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Marketo, a cloud-based marketing software company, debuted on the Nasdaq today under the ticker symbol MKTO at $13 a share and closed at $23.10. Its biggest shareholder is venture capital firm InterWest Partners, whose 33.3 percent stake was worth $302 million pre-sale and is now worth north of $565 million.

Tableau Software started trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DATA. Its shares were priced yesterday at $31 and closed today $50.75. Its biggest shareholder is New Enterprise Associates, which invested a combined $29 million in three rounds between 2004 and 2010 for about 37 percent of the company.

It sold two million shares at $31 in the offering, but still has 17.6 million shares remaining, making its combined gain on Tableau, by my math, worth $955.2 million. On paper that amounts to a one-day gain of 3,194 percent.

Now are you convinced the IPO market is back?

The company announced a short while ago that it had landed a $45 million Series E round of financing led by Janus Capital; the Hillman Company, the investment firm run by Pittsburgh billionaire Henry Hillman; and a third party that was not named. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures also participated, as did a few accounts managed by investment firm T. Rowe Price. Cisco Systems is also an investor.

The round brings Apptio’s total capital raised to $136 million. Its last reported implied valuation was about $600 million. CEO Sunny Gupta wouldn’t tell me the new valuation, but said it was a “considerable improvement.” You can probably do the math yourself.

When I last checked in with Gupta in mid-2011, Apptio, which is based outside Seattle in Bellevue, Wash., had 60 customers, including Facebook, and was managing about $50 billion in tech investments. Now it has 125 customers, including Boeing, Target and Xerox.

Managing IT costs and investments is all Apptio does. Gupta is a former partner exec with Opsware, the company that venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz famously sold to Hewlett-Packard.

He spotted a shift in priorities: CIOs were increasingly focused not on managing technology, but on getting the best bang out of that technology for the dollar, and on keeping costs as low as possible.

Taking a round from institutional investors like Janus is usually a sign that an IPO is coming next. That’s the trajectory that both Facebook and Workday followed. Gupta was a little evasive when I asked him about his IPO plans. There’s nothing imminent, but he didn’t say anything to imply that we shouldn’t be watching for an S-1 filing within the next year or so. I certainly will be.

He’ll be made general partner and managing director at his new gig at DFJ, where he’ll spot new companies for investment potential and advise the firm’s existing portfolio companies.

“Bubba has deep experience with building teams and delivering a product vision, which is important perspective for emerging tech companies,” Andreas Stavropoulos, DFJ managing director, said in a statement. “He has expertise in scaling teams, working through complex partnership negotiations and designing creative experiences.”

Murarka has been with Facebook since 2008, when he joined the company in a more biz-dev-focused role, where he worked on M&A teams and made deals with companies like Microsoft, Netflix and Yahoo.

Later in his time at Facebook, he switched over to product management, where he scaled the Android team up to 50-plus members and helped make the switch from HTML5-based apps over to native Android code. (Basically, it’s the reason your Facebook app is a whole lot faster today.)

Before his time at Facebook, Murarka spent the better part of a decade at Microsoft in a number of different product and tech positions.

Photo courtesy NeuroGaming Conference & Expo

In San Francisco this week, a nonprofit group dedicated to neurogaming — the intersection of brain science and videogame playing — is taking its turn at bat in predicting the next wave of game-changing technology.

The conclusion of the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo’s organizers, unsurprisingly, is that hardware and software that monitor and respond to your body’s electrical and chemical signals will do for games what synchronized sound did for movies. Zack Lynch, CEO of the neurotech industry’s trade group, said the end goal is to create a new, deeper category of games.

Speakers and expositioners all had their own takes on how to reach that goal, including (just to name a few):

• “Mind-reading” headsets with sensors that attach to the ear and forehead
• Smooth, unassuming touchscreens that provide haptic (touch) feedback
• Headphones that convert low-frequency bass sounds — think explosions in an action game — into physical vibrations
• Neurotech integrations with much-discussed emerging wearable technologies like Google Glass and the Oculus Rift
• Experimental sensors that could estimate a player’s emotional state by, for instance, calculating the pH of their sweat.

