That was July. Wednesday, Domo will announce that it has raised another batch of money, and is bringing in a new investor. The company has closed a $20 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

IVP, which had invested in Omniture and so has a history with James, is joining an all-star cast of investors including Benchmark Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel; and Hummer Winblad, plus a bunch of personal investments. The round — which is being described as an A-1 round, brings Domo’s total capital raised to date to $63 million.

IVP general partner Todd Chaffee said Domo is an example of a dynamic management team going after a high-growth market. “We know Josh has the experience to build Domo into a disruptive and dominant player in a growing $10 billion market,” he said in a statement. Aside from Omniture, IVP has backed HomeAway, MySQL, Twitter and Zynga.

James wouldn’t tell me the implied valuation, but he did concede that it’s upward of “a couple hundred million.” And if that’s not surprising enough, what’s equally surprising is one possible use for the money: Acquisitions. Well, maybe.

“Let’s just suppose, and this is 100 percent supposition,” he told me over the phone Tuesday, “that we want to buy someone. We’ve thought about it. We’ve had potential targets cross the email threads. It’s not the right time to do that stuff just yet. But it’s nice to know we have the flexibility when the time comes.”

So where’s Domo, the business intelligence software-as-service play he was building? It’s running as a demonstration with a few early customers, he says. And he’ll have more to say about it publicly in about three to four months.

“We have a few thousand people who say they want to see a demo, and we’re working through that list,” James says. “The feedback has been more positive and at a higher rate than I would have thought possible. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do a lot of installations all at once.”

That’s what we call a good problem to have.

Man, have you ever really wondered
Like why are we here? What the meanin’ to all of this?
– OutKast, “Church”

Since Marc and I founded Andreessen Horowitz three years ago, we have raised $2.7 billion. That statement begs a few questions. The two most obvious are:

• Why did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money?
• How did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money?

To get to the answers, it’s useful to go back to the original motivation for starting Andreessen Horowitz.

After raising our first round of funding for Loudcloud in 1999, we went to visit our new venture capital firm and meet their full team. As founding CEO, I remember being quite excited to meet our financial backers and talk about how we could partner to build a great company. That excitement took a sharp downhill turn when one of the top partners said to me, in front of my co-founders, “When are you going to get a real CEO?”

I was completely stunned — the comment knocked the wind out of me. Our largest investor had basically called me a fake CEO in front of my team. I said, “What do you mean?” — hoping he would revise his statement and enable me to save face. Instead he pressed on: “Someone who has designed a large organization, someone who knows great senior executives and brings prebuilt customer relationships, someone who knows what they are doing.”

I could hardly breathe. It was bad enough that he undermined my standing as CEO, but to make matters worse, I knew that at some level he was right. I didn’t have those skills. I had never done those things. And I did not know those people. I was the founding CEO, not a professional CEO. I could almost hear the clock ticking in the background as my time running the company quickly ran out.

Could I learn the job and build my network fast enough, or would I lose the company? That question tortured me for months.

In the years that followed, I remained CEO, for better or worse. I worked incredibly hard to close the gap between what the partner had described and where I was at the start. Thanks to a lot of effort and help from friends and mentors, especially Bill Campbell, the company survived and ultimately became quite successful and valuable.

However, not a day went by when I didn’t think about that interaction. I always wondered how long I had to grow up, and how I could find help to build my skills and make the necessary connections along the way.

Marc and I discussed this often. We wondered aloud why, as founders, we had to prove to our investors beyond a shadow of a doubt that we could run the company, rather than our investors assuming that we would run the company we’d created. This conversation ultimately became the inspiration for Andreessen Horowitz.

Marc and I share a simple belief that became the basis for our new venture capital firm: In general, founding CEOs perform better than professional CEOs over the long term, and a venture capital firm that enables founding CEOs to succeed would help build the best companies and yield superior investment returns.

As we set out to design a venture capital firm that would enable founders to run their own companies, we began by asking: In what ways are professional CEOs superior to founder CEOs?

Professional CEOs bring two core advantages to the table:

• Superior skill set — Being CEO requires vast know-how that is very difficult to gain without extensive experience actually being CEO. Founders with no CEO experience naturally make many critical mistakes during their “on the job training” period. Excellent professional CEOs already have those skills.
• Superior network — Great professional CEOs know lots of outstanding executives and employees. They also know key reporters and analysts, important potential customers and top industry players. Founders tend not to have enough industry experience to know all these people, and need to build their networks almost from scratch.

Next, we asked: How might a venture capital firm help close those gaps?

Addressing the skill-set issue proved to be difficult because, sadly, the only way to learn how to be a CEO is to be a CEO. Sure, we might try to teach some skills, but I know from experience that learning to be a CEO through classroom training would be like learning to be an NFL quarterback through classroom training. Even if Peyton Manning and Tom Brady were your instructors, with no experience, you’d get killed the moment you took the field.

We decided that while we would not be able to give a founder CEO all the skills she needed, we would be able to provide the kind of mentorship that would accelerate the learning process. As a result, our first requirement for General Partners is to be an effective mentor for a founder striving to be a CEO. This is why so many of our General Partners are former founders or CEOs or both, and they are all highly focused on helping founders become outstanding CEOs.

