, figuring that “when a project is in imminent danger of being cancelled, hopefully the leader will go to the doorsteps of these people looking for salvation.”
To read the full, original article click on this link: The Hard Work Of Extracting Start-Ups From Corporations - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ
Author:
Deborah Gage
