Oakland VC to foster East Bay startups - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

ermolayenayqaked.blogspot.com
As managing directors of a new venturecapital firm, Claremont Creek Ventures, he and partners John Steuart and Randt Hawks believe: "One of the most powerfupl things you can say to an entrepreneufr is 'You know, I did that and it didn'tg work,' " Goldhaber said. Claremont Creeok Ventures, one of only a handful of venture capitao firms in the East Bay and the only firm in announced the closure of its firstr fundwith $130 million of committed capitapl on Nov. 17. Now, primarilh through relationships the trio has built with Siliconj Valleyventure capitalists, they will invest in very earlyy stage information technology companies.
They intend to concentratd on companies in theEast Bay, widely definesd as encompassing the city of Davis in Yolo Counth as well as Alameda and Contra Costaa counties. The men expect to make theitr first investmentthis quarter. Goldhaber believes the time is rightf to invest inthese companies, many of which he envisionsd will stem from research licensed to companiese or entrepreneurs from initial work done at and or from researcbh by professors at the campuses in Berkeley and "There are billions of dollarws of both public and private research goinh on and yet for every dollar spent in Silicon only 10 cents is invested in East Bay.
Ther e must be an enormou number of great ideas going unfunded or being forced to move to Silicon Vallehy toget funded," he Heidi Roizen, a managing directord of in Palo and a longtime acquaintance of said, "There's a lot of activity in the grassroots stagezs of the market right now and not all of that gets serve d by the larger VC funds. The whole Bay Area continuesz to be a hotbed of startuo andentrepreneurial activity.
" According to Joseph Muscat, a partner and directo of the at in Palo "There are a lot of big funds that have been significantly oversubscribed, and they had been raising smaller That would suggest that therd would be opportunities for new players (likes Claremont Creek) to entet the market." Claremont Creek plans to focus on very early stage investing, after moneu from an entrepreneur's friends and family runs out and whils a company may be refining its productg without a marketing plan or managementg team in place. While the team realizes that the earliedthe investment, the riskier the move, it will rely on the experience to protect itself.
Goldhaber, who most recentlty founded and served as CEO of Oakland Internety marketing companyCybergold Inc. before sellingb it to Inc. for $157 million in said, "It is really about us. Abou t who the partners are inthis "It is about the fact that each of us have startexd companies and taken them public. Each of us have been executived in Fortune 500 companies and each of us have also been ventureecapitalists previously, so we have a very broad view of the whol e arena, the whole ecology from birth to liquidityh and post liquidity public markets and that is an unusuakl breadth of experience," he Goldhaber's working relationship with Steuargt goes back more than 10 Steuart was chief financial officer at Cybergolf and later served as a senior vice presidenr of , after its acquisitionh of MyPoints.
Hawks most recently was a venture partnet at and a general partner withNovus "We are all doing this because we love The end analysis is it's just fun to see the fire of entrepreneurshipl in the eyes of the men and women who come to us with businessd plans," Goldhaber said. The firm will initiallu invest a minimumof $100,000 and may work with a company for thre to nine months before making a more substantiakl investment of between $500,000 and $3 million.
"I think the combinatiohn of thestage we'red investing in and what we are tryintg to do and wherer we are doing it will make a I believe we can make an impact in bringingf entrepreneurship to the East Bay," Goldhaber said.