Of course, not all founders want to be CEO — there are companies for which the right thing is to bring in a professional CEO. For those companies, we focus on helping the founders identify the right CEO, and then helping the CEO successfully integrate into the company and partner with the founders to retain their unique strengths.

Next, we went after the network.

Existing venture capitalists with whom we had worked had important industry relationships, but we found them to be lacking in the following ways:

• Siloed — As an entrepreneur, you can often count on the General Partner on your board to introduce you to customers or executives, but you can’t count on the venture capital firm itself. Each General Partner has his own distinct network, and it’s not really feasible or practical to access the other partners’ networks because those partners prioritize their own companies, and in practice you will never see them — they are not available to help you. So, there is no firm-wide network you can plug into.
• Hard to access — As CEO, it’s always a bit weird to say to your VC, “Please introduce me to some potential customers.” First, it seems like an inconvenience — VCs are clearly busy people, with many other things to do. Second, there isn’t any easy process to execute that introduction. Where will this introduction take place? Will the VC set up the meeting? Will you have to fly out to see the prospect? Will the VC come with you? Will the prospect be qualified well enough to do that? If not, then should you even ask? To make matters worse, the need to meet customers is not a one-time event. How do you ask your VC the second, third and tenth times? And at what point does your VC start to judge you as incapable of reaching customers (or partners, distributors, suppliers, investors or acquirers) on your own?
• Incomplete — Finally, VC networks tend to be incomplete. A certain General Partner might know a certain type of customer, like telecom carriers; but not others, like pharmaceutical companies or government agencies. They may know customers, but not have deep relationships with key reporters. They may know key reporters, but not know executives you would want to hire. They might know executives, but not engineers. As founding CEO, one tends to be busy. If you spend time trying to tap a network and come up empty, you probably won’t bother trying again.

To address these issues, we designed Andreessen Horowitz’s network to be firm-wide, dead simple to access, and comprehensive — supported by operating partners who work full-time to develop and manage each branch of the network.

This approach has already lead to some stunning results:

• In 2011, we hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at our office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.
• We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio.
• We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011, and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies.
• We’ve had nearly 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies.

Through these practices, we’ve been able to help founders develop critical CEO skills and wield networks as broad and powerful as the best professional CEOs. And that is why we have become a popular firm among founders.

Our reputation with founders has then enabled us to invest in great entrepreneurs building the great new technology companies. Interestingly, the demand from entrepreneurs has come in all stages and sizes. From seed-stage entrepreneurs like JR Rivers at Cumulus Networks, to entrepreneurs with fast-growing enterprises like Brian Chesky at Airbnb, great founders everywhere want to be the best CEO that they can be, and work with us to help them do that.

And that’s both how and why we raised $2.7 billion. We are uniquely positioned to help the greatest technology entrepreneurs in the world build the best technology companies in the world, and that’s just what we’re going to do.

It’s better when it’s a charismatic one like Mike Maples and even more fun when there is an audience. Well, at last week’s Founder Showcase, I had the chance to chat on stage with up-and-coming investor Mike Maples, Jr.

Maples, for those who don’t know, is partnered with Roger McNamee in pushing a new strategy about where the markets are headed.

On stage at the Founders Showcase, we talked about his investment philosophy and batted about lots of surfing metaphors.

To summarize, Maples thinks the social networking wave has already crested and he’s moving on to catch the next wave in a less crowded part of the beach.

But, I’m just as clueless about surfing as I am about investing. So I recommend you check out the video of our interview to get the full sense of things.

To really appreciate that video, I recommend also checking out the interview that preceded my chat with Maples. First of all, it explains some of the inside references Maples and I make. It also explains why I hid the microphone from Founder Showcase chief Adeo Ressi. (You can have it back now, Adeo.)

Plus, it’s a darn good chat between the New York Times’ Evelyn Rusli and venture capitalist Mark Suster.

Since participating in a $112 million funding of Web darling Airbnb Inc. in July that valued the online room-rental company at more than $1 billion, Mr. Andreessen said his venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has “taken a step back.”

With some deals for private companies “definitely on the expensive side” amid a choppy stock market and concerns over a European debt crisis, Mr. Andreessen said he is looking to invest in fast-growing tech start-ups that aren’t as well known and where “pricing is still under control.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Mu Sigma helps some of the world’s biggest corporations make sense of the vast amounts of data being produced online. The company, which is headquartered in Chicago with most of its analysts in Bangalore, employs about 1,500 people, up from about 1,200 in June.

The latest funding round was led by General Atlantic, with Sequoia Capital, a current investor, raising its stake. Sequoia had invested $25 million in Mu Sigma in June. The valuation set by the latest fundraising wasn’t disclosed.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Aneel Bhusri

Allen is said to have advised Workday on its recent funding round, which closed in October. As exclusively reported by AllThingsD at the time, Workday raised $85 million at an implied valuation of $2 billion. The Series F was led by T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. Bloomberg also says that Michael Dell’s personal investment vehicle, MSD ventures, was in on that funding round, which grew to $100 million since the closing.