But questions about the technology’s future abounded throughout the first day of the conference on Wednesday. At the root of all their caveats was a single point of potential failure: those pesky consumers.

“Most consumers are not going to put down their hard-earned money” for experimental one-time-use gadgets, NeuroSky CEO Stanley Yang said. “There has to be lasting value.”

(Yang should know: his company’s first consumer product, the Star Wars Force Trainer, was a $130 ping pong ball-levitating device … batteries not included.)

Photo courtesy NeuroGaming Conference & Expo

“Regardless of how we define it, keep the consumers in mind,” Petrovic said in a venture capital-focused panel about investing in the technology. “Don’t call this ‘the next great neurogaming platform’ or ‘neurogaming device,’ because it won’t sell.”

Those terms, he explained, connote an invasion of one’s body and may seem scary to those unfamiliar with the technology — that is, almost everyone.

A few of the speakers and numerous attendees (Lynch said about 300 registered for the conference online) suggested that the best immediate hope for brain-powered technology is not consumer gaming at all, but rather improvements in the places where it has already succeeded, like clinical therapy for those with limited mobility or as a teaching aide for children with mental disorders like ADHD.

The problem is that most brain-training games are just, well, boring, said Petrovic’s fellow panelist Roger Quy, a general partner at Technology Partners. A popular refrain throughout the day was that without great content, all attempts at neurogaming would be doomed to the same fate as 3-D TV, which fizzled despite enormous hype and investment.

Union Square associate Nate Hennings added that games targeted at a niche of enthusiasts may prove to be a testing ground for the mass viability of neurotech, just as the Tesla Roadster laid the groundwork for cheaper versions of the electric cars.

The dream, though, is that one of the companies represented at the conference will come up with a device that immediately “clicks” with consumers, as the Wiimote did starting back in 2006. To that end, perhaps the most important axiom to measure future brain gaming products’ success came out of Yang’s appearance earlier in the day.

“What happens to the consumer when they open up the box?” Yang asked. “Are they able to plug it in and start having fun instantly? If you can’t deliver that, nobody will jump in.”

Other investors in the round include Kernel Capital and ACT Venture Capital (two Irish VC firms) and Enterprise Ireland, a government-backed development outfit. Cloud software company VMware is also an investor.

FeedHenry specializes in providing a cloud-based platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying mobile applications aimed at large organizations. It also runs what it describes as a “backend as a service” that helps get mobile apps working with existing enterprise applications. Its partners include Rackspace, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard and VMware’s open source platform service, Cloud Foundry.

It’s also a would-be rival to Parse, the mobile development firm that was acquired by Facebook last month.

On Deck announced this morning that Google Ventures has led an additional $17 million investment with participation from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Industry Ventures. Other investors in the round include Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and First Round Capital.

That round comes on top of a $100 million round of debt financing raised last year from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit Corp., and a $15 million Series C led by SAP Ventures in 2011.

So far, On Deck has funded more than $450 million in loans to small businesses. Its borrowers, CEO Noah Breslow told me yesterday, tend to be small: Restaurants, auto body shops, doctor’s and dentist’s offices, construction contractors. Most of them have 200 employees or less. “Our customers tend to be businesses that do a large number of small-ticket transactions,” he said.

Launched in 2006, On Deck has turned out to be sort of a right-time, right-place story. Commercial banks were being tightfisted with loans, even to healthy businesses. But they also tend to be challenged by the time and effort that goes into underwriting a smallish loan that the borrower only needs for a short period of time.

Where banks tend to focus more on the personal credit rating, the On Deck software gathers live digital data from a business’s operations in order to help evaluate the business’s health. The point is to use that data that banks and other potential investors usually don’t see, as a tool to realistically evaluate the risk of making a loan that goes beyond the simple credit rating of the business owner. On Deck then takes it a step further and actually makes the loan.

