Paul English, Kayak, Sequoia, and the Triple-Digit Club

My most recent Globe column focused on what I call the "Triple Digit Club" -- companies that have raised $100 million or more in venture capital funding.

The club includes Boston-area companies like E Ink, Kayak, A123 Systems, GreatPoint Energy, and Luminus Devices. (Kayak is the current club president, having raised $223 million.)

My favorite tidbit from the column is that Sequoia, one of the investors behind Kayak, apparently used them at the famous "RIP Good Times" presentation in October as an example of a company that already operates lean and mean. From the column:

The entire start-up world...took notice last month when several partners of Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that funded companies like Google, PayPal, and Electronic Arts, called a meeting to warn its companies about the coming recession. The text on the opening slide? "R.I.P. Good Times." Spending cuts, the firm advised, are a must, and acquirers will gravitate to profitable companies.

Sequoia, as it happens, is an investor in Kayak (A123Systems, too). According to [Kayak co-founder Paul] English, people who were at Sequoia's cautionary meeting say that partner Michael Moritz mentioned Kayak several times.

"They were talking about us as a company with a lean profile," he says. "In their portfolio, we are the skinniest as far as costs." That frugal posture will be an asset if even gloomier times are ahead.

The video features English talking about his approach to hiring and firing engineers.

E Ink & Esquire

Had breakfast on Friday at Henrietta's with a really interesting bunch of tech company founders....including Wendy Caswell from Zink, Antonio Rodriguez from Tabblo (now an exec at HP), Gregg Favalora from Actuality, Nabeel Hyatt from Conduit Labs, and Sim Simeonov from Polaris/Plinky.

We talked about a lot of stuff, but one thing everyone was interested in (well, at least Gregg and I) was how we can get our hands on a copy of the October issue of 'Esquire,' which will have a front cover and inside cover featuring E Ink displays.

E Ink CEO Russ Wilcox said he's even having trouble getting his hands on a hundred or so of the magazines for his employees. (Not all of the copies of the October issue will have the E Ink displays affixed to them.) Subscribers won't get them... they'll be at newsstands only. (Perhaps mailing the mags posed too big a risk of damage.) Russ said he didn't know which newsstands will get them, so there's no use camping out at Out of Town News in Harvard Square.

Though you could get lucky...

Boston's Most Innovative Display Companies

Sunday's Globe column focused on three companies trying to bring new display technologies to market: Siftables, Vitality, and A2a Media.

Here's the video, with demos from Siftables and A2a, followed by my list of the five most innovative display companies right now in the Boston area (plus a few bonus companies).



So in addition to those three companies, each of which I think has some promise, here are the five most innovative display companies in the Boston area. How do I define innovative? Cool technology with the potential to change the world. Let me know who I missed in the comments section.

1. E Ink: Low-power, paper-like digital displays for products like Amazon's Kindle and mobile phones.

2. Ambient Devices: Putting Internet connected displays in unexpected places, like a refrigerator magnet or umbrella handle. Former Palm CEO Carl Yankowski was enlisted last summer to help Ambient make it big.

3. Myvu: Will consumers wear Robocop-style glasses to watch video content from their iPod? Myvu's gonna find out.

4. CircleTwelve: A one-man effort to commercialize the DiamondTouch table developed at Cambridge's Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. Here's some earlier Innovation Economy coverage of CircleTwelve, and a comparison of DiamondTouch and Microsoft's Surface technology.

5. QD Vision: Enlisting quantum dots to produce brighter displays that use less power. Here's a Technology Review article on the company.

And in the honorable mention category: Actuality Systems still sells its knock-out 3-D displays, but is repositioning itself as a medical imaging company. Emo Labs is a company built atop cool technology: integrating a display and speaker, so the audio actually comes out of the screen. But they've been having trouble gaining momentum, despite some funding from Polaris Venture Partners.

On the content side, three more companies are worthy of note.