Previous investors include Dave Duffield and Greylock Partners, who are in for $90 million across four rounds; and New Enterprise Associates, which joined a $75 million Series E round in 2009.

Apparently encouraged by the successful IPO of Jive Software earlier this month, and the performance of its shares, which are up nicely since the debut, Workday now appears poised go through with the IPO that CEO Aneel Bhusri (pictured) hinted in October would take place during the second half of 2012.

And there’s no question that Workday is in a hot space. SAP’s $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors last month, plus Salesforce.com’s deal for Rypple last week, attest to the urgency with which larger companies want to be in the HR software business.

Think about it: Every company — of any size — needs to keep track of its people, their salaries, performance-review information and so on. And why bother with software that runs on the local machines, when the cloud is so much more efficient?

Bhusri was a senior executive and co-chairman of PeopleSoft’s board, and was on hand for that company’s hostile takeover by Oracle. After losing that battle, he and co-founder Dave Duffield concluded that the next battlefield for enterprise software would be in the cloud.

Workday’s average customer has between 10,000 and 15,000 employees. Among its 250-odd customers, the biggest is Flextronics, the huge electronics manufacturing company, which has 200,000 employees. Others include Time Warner, Thomson Reuters, Chiquita Brands and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Salesforce.com. Workday has some two million employees in its system.

And while there’s no S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to peruse yet, the IPO watch on Workday officially begins now.

To all those entrepreneurs, I offer my advice: Don’t do it. Shotgun weddings don’t work in romance, and they don’t work in venture capital, either.

Solutions that offer the best valuations, without the close-knit partnerships required to build successful long-term businesses, are never going to be sustainable solutions.

In my experience, a lack of shared understanding between the parties upfront can lead to bigger problems down the line.

I recently read a statement from Founders Fund boldly declaring that VCs impose “value-destroying distractions” with the “intrusion of adult supervision.” As I reflected on this thought, I began to wonder — if any entrepreneur shares these feelings, why then would he ever enter into an arrangement with a venture firm?

The fact is, a VC’s value can vary widely. Just like you’d be better off not going under the knife of a neurosurgeon who graduated med school with a C- average, you’d be wise not to choose a sub-par venture investor who doesn’t share your values. Take the time to find the right one.

If both enterprise and investor don’t understand each other upfront, there is going to be a lot of dissatisfaction about where — and how — the relationship ends. When you look at the start-up and venture capital sectors separately, it seems they both understand this principle. For each, building relationships is a prerequisite to building up businesses.

In the start-up world, founders take a long-term approach when searching for co-founders. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford on Larry’s first day of class before founding Google; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were friends in high school and spent every day together before founding Apple.

Similarly, while you probably won’t find a VC partner after a single meeting, there are a few things to keep in mind that can increase your chances of success over the long run.

First and foremost, do your homework. It’s shocking to me how few entrepreneurs actually make due diligence calls to other portfolio CEOs. At Foundation Capital, we provide contacts for every company we have ever funded. Use those kinds of resources. Ask for references beyond what is on the Web site. Don’t expect glowing reviews from every single reference, but weigh the feedback carefully and decide if you like what you hear overall.

Second, dig deeply into how the firm works with founders on a day-to-day basis. Consider how much — and in what capacity — partners participate in their portfolios. Think about the proposed value-add, and if it will complement the existing capabilities of your executive team. Decide if the VC firm’s approach fits your style.

Third, don’t get seduced by the name of the firm. This isn’t choosing a college or buying a car. Set the prestige factor aside. Frankly, a firm’s name counts for little when it comes to predicting the success of your venture. It’s really about the individual partner who will be working with you. Decide if you want to work with that particular person.

Finally, ask the tough questions:

• How will this investor help out during difficult times?
• Will he or she understand the process and need for more funds if or when that time comes?
• Is the investor’s approach to the venture truly collaborative — one in which both parties are dependent on each other to succeed?
• Are your prospective investors passive-aggressive, or do they come out and tell you what they’re thinking?

Strong entrepreneur/VC partnerships are based on mutual respect and a true drive to succeed. You don’t want an investor who simply hands you a check and pushes you out the door with nothing more than an expectation of flawless execution — and, of course, a significant return on that investment.

At the end of the day, accepting an investment is like committing to a relationship — there will be ups and downs and disappointments, and even a few failures along the way. But the best partnerships — like the strongest relationships — are lasting ones. Granted, we’re talking about a decade and not a lifetime, but it is still critical to understand the people you are bringing into your business and whether you can work with them over the long haul — through thick and thin.

Understanding a prospective partner takes time. So do yourself a favor: Play it smart. Take your time. Do your homework.

Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, where he primarily focuses on consumer Internet companies. A former entrepreneur, Charles was a member of the founding executive team at TellMe Networks and on the founding team of @Home, and has a background in general management, sales, marketing, product management and business development.

