News from Valhalla October 2012 - Volume 21
Valhalla Partners

Valhalla in the News

Valhalla Sponsors Trilogy Alumni Event

Readers of this newsletter would have enjoyed attending a Valhalla-hosted event in New York City the weekend of October 20. Specifically, we hosted the "Trilogy Alumni Only the Best Unconference" event for alumni of my former company, Trilogy.
Art Marks was an early investor in Trilogy, and served on its Board for almost 15 years. When I joined Valhalla as a Venture Partner earlier this year, Art supported my suggestion that Valhalla sponsor the Trilogy alumni conference. I expected it would be a great combination since Art and Valhalla embrace Trilogy's belief that exceptional people are the lifeblood of any organization.
Most people know Trilogy as one of the largest privately-held software companies in the world, but Trilogy's culture of rethinking everything to maximize impact remains a key memory. Accordingly, it is no surprise that our annual alumni event is an "Unconference", because the gathering is not a conference but an event committed to rethinking everything, including the agenda. Every potential speaker arrived prepared to go on stage without knowing time allotments or the exact direction of his or her presentation.
As an example, we had an alumnus who traced his career path from technology presales to a reality TV appearance to investments in organic farms and a radical rethinking of the restaurant industry. Another alumnus presented how to run a virtual global company in the cloud, without an office and spending zero time on administrative tasks, all while traveling nearly full-time. In general, the more unique the idea, the higher the enthusiasm level of attendees.
For Valhalla, the highlight was a session focused on venture capitalists and how VCs evaluate ideas, entrepreneurs, and funding decisions. Participants on the panel included Art, Valhalla GP Kiran Hebbar, and Gary Chou of Union Square Ventures. Kiran moderated the session as the panel focused less on what entrepreneurs must do and more on what they should not do. Art gave a humorous breakdown of the roles he looks for on an entrepreneurial team by evaluating the Oceans Eleven movie and the roles and attitudes of each player. I am sure more than a few people went home that night and watched the movie on Netflix.
Valhalla's partners appreciated the opportunity to spend time with such an exceptional group of people. A special thanks to Scott Francis, Cindy Lo, Jean Barmash, and Gary Chou for spending countless hours to ensure an exceptional event. Thanks also to Union Square Ventures who allowed us to use their office space as the Unconference home.

This Month's News Stories

10.30.12 Geomagic Teams with Solutionix to Provide 3D Scanning Software for the Versatile New Rexcan CS Plus Scanner

Exclusive Deal Delivers A Fully Automated 3D Scan System for Manufacturers and Engineers

10.29.12 Nirvanix Offers Cloud Storage Customers Facing Hurricane Sandy Option to Move Data to Other Geo Locations for Free

Activates its Disaster Avoidance Program Enabling Customers Using Nirvanix's New Jersey Data Center to Move Data Across the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network

10.25.12 Geomagic Helps Experts Make Beautiful Faces and Restore Function

Digital Design Solutions Showcased at MaxilloFacial Prosthetics Event

10.24.12 Independent Colleges of Indiana Selects Nirvanix for Storage-as-a-Service for 31 Private Higher Education Institutions

Changing the Backup Paradigm, State-wide Collegiate Consortium Shifts to the Nirvanix Cloud

10.23.12 BlueStripe Transaction Monitoring First to Track Individual Transactions Without Code Changes, APIs, or Appliances

BlueStripe Software today announced the availability of FactFinder v7

10.22.12 Avail-TVN CFO Bill Arendt to Provide Insight on "Sustained Excellence" at the 2012 MIT Sloan CFO Summit

Arendt to Discuss Raising Capital at the World's Leading One-Day Summit for Financial Leaders

10.16.12 Sepaton S2100-ES3 Sets New Mark for Single System Storage Capacity with New Hitachi Storage Arrays

First disk-based backup vendor to protect 2 PB in a single system

10.15.12 Avail-TVN Scores Long-Term Industry-Wide Deal

Havoc TV Picks Avail-TVN to Deliver the Best In Indie Music and Action Sports Entertainment

10.12.12 Adaptly featured in WSJ article on Media Technology Summit

Old-School Brand Building, Not Metrics, May Be Social Media's Forte

10.11.12 Valhalla's PlaceIQ in the News

Mobile Display ROI And Location Reviewed At MIMA Summit

10.11.12 Legolas Media Partners with GfK

Legolas Media and GfK Team to Offer Brands Real-Time Qualitative Campaign Measurement & Optimization

10.10.12 SolidFire Delivers Production-Ready Deployment of OpenStack Compute "Nova" and OpenStack Block Storage "Cinder" with Canonical

Company Demonstrates SSD-Based Reference Architecture at the OpenStack Summit San Diego 2012

10.10.12 Sepaton CTO to Speak at SNW about Database Deduplication

Titled, Making a Hash of Database Deduplication, the session will be held on Thursday, October 18 at Storage Networking World

10.10.12 DomainPower Voted Best New Monetization Solution at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. 2012

Domain Holdings' flagship Monetization Platform was chosen as Best New Monetization Solution by voters

10.9.12 BlueStripe Named Gold Winner for Innovations in Business Transaction Management at 2012 Golden Bridge Awards

The Golden Bridge Awards recognizes the world's best in organizational performance, innovations, products & services

10.3.12 Videology Acquires LucidMedia

New Partnership Allows Full Funnel Marketing and Media Mix Modeling Solution

10.2.12 Lafarge Implements BlueStripe FactFinder for More Stable Physical and Virtual Infrastructure

Lafarge is using FactFinder throughout the application lifecycle, from monitoring live user transactions to certifying application upgrades and deployments

10.2.12 BlueStripe Software Names Alex Eckelberry to Board of Directors

Successful Entrepreneur Brings IT Management Market Expertise

The Valhalla Team

Investment Staff

Charles Curran, General Partner
Harry D'Andrea, Administrative General Partner
Dan Gordon, Director of Research
Kevin Greene, Partner
Kiran Hebbar, General Partner
Randy Jacops, Venture Partner
Hooks Johnston, General Partner
Art Marks, Managing General Partner
Josh Resnik, Venture Advisor

Administrative Staff

Claudia Bartz, Executive Assistant, Office Manager
Sara Endicott, Executive Assistant
Bibiana Speroni, Executive Assistant, Finance and Research

Q & A

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