Breslow said loan volume is up 100 percent over last year, and is on track to grow again by 140 percent this year. By the end of the year, it will have loaned more than $1 billion to small businesses.

As the business grows, On Deck has gathered a lot of data on its applicants. And as so many companies are starting to realize, that aggregated data is yielding some interesting insights. Stay tuned for more on that later this year.

The company said today that it has closed a $17.1 million round of funding from its existing syndicate of investors, plus a new lead investor, Triangle Peak Partners. The round brings its total capital to $116 million raised since 2005.

It’s Vidyo’s fifth round of funding, the last being a $22 million series D led by QuestMark Partners. Networking company Juniper Networks later joined that with an undisclosed amount at the time, though a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests it was between $12 million and $14 million.

Previous investors include Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Saints and Four Rivers Group.

In a statement announcing the funding, Vidyo said it saw billings increase by 68 percent year over year. This included a 77 percent surge in its health care business, and 67 percent growth in large enterprises. Since it’s private, it doesn’t disclose revenue.

Vidyo’s secret sauce is a technology called Adaptive Video Layering. Its hardware sits in a rack in the customer’s data center and constantly watches the underlying network conditions, and then adapts to meet them while video calls are under way. If there’s a lot of interference, the Vidyo system throttles up and down on the picture and sound it’s trying to deliver, based on the condition of the network. But it also adapts dynamically to the device that’s being used: It supports Apple’s iOS devices and also Google Android devices. It’s also the technology behind Google Hangout.

First the funding: Gainsight said today that it has landed $9 million in a round led by Battery Ventures. Roger Lee, a Battery Ventures partner, led the deal.

Founded last year and based in Mountain View, Calif., Gainsight aims to use Big Data analytics to help companies hold on to their customers by making sure they’re getting the most out of the products and services they buy. How much would you pay to get an early warning that a key customer was at risk of bolting to a competitor’s product because they misunderstand something about yours?

Gainsight has a phrase for it: Customer Success Management. I call it churn reduction, but whatever you call it, it’s a pretty powerful idea, and already companies like Jive, Marketo and Eloqua (now a unit of Oracle) have signed on.

It’s an idea that founder Jim Eberlin happened upon at his old company, Host Analytics, which he ran for more than a decade. Which brings us to the new CEO. Gainsight named Nick Mehta (pictured), the former CEO of LiveOffice, a cloud-based email archiving outfit that’s now part of Symantec, as its new CEO. Eberlin will take on a product development role full-time.

The social gaming company announced the appointment of John Doerr — longtime, well-respected Silicon Valley venture capitalist and general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — to Zynga’s board of directors.

“John has been a supporter of Zynga since our early days, and truly understands our core values and mission,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and founder of Zynga, in a statement. “John has worked with some of the most well-known companies in the world at every stage imaginable and his experience helping teams innovate at scale will be a tremendous asset for our leadership team.”

Indeed he has. Doerr is acclaimed as a Valley VC with a solid track record of spotting great companies early on, including Google, Amazon, Netscape and Intuit (though to be sure, in recent years Kleiner and Doerr have come under scrutiny for being late or missing the boat on investing in the next wave of Web giants). Doerr continues to hold board seats at a number of companies, again including Google, as well as Coursera and social magazine startup Flipboard.

Zynga has had a rough year (to put it mildly). After a long string of high-level departures — including execs like former CFO Dave Wehner and former COO John Schappert — it endured a tanking share price and an overall waning sense of Wall Street confidence.

Zynga has rallied in recent months, however, aiming to turn the company around with a number of long-term bets. Zynga just recently launched its first foray into real-money gaming this week in the U.K., with plans to eventually bring the online gambling games to the U.S. and on Facebook and mobile devices. And Zynga has made it abundantly clear that while the majority of its revenue still comes from Facebook-based games, Zynga wants to transition off of reliance upon Facebook’s platform, building a fuller network of social-game-playing customers across its own Zynga network. That includes, of course, a large push into mobile — just like the rest of the industry is doing.

So Doerr’s addition is likely another step in this direction, welcoming aboard a tech industry mainstay with years of experience to offer.