In a positively Shermanesque blog post titled “A Clarification With Respect to Yahoo,” Marc Andreessen wrote that neither he nor partner Jeff Jordan would become an operating exec, including CEO, acting CEO, chairman or executive chairman at the troubled Internet giant.

Of course, if the VC firm wins the partial investment deal against other bidders, Andreessen will absolutely be a key player in the remaking of the company. Already, he and Jordan have met with numerous Yahoo execs as they have assessed the company.

The bid by Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz is about $16.50 a share for slightly less than 20 percent of the company. The group, which is competing with another bid by TPG Capital, has a lot of other plans around reviving Yahoo and dealing with its myriad of issues.

The reason for the pronouncement, sources said (and I am just boldly declaring myself) is because the firm is now in the middle of raising a mega-funding round of up to $1.5 billion and limited partners are worried about a lack of focus on its many other investments.

So Marc and Jeff are fully committed to moolah-making at the VC firm. Please pay no attention to the whole Yahoo mishegas over in that corner there!

Here’s the entire post (full disclosure — I got the Jordan part right, but surmised that Andreessen could become chairman if his group won the bid):

A Clarification With Respect to Yahoo

From Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz:

Over the last several weeks, there have been erroneous reports in the press that my partner Jeff Jordan and/or I might become an operating executive of Yahoo in some capacity.

To be crystal clear, neither Jeff, nor I, nor any of our partners at Andreessen Horowitz, are in the running for, or would accept, any operating role at Yahoo, including CEO, acting CEO, chairman, or executive chairman.

Jeff and I have high regard for Yahoo, but we are fully committed to our day jobs as general partners at Andreessen Horowitz and board members of our portfolio companies.

The Los Angeles-based company is aiming to become the eHarmony of e-commerce, meaning that it is trying to help e-commerce providers match the right shopping experience to the right shopper, in real time.

The reason SteelHouse is optimistic is that its president and CEO, Mark Douglas, was the VP of technology at eHarmony for almost four years.

Investors in the latest round include Greycroft Partners, Rincon Venture Partners and Lighthouse Venture Group. The company’s original investors are Baroda Ventures and Silicon Valley angel Ron Conway. The company had previously raised $1.55 million in a first round.

SteelHouse is building a behavioral platform that allows e-commerce companies to present different offers to shoppers, based on the personality and behavior of the person visiting. Some of its clients include Comedy Central, Mrs. Fields, SkyMall, eCampus.com, Evite and Cooking.com.

The company says it will use the capital to continue investing in its technology.

In a shift away from the frenzy surrounding consumer-focused companies such as social-games maker Zynga Inc., venture capitalists are pouring more money into business-to-business start-ups.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

A day after teaming up with the storage concern NetApp, Cloudera announced today that it has landed a $40 million series D round of venture capital funding from Ignition Partners, in a round led by its partner, Frank Artale. Previous investors include Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel. Cloudera says it will use the funds to expand its marketing and sales operations. By my count, the round brings Cloudera’s total capital raised so far to $76 million.

Cloudera has been on a roll — it’s the Hadoop outfit that many companies are turning to when they decide to tackle their big-data problems. Among its customers are eBay, AOL, Facebook and Groupon. While Hadoop itself is free for anyone to download and install from the Apache Software Foundation, Cloudera provides support and training, and an enterprise-ready version of Hadoop that has been tweaked for easier deployment in big companies.

And that’s not all the new money sloshing around the world of Hadoop, the open source project with the cute cartoon elephant as its mascot. (Hence the money-origami elephant pictured above.)

Accel Partners, which led Cloudera’s last round, is launching a $100 million “Big Data Fund,” with Cloudera as a partner. The point, Accel partner Ping Li told me, is to fund companies working in what he calls the “big data stack,” whether that’s in infrastructure like storage or security or management, or building applications that run on Hadoop. And the opportunities for that are multiplying, he told me.

“We’re seeing an undercurrent of picks-and-shovels kind of innovation around solving big data problems,” Li told me in an email. The volume of data is exploding at such a rate that it’s breaking traditional data-management technology like relational databases. It’s a problem that touches practically every industry. The fund will be overseen by several Accel partners based in the U.S., Europe, China and India.

The second round of funding was led by Battery Ventures. The company previously raised money from the fbFund, a $10 million seed fund and joint venture run by Facebook, Founders Fund and Accel Partners.

Nisan Gabbay, founder and CEO of Sociable Labs, said Sociable is exploring what social commerce means, and from what he’s determined so far, he doesn’t believe it means people shopping on Facebook.

Rather, he thinks the most value lies in connecting to friends on actual retail sites to share recommendations.

For instance, it would be helpful if people could see which of their friends are registered to run in a 5K when signing up for the race, or if anyone they know has stayed in a particular hotel in Miami before using a travel site to book a room.

Sociable’s beta customers include Active.com, Chegg.com, Backcountry.com, Rue La La, HauteLook and Sole Society.

“Facebook is focused around entertainment, but it’s not about discovery or an immersive experience,” Gabbay said. “I find that the right experience is to offer the feature set where they already shop online, and by adding social features and the graph into that experience.”

