Ribbit introduced itself formally to the world today. Talk about BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), but the company has adopted the line that it is “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company”. For the best coverage of the company’s proposition, read Techcrunch’s post, which goes pretty deep in understanding what’s possible. Ribbit is a classic (and wonderful) startup problem: How do you decide what to do when everything is possible. Ribbit has a killer advantage, which is that -- under the covers -- it has a Class 5 soft switch, the innards of a traditional telephone company that allows it to set up, route, and terminate phone calls. No other startup can duplicate that infrastructure in less than 3-5 ...

Last week, Cleversafe introduced a major update to its open source software. Cleversafe is a company with a big, hairy, audacious goal: transform the infrastructure for storing data. All data. Enterprise data. Consumer data. Internet data. Transform the storage of data by radically simplifying the underlying method of storing it and meanwhile making it much more secure and reliable, not to mention cheaper. Like many startups, Cleversafe has gone through significant transformations itself as it has figured out how to navigate toward this goal. A key decision the company made early on was to put its core software into the open source domain. But it realized earlier this year that ...

This past week, Justin.tv launched its live broadcasting system. Read the Los Angeles Times coverage of the company. Everyone's first question to us: How the heck are you going to make money on that investment? Good question! Answer: We don't know, exactly. We have some suspicions. But Justin.tv is the emblematic deal for what we believe about venture capital: The more you think you know about how you're going to make money in an investment, the less likely you will either make money or make it the way you think you will. In other words, risk is the sine qua non of real venture capital. We prefer to bet on the people behind the ...