“What’s exciting is this is still day zero — just the beginning — of social gaming’s potential,” Doerr said in a release. “I’m excited about working with Mark and the Zynga team in its next chapters of growth.”

Doerr joins Zynga’s eight other board members, including fellow Kleiner partner Bing Gordon, Jeffrey Katzenberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Stanley J. Meresman, Sunil Paul, Ellen F. Siminoff, Owen Van Natta and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus.

The bottom fell out for young biotechs after the economic downturn. Last year offered no relief, with venture investments in life sciences falling 14 percent from the year earlier to $6.6 billion, according to a MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data from Thomson Reuters.

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These companies, which include consumer and e-commerce businesses, have just enough capital to keep going, for now. But they aren’t growing fast enough to raise more financing or secure a big “exit” through a sale or by going public. In Silicon Valley, they are often called “zombies.”

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That’s making companies with new approaches to security pretty popular among venture capital and private equity investors. Today, one new firm, Endgame Systems, announced that it has landed a $23 million Series B investment led by Paladin Capital. Previous investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and TechOperators. Retired Lt. Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, a managing director at Paladin and a former director of the super-secret National Security Agency, will join Endgame’s board.

Started in 2008, Endgame specializes in what it describes as providing real-time command-and-control capabilities, including analytics, visualization and knowledge discovery, all intended to enhance computer security efforts.

CEO Nathaniel Fick put it this way: “As Internet-connected devices become more pervasive in our lives, the barriers to entry are falling for malicious actors to have impact thanks to commoditized and easy-to-access tools,” he said. “The only way to be successful at cyber operations in a changing environment like that is to ingest massive amounts of data, analyze it in real-time and act.”

Endgame has been expanding in recent months. Fick joined as CEO late last year. Niloofar Howe joined as chief strategy officer. Matt Georgy, a former computer security officer with the Department of Defense and the Air Force before that, joined as CTO. Its chairman is Christopher Darby, the CEO of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The round brings Endgame’s total capital raised to $52 million, following a $29 million investment by Bessemer in 2010.

Domo, based in Lindon American Fork, Utah, and founded by former Omniture CEO Josh James, has in the last two years become famous for the fundraising prowess of its popular CEO.

Sources familiar with the deal’s terms tell AllThingsD that the funding round announced yesterday values Domo at $310 million post money.

Many of these investors are betting primarily on the reputation of James, a likable CEO with a knack for pulling silly stunts, like a contest to guess the company’s name, and a “funeral” to kill the old one, in order to gin up publicity for his company.

Stunts aside, there’s a lot of faith percolating in the Valley for James. AllThingsD reported in 2011 that after leaving Adobe, which had acquired Omniture, he was raising an unusually large seed round of betwen $5 million and $8 million. At the same time, he was also raising what eventually turned out to be a substantial A round that already included Benchmark Capital.

One venture capitalist who asked not to be named said that he convinced his firm to write James a check in this round after having lunch with him recently. “He said to me ‘Oh, by the way I’m raising another round,’” this person said. “I went to my firm and said we should get it in on it, just because it’s Josh.”

With total capital raised now $125 million, the list of investors who’ve bet on James is substantial. GGV Capital was the lead investor, with Greylock and Bezos Expeditions also joining in. Others include Workday co-CEOs Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, who have made personal investments.

From there the list gets even longer: Founders Fund, Mercato Partners, etc. IVP, which joined with a $20 million investment in the extended A-round, also participated, as did Sorenson Capital’s Fraser Bullock. Then there’s Cougar Capital, the VC fund run by Brigham Young University.

Domo also named lots of angels in its press release. There’s Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff; Lars Dargaard, founder and CEO of Successfactors; Marc Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad Ventures; John Pestana, James’ co-founder at Omniture; and John Thompson, the former CEO of Symantec.

For the most part, what they’ve been doing up to now has been social media monitoring, which means listening to what people say on Facebook and Twitter and blogs. What you decide to do based on what you see people saying is pretty much up to you. The big leader in this business is Radian6, which Salesforce.com acquired in 2011, and which forms the backbone of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.