Currently, most social commerce experiences are tied to the “like” button.

You can like a product and have it show up in your news feed on Facebook. But that information is not useful to your friends until they are shopping for something similar, at which point it may not be easy to find.

“Not everything can happen on Facebook,” Gabbay said. “Your friends don’t want to see what you are buying until they are making a decision.”

Privacy protections will obviously be key with this sort of integration and long-term cataloging of consumer purchases. But after a quick look at how Sociable is integrated on Active.com, a Web site dedicated to sports events, it doesn’t feel invasive. It’s information that friends would normally share on Facebook, but which would instantly get lost in the stream of news.

Sociable Labs will charge its lowest-paying customer $50,000 a year for services and licenses. The company currently has 25 employees, and plans to use the funding to deploy the software more broadly and market it, now that it is coming out of beta today.

Aneel Bhusri

Today, Workday will announce that it has just raised $85 million in new financing, bringing its total amount of capital raised to $250 million. Sources familiar with the terms of the deal tell me that the investments value Workday at $2 billion.

The funding round isn’t coming from traditional venture capital players, but from institutional investors who will want to be shareholders of Workday when it goes public in the second half of next year. The round, which is being described as a Series F, includes T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.

I’m also told, by sources familiar with the deal, that William Danoff, the manager of Fidelity’s $80 billion Contrafund, the mutual fund giant’s largest stock-based fund, has participated in this funding round. This would be the Contrafund’s third recent investment in a privately held Internet company, the other two being Facebook and Zynga. In fact, it’s the same group of funds that took part in a huge round with social gaming force Zynga in February; in Groupon in January; and which earlier this year bought nearly three million shares of Facebook for $25 each.

Previous investors include Dave Duffield and Greylock Partners, who are in for $90 million across four rounds; and New Enterprise Associates, which joined a $75 million Series E round in 2009.

Why raise from institutionals and not VCs? “Because Workday is going to go public, and probably before the end of next year,” Bhusri told me. “Rather than do a round that adds an overhang to the existing capital structure, this is a group of investors who will likely buy more in the IPO,” he said. “In some ways, it’s an early debut of an IPO.”

And while there’s no S-1 filing from Workday to peruse just yet, Bhusri told me that Workday is growing plenty fast. Having disclosed $160 million in billings in 2010, Workday, he says, is on track to do twice that — or about $320 million in 2011 — and that it’s close to breaking even. So this round of capital is insurance. With the world economy so out of joint, if no logical window for an IPO emerges in 2012 — a reasonable worry — then Workday won’t be forced, should the need arise, to raise more capital in a difficult market.

So what is Workday, exactly? For the answer, you have to turn the clock back to 2004, when the software giant Oracle made its initial hostile bid to take over PeopleSoft. Bhusri was a senior executive and co-chairman of PeopleSoft’s board. After losing the battle to resist Oracle, he and co-founder Dave Duffield decided that the next battle for enterprise software would be in the cloud. Workday was born within months of their departure from PeopleSoft.

The plan, Bhusri says, was to create the next generation of PeopleSoft’s software, or the next generation of SAP’s Human Resources and Enterprise Resource planning software — essentially, software that businesses need to run day to day. But rather than deliver it in the traditional manner — run it on machines at the customer’s location — it’s all delivered via the cloud. “It’s as if you were going to start over with a clean sheet of paper and design this kind of software all over again,” Bhusri says.

And Workday’s customers aren’t exactly small players. Its average customer has between 10,000 and 15,000 employees. Among its 250-odd customers, the biggest is Flextronics, the huge electronics manufacturing company, which has 200,000 employees. Other customers include Time Warner, Thomson Reuters, Chiquita Brands, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Salesforce.com. There are some two million employees on the system. All that after only four years of actively selling the product.

And what Workday sells is a system that tends not to get replaced very often in large companies — perhaps once a decade. That gives the company an advantage when it asks for contract commitments that last three years; most cloud companies offer their services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Workday’s targets are Bhusri’s old customers who bought PeopleSoft software to run their businesses one product generation back, and also those who run SAP software. So when a new customer signs on it’s usually one or the other being displaced. Other rivals include Lawson, Infor and, occasionally, the payroll giant ADP.

The typical new customer, Bhusri said, is using one of those other platforms and is ready to upgrade. “To upgrade to the newest version, they get a price quote that’s so high they start looking for a better way,” he says. “That’s when they find us.”

And Workday isn’t sitting still with HR software. Its next battle will be in financial planning software that companies rely on to handle money — accounting, expenses, procurement. Workday already has 50 customers running the financial stuff. Once they try Workday’s HR, they like what they see, making for an easy upsell. Others just swap out both the HR and financial parts in one go, Bhusri said. And the competitive targets are the same as well: Oracle and SAP. One wonders if they aren’t just a little worried.

In case you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick rundown of what’s expected today:

Lytro, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, is an outgrowth of his Stanford University PhD research into what is called “light field photography.”

Without getting too technical, a light field camera captures light all throughout the scene in front of the lens, as opposed to the cameras consumers are used to, which bring a particular thing into focus first.

