Gus Tai's Most Recent Posts

Reading the Horizon Award profile of Nice Systems' new product, Perform, made me smile. It's definitely a clever and very hard-to-develop product. All businesses succeed on their ability to profitably satisfy their customers. Here is an innovative technology that should help with both profitablity and satisfaction.

At least for early stage companies, you can never know too much about the mindset of the customer. First off, there usually aren't that many customers to begin with; second, the ones you do have may have a hard time describing their reactions to something so new; and third, even if the customers could articulate what they're thinking, many remain in evaluation mode for quite some time. Given that reading customer intent is like reading tea leaves, having a way to collect and organize more information provides more leaves, and perhaps more business intelligence.

I've always liked Microsoft's code names for their various projects. The better known ones were Cairo, Longhorn, and my previous top choice, Hailstorm. I hadn't been aware of the Horizon Award Winning Project called Vigilante, but I must say that this name is now my favorite. It's appropriate for and descriptive of their approach to the big problem of fast spreading worms. And since it's not a commercial name, it doesn't benefit from starting with the letter "A".

The Vigilante project falls within an area of interest of mine. And if it realizes its potential, it should prove to be very important to almost all enterprises. Despite the ongoing evolution of security solutions, we'll continue to be in an arms race with the developers of these threats. As a result of these constant innovations, we at Trinity have found security a fertile investment area over the last seven years (Network Alchemy, Aventail, Intruvert, Sygate, Mirage and Aruba).

I'm sure that if you're like me, you probably feel overwhelmed at times with too much information. I do my best not to act as if I'm plugged in during all of my waking hours. But I can't resist the urge to frequently check my BlackBerry (although only 20 seconds have passed) or to read certain websites or blogs to keep current. Unfortunately, in this day and age, it isn't possible to stay up-to-date on everything. There are just too many data sources and too many ways to access information.

It's good news, then, that there's research and development underway to find ways to help filter the noise and convert what's remaining into useful knowledge. I'm glad that Computerworld chose to profile PubSub as a leading example of a technology that saves time by finding what we need and nothing more. PubSub is solving what I consider to be a hard problem: matching user generated interests against what the company characterizes as a fire hose of streaming, real-time information. I wish I could figure out how to apply this to my job, where anecdotally, a venture capitalist may hear of perhaps 500 companies before finding one that matches his or her interests and investment style.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts on Computerworld’s Horizon Awards.  I’m looking forward to your comments, feedback and even funny stories that help make this blog interactive. 

Let me first start off with a little bit about my background.  I’m a General Partner at Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA.  I’ve been investing in software companies for the last 10 years, and prior to that had consulted to software and systems companies in Silicon Valley after doing engineering work at Digital Equipment.