But there’s a new player that has been attracting notice. New York-based Tracx — pronounced “tracks” — has been doing business with companies such as Coca-Cola, Kraft, Samsung and Sears. Today, it will announce that it has landed $3.5 million in venture capital funding in an extension of a Series B round announced last year. Flybridge Capital is leading the round, and early investors Revel Partners and Rutledge Partners also participated. The round brings Tracx’s total capital raised to $9.5 million.

The funds will be used to boost Tracx’s go-to-market efforts around Social Leads, its cloud-based product for tracking and sorting through social media traffic and determining where the business opportunities are.

I talked with CEO Eran Gilad today, and he described what Social Leads — now in a final beta, and set for release in April — does. Basically, once you see someone talking about a product or a service or a brand on social media, it ranks what they say according to where they may be in the buying process. As Gilad puts it, not all actions on social media are alike. “A ‘Like’ on Facebook isn’t as important as a comment on Facebook,” he said.

Potential sales leads get organized based on where they appear to be in that process of making a buying decision. Are they actively doing research, or are they just curious? Or are they commenting on something they’ve already bought?

Once a prospect is identified, you can see all their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, their blogs and so on, for more insight into what they may be thinking or doing and to learn a bit more about them. You can also track conversations by geography, and see what people in one city are saying versus those in another.

From there, sales pros can jump right into action, making a sales pitch or shifting marketing spends based on what may be causing the conversation to happen in the first place. There’s no days-old static report; data is real-time. And data is visible to any person in the company, not just the sales and marketing teams: Someone on the product development side, for example, might see something in the comment streams that yields some critical insight and an important change to a product.

Tracx also talks to other tools that companies use, like Omniture and Google Analytics.

So far, more than 250 companies are using Tracx, and sales at Tracx were up 4x in 2012. The company moved its headquarters from Israel to New York last year, and now employs 50 people.

Instead, Mr. Goldberg tapped Tiger Global Management LLC, an investment firm run by Chase Coleman, an East Coast native and protégé of hedge-fund guru Julian Robertson. In January, Tiger helped lead the $444 million equity portion of SurveyMonkey’s $800 million recapitalization.

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It is hard to imagine that blogging was an innovation for the venture capital industry 10 years ago. But it was. When I entered the venture business, no one would have thought of blogging. After all, how could you give away all your best VC secrets? The venture industry was a black box, and the VCs liked it that way. But that’s not how we saw it.

Truth be told, VentureBlog was the brain child of Andrew Anker. Andrew and I worked together at August Capital in the early 2000s, along with Naval Ravikant. We were all deeply ensconced in the emergence of social media. Andrew approached me and Naval and suggested that we start a VC blog. We discussed the fact that VCs rarely talk about what they do or how they do it. But we could not come up with a good reason why that was. So far as we could tell, there weren’t any real secrets to be had. So we decided to do the unthinkable and actually write about venture capital.

The beauty of being the first bloggers in an industry is that we had a ton to write about. The world was our oyster. We could talk about how best to pitch a VC. We could talk about the technologies that excited us. We could talk about the many conferences we attended. No matter what we wrote about, we were the first VCs to discuss it. And entrepreneurs were clamoring for information about venture capital. Not surprisingly, the value of this conversation we were having with entrepreneurs was not lost on others in the venture industry. And soon, VC blogs started popping up everywhere we turned.

There is little question that this marketplace of ideas was incredibly valuable to entrepreneurs. What was once a black box became a glass box. Venture investors started writing about everything — how they analyzed businesses, how they assessed teams, how they derived valuations. What’s more, VCs started writing not only about the industries in which they were interested, but the very companies they found compelling. It was a brave new world. So much so that it was front-page news for the venture capital industry — the Venture Capital Journal ran a cover story in January of 2005 entitled “My Life as a Blogger” accompanied by my smiling mug. Ridiculous but true.

