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Venture Money in Open Source

Posted by samzenpus on from the money-fixes-everything dept.

prostoalex writes "Interesting statistics from VentureOne and New York Times on open source venture capital investments: "In 1999 and 2000, according to VentureOne, venture capitalists invested $714 million in 71 open-source companies." Even more interesting stats: "Most of those projects collapsed." The article talks about both successes and failures: Red Hat, TurboLinux, JBoss."

1 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. VC money is actually bad for business by lashi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    VC usually only care about maximize return on their investment in a short time. As a result, they take approach that's actually bad for the long term growth for business.

    According to the former chairman of ArsDigita, VC basically pushed him out and run the business with their own man as CEO and killed ArsDigita. At first I was surprised by this but it seems that's the way VC operates.

    http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

    Paul Graham has an interested 'unified theroy of VC suckage' on his page

    http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/venturecapital.h tml

    very interesting read. Also I agree $750 mil is peanuts for VC. Greylock and Partners (mentiion in the ArsDigita story) alone manages over $2.2 billion in investments. That's just one investment company.

    http://www.greylock.com/strategy/funding.cfm