The result is an image that can be focused after it is taken, and, Lytro claims, a camera that is faster from power-up to capture, and has exceptional performance in low light, even without a flash.

Lytro claims it has spent the last five years and nearly $50 million from several of Silicon Valley’s heaviest-weight VC firms working to pack all that technology into a camera small enough to compete with the myriad point-and-shoots currently available.

Join us as we see for the first time if Lytro has gotten the picture.

View the slideshow

Liveblog:

11:17 am: They’ve let us into the event. No action yet, just a bunch of tech reporters tweeting away.

11:32 am: We’re underway. CEO and founder of Lytro Ren Ng is coming up now.

11:33 am: Lytro grew out of Ng’s Stanford PhD work in light field imaging.

11:33 am: Ng starts with some stats on digital cameras.

He says that at the end of the day, both film and regular digital cameras record the same data — a flat image.

11:34 am: “The light field is all the light traveling in all directions at every point in space,” says Ng.

11:35 am: Still on the tech, Ng says his focus at Stanford was on miniaturizing the camera technology. At the time, the only light field cameras were huge arrays of cameras in labs.

11:37 am: We’re on the history of his research now — Ng says the first camera he built was a one-off medium format camera.

11:39 am: The important takeaway here is that this camera is as much about the computer science behind it as it is about the optics and the hardware.

11:41 am: Ng moves on to the features of this technology for the user.

11:42 am: 1. Shoot first, focus after. 2. Ability for third parties to interact with the picture after it is put online.

11:43 am: Ng shows what appears to be a screenshot of his Facebook page, with a Lytro interactive image embedded.

11:44 am: Ng says that all Lytro images can also be viewed in an “immersive 3-D.”

11:45 am: Now we get to see the camera. It’s called the “Lytro.”

11:45 am: 8x optical zoom, with an f 2.0 aperture.

11:47 am: It’s an 11 “megaray” camera — which means it captures 11 million rays of light, says Ng.

11:49 am: It’s a metal rectangular tube, maybe 4 inches long. The lens is at one end and the small touch screen at the other. It’s unlike any camera design I’ve ever seen.

11:50 am: Ng says another benefit of the camera is how fast it turns on.

11:51 am: The camera doesn’t need to focus before it shoots, so time from activation to capture seems pretty instant.

11:52 am: Now he’s going to take a picture of the room — we’re being posed, no joke.

11:52 am: They will come in 3 colors — redish, blueish and grayish.

11:53 am: Ng is plugging in the camera, showcasing the software that comes with it. The camera uses micro USB.

11:54 am: Liveblogging solo here, but there are a few pictures I’m putting up on twitter (@withdrake).

11:55 am: Software seems to be pretty snappy. All the pictures are square format.

11:56 am: Ng says you can refocus the image on the camera, in the computer software, or on the web, wherever you embed the image.

He says you can post to Facebook from inside the Lytro computer software.

11:58 am: Ng just posted something to Facebook from the software. Facebook friends can zoom and refocus the image right in Facebook.

11:59 am: The camera will come in 8GB and 16GB versions.

11:59 am: 8GB version can capture 350 light field images.

12:00 pm: Ng says that the camera will ship in early 2012.

12:01 pm: Now he’s dancing around price.

12:02 pm: It will be $399 for the 8GB version.

We’re wrapped up. Moving on to the demo station. … See gallery of pictures above.

Fast forward to October, and Slootman is not only CEO of a new company, ServiceNow, but is getting his old band from Data Domain — which he sold to EMC in 2009 after a takeover battle with NetApp — back together.

So what is ServiceNow? It was started in 2003 by Fred Luddy, the former CTO of help-desk management outfits Peregrine Systems and Remedy, one of which is now part of Hewlett-Packard, the other part of BMC. The ServiceNow idea is basically to compete with HP and BMC by replacing those old on-premise help desk management applications with a cloud-based software-as-a-service offering.

ServiceNow has grown like crazy, doubling its sales every year for eight years in a row — it now has 500 employees and boasts $130 million in recurring revenue. Slootman joined as CEO in April. And now he’s hired a bunch of his old buddies from Data Domain to join him.

Having earlier in the week tapped Arne Josefsberg — a 25-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently general manager of the Windows Azure service — as its chief technology officer, ServiceNow has just hired a batch of Data Domain guys away from EMC:

• Michael Scarpelli, the former CFO of Data Domain will now be ServiceNow’s CFO.
• Dan McGee, the onetime senior vice president of engineering, will be — you guessed it — senior vice president of engineering.
• David Schneider will be senior vice president of worldwide sales and service, taking the same title he held at Data Domain.

Though people know Slootman primarily for his work in the storage business at Data Domain — which he ultimately sold to EMC for $2.1 billion — he calls his journey into that line of business a “diversion.” Before Data Domain, he was a senior executive at Borland Software. “Before I was a storage guy, I was an applications guy. I worked in the software layer, so this is right in my wheelhouse,” he told me. “People say the cloud is hot, but what’s even hotter is cloud management, because people need software to manage it, and we’re right smack in the middle of that set of issues.”

