Venture Initiation and Entrepreneurship

From Business Week:

Jaxtr’s tale illustrates the new calculus governing high-tech venture capital. For years, angel investors and traditional venture firms existed in a sort of symbiosis. Wealthy tech-industry veterans willing to open their checkbooks for $100,000 or so—the angels, as they’re known—could bootstrap promising young companies before serious money, to the tune of six or more figures, from venture firms arrived. Angling for a slice of Jaxtr, however, were both groups: Mayfield Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards, and the Founders Fund on one hand; angel investors Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and Rajeev Motwani on the other. “The company was a bit in the driver’s seat,” one investor says.

Angels with Deeper Pockets

What put Jaxtr in the driver’s seat is a turnabout in traditional roles for angel investors and venture capitalists. Venture capitalists are responding to the emergence in recent years of what have come to be known as super-angel investors, who sink multimillion-dollar investments into Web startups and other tech companies, often carrying them further into their life span before they knock on VCs’ doors. Professional angels and boutique angel funds have been a driving force behind emerging Web companies including Kevin Rose’s Digg and Revision3, Marc Andreessen’s Ning, search engine Powerset, and online music site Last.fm, to name a few (see BusinessWeek.com, Slide Show: “Tech’s Next Gen: The Best and Brightest”).

“We have the flexibility to invest like an angel or a later-stage venture capital firm,” says David Weiden, a general partner at Khosla Ventures, an angel-investment fund headed by Sun Microsystems (SUNW) co-founder Vinod Khosla. “Because we’re investing our own money, we can scale down to whatever we want.” Khosla investments range from $100,000 to $25 million, in areas including Internet technology and clean energy.