Now that ten years have past, one has to ask if we VC bloggers have learned anything? Is it all just navel gazing, or is there something to this blogging stuff? The answer is a resounding “yes.” It is often navel gazing, but there’s something to it. Those of us who have spent the last decade or so blogging have gotten a lot of value out of it. In particular, I find that I learn a ton by articulating a particular point of view; I learn even more by engaging in a conversation with entrepreneurs about that particular point of view, and I am able to generate a bunch of attention by actually having a point of view I’m willing to articulate. The combination is powerful and valuable.

I often find myself espousing the belief that entrepreneurs should not bother writing a business plan. Business plans are static tomes that are almost assuredly outdated the second they are completed. So why bother? The one reason is to better understand and articulate your business. Some entrepreneurs find the act of memorializing their businesses in a document to be clarifying. The same is true of blogging. If you really want to fully appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of a point of view, articulate it. I have found that the process of writing about a particular topic can be highly elucidating. Sometimes I get it really right and sometimes I get it really wrong, but I always have a deeper understanding of the topic when I’ve finished writing about it.

The same is true of the conversation that surrounds a well-articulated blog post. At the outset of blogging, all of the conversation took place in the comments section of the blog itself, or in the posts on other related blogs. That conversation now extends into the social web. Commentary on my blog posts appears on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, providing me with an even broader discussion of the relative merits of my points of view. I quickly learn what resonates with my readers and what does not.

Lastly, blogging has become an incredible megaphone. Over the years, millions of people have read what I have to say about venture capital and entrepreneurship. What’s more, blogging has given me the ability to connect directly with my readers. My point of view is not filtered or interpreted by others — I get to speak for myself. In combination with the powerful amplification of social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, VentureBlog has proven a valuable tool for me and my firm to rise above the noise.

I had no idea ten years ago that VentureBlog would prove a catalyst for a whole industry of bloggers. But I am thrilled that it has. Not only has blogging provided us venture capitalists with the opportunity to demystify an enigmatic industry. More importantly, it has given entrepreneurs an invaluable resource to assist them in the incredibly challenging task of company creation. With any luck, VentureBlog and the many VC blogs that followed will continue to flourish for years to come.

David Hornik is a general partner at August Capital, with a focus on information technology companies. He is the author of VentureBlog, the first venture capital blog, and VentureCast, the first venture capital podcast, and is the founder and executive producer of The Lobby conference, an annual gathering of the thought leaders of the digital media ecosystem.

Here’s something new going up on GitHub: Starting today, the latest version of documents from Series Seed, a basic set of documents for companies working with early-stage investments, will be up on GitHub, too.

No, it’s not software code, but the fact is, said Ted Wang, the Fenwick and West lawyer behind Series Seed, it’s pretty much the first place that companies look when they evaluate people they want to hire. “When my clients are evaluating people, they look at GitHub. It’s sort of replacing the resume,” Wang told me.

Wang, of course, is the well-known lawyer who has guided companies like Twitter, Facebook, and has advised companies that were acquired by Google, Zynga, eBay and others from their earliest days.

Wang created the Series Seed documents in 2010, and since then several major venture capital funds, including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, among others, have agreed to use them as the basis of their own seed-stage investments.

As the costs to start a company have come down, it no longer made sense to have more than 100 pages of legal documents to sign and review.

Now the documents themselves will be available on GitHub with all that implies. Discussion about changes and tweaks will move to GitHub and off private email chains and comments on the Series Seed blog. But it also means that other people can take the basic version of Series Seed documents, change the bits they don’t like and upload their own.

“I think that would be great,” Wang told me. “All the time, I hear from people who like the documents, but don’t like a few little things they’d like to see changed. Now they can create their own.”

(Update: I made some minor changes above in the description of companies advised by Wang.)

At the point where I wrapped up part one of our conversation from late last year, Levine had been talking about opportunities he saw around data storage in the enterprise. As he sees it, another big space ripe for disruption — and thus investment — is in security. That’s where the conversation picks up below:

AllThingsD: So Andreessen Horowitz has done a bunch of security deals. What kinds of opportunities are you seeing there?