So what’s the plan for ServiceNow? To kick things up a notch, naturally. “We’re getting the company IPO-ready,” Slootman says. And while it hasn’t hired any bankers yet, it’s not for nothing that Slootman just brought in a team of trusted execs who were along for the ride with Data Domain’s 2007 IPO and subsequent acquisition.

If and when it happens, a ServiceNow IPO will be rather different from so many others in recent history. ServiceNow is already cash-flow positive: It has $70 million in cash on the balance sheet, Slootman says, and started with practically no venture capital. It took a small $2.5 million round from JMI Equity in 2005; in 2009, Sequoia Capital invested by buying out some employees’ shares, and Sequoia’s Doug Leone joined the board of directors.

So what happened at Greylock? “I found out that I don’t have the temperament or disposition or DNA set to be a venture capitalist,” Slootman told me. “A lot of people told me I wouldn’t last, and they knew me better than I knew myself. If you’re going to fail at something, it’s best to fail fast and move on to the next thing.”

Ten months after announcing its first round of capital, Shopify has secured $15 million to continue to fuel its growth.

And it might just need that extra padding, since eBay announced — at a big, splashy event last week — that it had entered the same space.

Shopify creates tools and templates to power online storefronts that sell merchandise ranging from stuffed Angry Birds to the latest in protective cases for the iPad.

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures and Georgian Partners. The first round for $7 million was closed in December.

Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s CEO and co-founder, told me that over the past year the company managed to blow through its two-year plan in six months. Shopify has grown from 10,000 storefronts to 16,000 in 80 countries and has more than doubled its staff to 80; it expects to have 130 employees in the next year.

Lütke declined to provide any specific figures, but back in December he said Shopify was processing more than $100 million in revenues from all of the sites combined.

Along with supporting the growth, Lütke said, some of the capital will go toward unspecified acquisitions.

One acquisition is already making a big contribution: Shopify purchased a company that supported e-commerce on an iPhone application, and already 5 percent of sales on all of the sites it supports come from Android, iOS and mobile Web (not including tablets, because Lütke doesn’t believe those are mobile devices).

The funding will also go toward the Shopify Fund, a $1 million kitty that will finance developers to create e-commerce widgets that plug in to Shopify’s architecture. So far, a number of plugins have been developed, starting with QuickBooks, Mail Chimp and Hubspot.

Shopify was founded in 2006 as an online storefront selling snowboards and other winter apparel. That’s when Lütke figured out how difficult it was to start an online store — he decided to shut down the storefront and focus on reselling the software it had built for Shopify’s own use.

Other merchants Shopify works with include Tesla Motors, Amnesty International and the Foo Fighters.

Last week, eBay unveiled X.commerce, which is designed to help any size retailer — from family-owned stores to Toys “R” Us — stay current as shopping goes online and mobile. The platform has been slowly coming together over the past year as eBay has made several acquisitions, including the purchase of Magento, one of Shopify’s main competitors.

It is eBay’s goal to provide a package of e-commerce services to retailers for free, and use it as a lead-generation tool for its more high-margin services, like PayPal and GSI Commerce.

Shopify charges a flat monthly fee depending on the size of the retailer, and also charges developers a percentage of each application sold on its platform, just like eBay.

In closing the fund, the Menlo Park, Calif., firm is bucking two prevailing trends in the venture-capital industry, including an anemic fund-raising environment that has winnowed the number of venture firms that can raise large pools of capital.

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Previously on AllThingsD: What Bad Economy? Three Big Silicon Valley VCs Poised to Haul in $2B in New Fund Raising.

Why walk away from a company that by all accounts is humming on all cylinders, with stock that has, since its 2004 IPO, zoomed from $13 a share to $120?

“I wanted to see if I could build my own company” was the reason he gave Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Having been on the ground floor in an engineering capacity at two companies over 16 years — the first was E.piphany — he wanted to build something of his own. “I’m a builder of things,” he says.

Today he’s taking the first step in that direction: Weissman has joined Benchmark Capital as its Entrepreneur in Residence.

Benchmark makes sense for Weissman, given its investments in enterprise and data-focused start-ups like Domo; Hortonworks, the former Yahoo team devoted to Hadoop; and Engine Yard.

That’s a pretty good indication of the kind of company he’d like to get involved with by way of Benchmark. Weissman describes himself as a “data guy,” and he was deeply involved in building out the architecture of Salesforce.com. As such, he’s a big believer in the Salesforce state religion of a “multitenant, shared computers, shared everything” view of the cloud, and the way data — and services around it — gets delivered.

There are obviously lots of things happening around ways to handle data and databases.

“There’s lots of new ways of doing things — Hadoop and NoSQL and things like that. Basically, there’s a lot of new companies and young developers who, because of the scale of data they’re working with, the relational database just wasn’t cutting it,” he says. “And while I love the relational database, I’m really intrigued by some of the new technologies. Many aren’t ready for prime time, but a lot of enterprises are interested in them, just the same.”