FrameMedia is a neat Wellesley company thinking about how to deliver content to Internet-connected picture frames... and LocaModa and Aerva are both exploring ways to enliven flat-screen displays in public places with all kinds of interactive content.

First Digital Magazine Cover Will be Powered by E Ink

Esquire Magazine and Cambridge's E Ink Corp. are partnering on an electronic paper cover for the magazine's September October issue, according to the New York Times.

The display will read, "The 21st Century Begins Now." Inside the front cover will be an ad for Ford's Flex SUV, also using an E Ink display. The thin battery powering both should last about 90 days. Esquire's parent, Hearst Corp., is an investor in E Ink, and Esquire has an exclusive on use of the technology in the magazine biz through 2009.

The Times reports, "The electronic cover will be used in only 100,000 copies that go to newsstands — its overall circulation is about 720,000." That ought to make these hot among collectors and technophiles.

Next-Gen Display Technology Demo Night, on Feb 13th

I'm really excited about a panel coming up on February 13th, focusing on innovation in display technology. We're going to have representatives from *six* local companies talking about how their products could change the way we interact with text, audio, and video -- and what business opportunities that could create.

Here's who will be there, and what they're up to:

- Ambient Devices (http://www.ambientdevices.com), integrating "glanceable" information into objects like umbrellas
- DiamondTouch, from MERL (http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch), turning a table into a touch-sensitive display
- E Ink (http://www.eink.com), whose paper-like display is built into the new Amazon Kindle
- Emo Labs, which layers an invisible audio speaker onto an LCD screen
- Myvu (http://www.myvu.com), which makes wearable displays that can plug into your iPod
- QD Vision, using quantum dots to make power efficient, next-generation displays

Everyone will have a product/prototype there to demo -- so you'll be able to see stuff first-hand.

Since the space at Cambridge Innovation Center is limited, we're forced to filter the crowd a bit, this time focusing on entrepreneurs and investors. So e-mail me if that sounds like you (kirsner at pobox dot com), and I'll send you the top-secret code required to register.

Last Night's "Thinking Big" Party: How Do We Build a New Generation of Really Big Companies in Massachusetts?

I've been interested for a while in the question of how we can build a new generation of "pillar" companies in Massachusetts...companies like EMC, Lotus, DEC, Akamai, Genzyme, and Boston Scientific.

Last night, a group of folks put together a cocktail party to talk about the issue.

It was an amazing crowd -- it felt like someone had summoned the 'Super Friends' to the Hall of Justice. George Hatsopoulos, founder of Thermo Electron, was there, as was Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technology, Carol Vallone, CEO of WebCT, Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, Tim Healy, co-founder of EnerNOC, Rick Hess, CEO of Konarka Technologies, Aron Ain, CEO of Kronos, Jonathan Seelig, co-founder of Akamai, and Robert Coughlin, the new head of the Mass Biotech Council. At one point, Russ Wilcox of E Ink was showing off a new Amazon Kindle e-book reader, which uses a screen made by his company. Wendy Caswell, CEO of ZINK Imaging, was our host, and the firms KMC Partners, Goodwin Procter, and BSG Team Ventures helped underwrite the event.

Dan Bricklin has some photos and an audio recording of the discussion. Paul Maeder from Highland Capital Partners touched on some of the same issues he brought up at a lunch last month: "We have been selling the seed corn," is his assessment.

Here are some of my thoughts on the evening's "main event" -- a conversation that Maeder and Michael Greeley of IDG Ventures led, with my help and lots of input from the crowd.