Levine: Data security. Okta puts active directory out in the cloud. All SAAS apps, everything goes out there. That’s access control, which very much is security. Security is also being exacerbated by the number of mobile devices in an environment. If you have BYO devices and you’re using someone else’s SAAS, as a CIO you don’t own either piece of that. So an interesting security problem to solve is how you make corporate data usable in that scenario.

Is anyone coming close?

Sure. There’s one company in our portfolio. Silver Tail (now part of EMC) does behavioral prevention. It can look at the behavior of an endpoint and determine if it’s a human being. If you can detect patterns of illicit behavior, you can shut them down before they do any damage. So that’s interesting. Bromium, which just announced, which builds impenetrable walls around processes that live on mobile devices. The premise of Bromium is that you no longer have to do virus scanning. It assumes that viruses are coming into a system anyway, and they’re going to come by way of something like a browser, and affect a running process. But if that process is wrapped by an impenetrable wrapper, it can’t get onto the system. To kill that virus, all you do is shut down that process. So that’s an interesting investment we’ve made.

How do you go about finding the companies that you invest in?

We are not thematic investors, first of all. And I love that. To me, if you’re a thematic investor you end up being the 40th one to pick a company in a given stack, because you have to be in on a certain kind of company. We really do see nearly 100 percent of all the deals that are occuring at any given point of time. We evaluate every single company on its merits. As soon as we say we need to be in on something like, say, database technology, then all of a sudden I have made a preordained and preconceived decision that this is important. I don’t want to have a bias coming into things, that I throw out something that’s actually interesting, or include something that may be way overinvested. We look at each company as a fresh canvas, but we will look at companies that have great technical co-founders who believe that they are going to go dominate a given market segment. It may not be obvious at all. Most obvious things are obvious to many people. It’s a matter of finding the non-obvious things. There are a lot of things we see, and there are a lot of areas where we haven’t invested.

Is that how do you explain GitHub? That was a huge deal, and no one really understood it at first.

I wasn’t really looking to invest in a collaborative source code control system. Before last year, I didn’t even know it existed, and didn’t internalize the value of what they do. After we met them and realized the power of what they do, and have done, and the potential future for that company, we invested. It’s interesting when you don’t have biases and just let everyone come in and pitch, knowing you really can see things in the eyes of the entreprenuer, which I believe is really critical. As soon as I have opinions, I start to shape the company in my mind’s eye, and that’s really backward, because as a board member you want them forming the vision and to help along the way.

I’m hearing deal flow has been really high. Is that likely to continue for awhile?

It’s good that we’re seeing tons of stuff, and there’s a tremendous amount of innovation occuring. It used to be there was a lot of consumer stuff going on, and maybe only a few things happening in the enterprise. Now the enterprise deal flow is much higher than consumer. But I’ll tell you, it’s so cool to see all that. And we’ll pass on most things. But it’s cool being here, at this firm, but also at this time. The last time there was really a lot of flourishing innovation around the enterprise was in the mid-1990s.

Will you be doing many more deals in 2013?

I’m sure we will. We have a lot of seed investments right now. It’s a lot like dating before you get married, so I’m a big believer right now in what we have going on with our seed portfolio. They’ve come up for A rounds, and we have the opportunity to really work with the company. But I like seeds, because you get to watch a company and watch the execution and the dynamics of the team. One recent deal we did was Convergent-IO, which was a seed that turned into an A round.

What do you like and dislike in a team?

We’re very much pro-technical co-founder or founder. I would say that that is like a fundamental criteria. It is easier to coach a technical co-founder on how to run a business than it is to coach a professional manager on the DNA of what the vision of the company is. We look for someone who has a burning passion to go take on the world. We want entrepreneurs that want to go for the long ball. They want to run the company for the long term, and they want it to be a standalone enterprise, as opposed to building something to get acquired. We also like to make sure the entrepreneur understands how they’re going to use the money they’re raising. We like for them to have an appreciation of the clear understanding of how to get from point A to B.