Krishna Yeshwant, a Google Ventures partner, and Geoff Duyk, a TPG partner, have also joined DNAnexus’s board of directors.

Andreas Sundquist, the CEO of DNAnexus, told me that one of the big advantages of having an investment from Google is access to its computing infrastructure and some of the 20 percent time from Google employees.

Google, he said, will collaborate with DNAnexus to provide access to a huge archive of publicly available DNA information. The archive will take over where the federal government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is leaving off, after being shut down because of budget cuts.

DNAnexus and Google have teamed up to take over that database and will continue to provide access — for free — to medical researchers. It will now live in Google’s cloud, and researchers will now have a new, easy-to-use interface for accessing it. It represents the largest single dataset ever put on Google’s infrastructure by a third party.

Don’t mourn the government effort. DNA databases are probably better handled by the private sector, Sundquist says, mainly because sequencing a genome, which used to require NASA-sized multibillion-dollar budgets that only big governments can sustain, is no longer so complicated or expensive.

“The reason we started the company is that we started to see that DNA sequencing was getting about 10 time cheaper every 18 months,” he told me. “Ten years ago it cost about $3 billion to sequence a human genome. Now you can do it for about $4,000. It’s like Moore’s Law on crack. In a few years it will be less than $1,000.”

That kind of cost reduction means there’s likely going to be an explosion in the amount of DNA information collected, the kind of surge that Google is uniquely capable of scaling up to manage. “We’re moving from a world where practically no one has their DNA sequences to a world where nearly everyone does, and it just becomes a part of your medical record,” Sundquist says. “The question is, how do you manage all that. It’s one of the biggest and most complex sets of data in the world.”

Answer: The cloud. Think of DNAnexus as sort of a Salesforce.com for people who need access to DNA information. The data will live in the cloud, and researchers will have access to it through a software-as-service model. “DNAnexus is really a DNA data management and analysis platform in the cloud,” Sundquist said. “We’re trying to build database technologies that unlock the possibilities of DNA-based medicine in the cloud.”

Who would pay for it? Anyone who needs DNA sequencing work done: Medical researchers, drug companies, medical doctors. DNAnexus will do the heavy lifting associated with getting the sequencing done. Beyond that, it will manage the ever-growing trove of DNA data and provide all the computing tools that those customers need in the course of doing their work, via a SaaS platform. It already has customers in academia, at places like Stanford University and Harvard University; at pharma companies; and even practicing medical pros in their day-to-day practices, using DNA information to improve their health care and diagnosis problems.

It’s a far cry from the $30 million round that Coupons.com announced on Monday, which followed a $200 million round in June.

But both companies are following the same premise that offline activities, like couponing, are moving online.

In particular, CouponTrade is targeting the secondary market, where consumers can go to trade both daily deal vouchers from providers, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, and gift cards from retailers, such as Macy’s, Walmart and Old Navy, so they don’t go to waste. So far, it lists inventory for 15 U.S. markets.

The secondary market is already fairly competitive, and in general, they are a bit rogue. They are not working with the major deal providers to prevent fraud, and instead rely on cash-back guarantees, which are often negotiated through payment providers, like PayPal, if a voucher ends up being used or not legitimate.

Others in the space include DealsGoRound, CoupRecoup, CityPockets and Lifesta. Since the company deals in selling unwanted gift cards as well, it is also competing against fairly established players such as PlasticJungle.

CouponTrade said investors include Jeff Cantalupo of Listen, a consulting firm in Chicago, and the Bousis family, who owns and operates the Chicago grocery chain, Cermak Fresh Market.

The model is known as “collaborative consumption,” under which a company gathers people who want to share or rent out their property or provide services to others online, with the company taking a cut of any transaction fee.

Since 2008, local start-ups have sprung up to allow people to share goods like cars or baby clothes, or services like putting together Ikea furniture or picking up groceries.

There are no figures on the number of companies based around the idea. But in just three years, a handful of collaborative-consumption companies have snagged lofty valuations and triggered a rush of venture capital into the concept.

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ClearSlide, a start-up headed up by Al Lieb, the co-founder of Evite, and Jim Benton, the co-founder VP of Sales at AdBrite, aims to make certain kinds of sales calls more low-impact for all involved. It just attracted a nice $11 million series A investment led by Greylock Partners. Prior investor Felicis Ventures is also in on the round.

Nothing in sales is more important that using the customer’s time wisely while also making a good first impression. Spend too long fumbling with a PowerPoint deck attached in an email or struggling to get a video conference working just right, and you’ve lost the prospect until you can get their attention again, which isn’t likely.

ClearSlide is a cloud-based service that makes presentation decks as easy to call up as a Web site. You have a dedicated, personalized URL. No attachments to send, no applications to install. Just give your customer a Web address and show off your presentation. The service supports graphics and video. The point is to improve your first impression and raise the odds of closing a deal. Customers who are using it include Expedia, Rackspace and LivingSocial.

The service is being aimed very specifically at sales teams, and is meant to work as well whether in person, over the phone or via email. Later this fall, new features will include advanced analytics and a version intended specifically for field-sales pros.