First, the question of why pillar companies are important:

1. They get big, employ lots of people, and tend to be supportive of their community (through philanthropy, supporting local schools, etc.)
2. They tend to attract media and Wall Street attention, which lets the world know something important in their sector is happening where they are based. They also hold conferences for customers/users... think of the annual MacWorld conference in San Francisco as an example. All of this sends a message that a particular place is a center of gravity, which brings more people interested in that area -- and more small companies -- to that place.
3. They tend to think like acquirers rather than acquirees.
4. They tend to spin off smaller companies in their space. (But we need to get rid of non-compete agreements to foster this.)
5. They serve as a source of experienced employees and executives to other companies in their space. (Again, we need to get rid of non-compete agreements to foster this.)
6. They make it easier for companies in their space to recruit people to the area. Say a consumer tech company in Boston -- like Bose -- is trying to bring a marketer in from the West Coast. That person, should things not work out at Bose, will not have a lot of other wonderful choices of other employers here in the Boston area. Same is not true when a chip company like Intel tries to recruit people from anywhere in the world to move to Silicon Valley.
7. They pay more taxes.

Now, as for what we can do...

1. Entrepreneurs need to have a jones to build a big, important company. The typical New England VC will not push them to brush off acquisition offers and stay independent.

2. Big companies get their start by discovering emerging sectors and opportunities. I don't think we're going to build an important, independent new PC company in Boston, or a networking equipment company, or even a medical device company. Boston Scientific got big because they saw the opportunity for less-invasive medical procedures before anyone else. Invent a cool new medical device today, and you're basically gonna get integrated into the product line of someone like a Boston Scientific or Medtronic before you have a chance to launch a second product.

3. So that means we need to support entrepreneurs dedicated to building pillar companies in new, as-yet-undefined market sectors. (Avid, which helped establish the market for digital video editing, is a great example.) I think the media -- that's me -- plays a role, and I'm gonna do my best to focus on entrepreneurs working on these new frontiers. But angel investors and VCs also play a role (can they avoid the temptation to fund a serial entrepreneur doing his seventh enterprise software start-up, instead of a first-time entrepreneur who is breaking new ground?) And finally, entrepreneurs and executives who have built really big companies need to give back. This does not just mean donating to or speaking at their alma maters. They ought to be serving on boards, or as informal advisors, to a handful of interesting start-ups in or near their areas of expertise. Some do, but too many don't.

Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, offers a different perspective on his blog.

Kind(le) Words for Cambridge's E Ink

Cambridge's E Ink is supplying the screen for Amazon's new $399 e book reader, the Kindle. This is the first tech device I've wanted to spontaneously purchase in a long time... in part because it seems to fill a new need (I'm always hesitant to ditch my current cell phone or mp3 player or GPS for something slightly better.)

Steven Levy of Newsweek has the most comprehensive look at the Kindle, and he has some very nice things to say about E Ink:

A reading device must be sharp and durable, [Jeff] Bezos says, and with the use of E Ink, a breakthrough technology of several years ago that mimes the clarity of a printed book, the Kindle's six-inch screen posts readable pages.

...This decade's major breakthrough has been the introduction of E Ink, whose creators came out of the MIT Media Lab. Working sort of like an Etch A Sketch, it forms letters by rearranging chemicals under the surface of the screen, making a page that looks a lot like a printed one. The first major implementation of E Ink was the $299 Sony Reader, launched in 2006 and heavily promoted. Sony won't divulge sales figures, but business director Bob Nell says the Reader has exceeded the company's expectations, and earlier this fall Sony introduced a sleeker second-generation model, the 505.

E Ink Pockets $16 million; will be featured in new Amazon ebook device

Intel Capital, Motorola, FA Technology Ventures, and other backers have put another $16 million into Cambridge-based E Ink, the pioneer of paper-like display technologies. The company, amazingly, has raised $130 million in funding since its start a decade ago, according to Private Equity Hub.

The company's displays are already in the Sony Reader e-book device, but the next product everyone's awaiting is the Amazon Kindle e-book device. Here's a NY Times piece from September that links E Ink and the Kindle.

(An aside: Doesn't the product name Kindle make you think of book burning? Or I suppose you can "kindle someone's interest" in a topic or an author...)