Allen Morgan

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :4/16/2008 1:19:18 AM

Allen Morgan’s smile is one of the most sought after in the fraught world of technology startups: if he swings a pitch for the fence, chances are it’ll be a home run for your business.

Written by John O’Hanlon

If you are setting up a new business, for heaven’s sake don’t mortgage your house or get a loan from the bank, I heard that doyen of European VCs Hermann Hauser say the other day. At least talk to an investor who is prepared to share the risk with you. It may be hard to get these guys to commit but once they have their money is in there for whatever period you have agreed: a bank will get cold feet the day you run into any kind of setback or deviation from your business plan and ask for its money back, and he has the scars to prove it.

Not many individuals have published ten commandments. Not having the internet at his disposal, God did the best thing he could at the time, but it’s fortunate that tablets of stone are no longer required because, on his blog, Allen Morgan frequently adds afterthoughts to the decalogue he issued in 2005 as a guide for entrepreneurs pitching to VCs.

Still, his precepts retain lapidary brevity. A lot of his suggestions relate to time. With a caseload as long as your arm, he is a very busy man. Be on time is his second commandment; get to the point – fast is his fifth, so I felt honored to be the recipient of his full attention.

There at the start

Allen is a Managing Director of Mayfield Fund, at 40 years Silicon Valley’s oldest venture capital company, and of course a major player, with more than $2.4 billion under management. Among the notable notches on its bedpost are Compaq, Silicon Graphics, 3COM, Amgen, Genentech and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Since it was founded by the ‘dean of venture capitalists’, Tommy Davis, in 1969, Mayfield has invested in 500 companies and has taken more than 100 of them public.

Allen Morgan takes a particular interest in enterprise software applications and infrastructure, “particularly innovative solutions that enhance knowledge-worker productivity, as well as on start-ups in the area of consumer internet services, interactive entertainment, online advertising and new media.” Allen’s notable investments include Jotspot (acquired by Google), PlanetOut, Serious Magic (acquired by Adobe) and Varsity Group.

Before joining Mayfield in 1999, Allen was a partner with two major Silicon Valley law firms, Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, but the move into venture capital was fairly seamless he told me. “People become venture capitalists in a lot of different ways. In fact as an industry it’s a very idiosyncratic market. My background is that I was a corporate lawyer in Palo Alto California for about 20 years representing software entrepreneurs. In the course of a nearly 20 year career, one finds that one tends to be as much of a business…

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