Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Venture Capital in Florida
Podcast Video | Posted by Phil Leigh on February 14, 2008
Summary: If you would like to learn about the venture capital market in Florida, this interview is for you.
Our guest today is Dan Rua who is the Gainesville (Fla.) Partner with Inflexion Partners. His other senior partners are in Tampa and Orlando. Inflexion specializes in venture investments in Florida. They are particularly interested in early stage companies with valuable intellectual property. Dan also authors the Florida Venture Blog.
Over the past five years I have interviewed hundreds of Digital Media industry executives and experts. Fewer than ten have been located in Florida even though I live in Tampa and the state is the nation’s fourth most populous one. There just did not seem to be a lot happening down here.
But things may be changing. AuthenTec and Intellon recently completed successful IPOs and both appear to be leaders in their respective fields of fingerprint authentication sensors and power line computer networking. Additionally, the University of Florida was recently named one of the top five universities in the country in terms of patents issued. Similarly after some of its students created The Blair Witch Project, Orlando’s University of Central Florida was given enough of a boost to form an impressive Digital Media Lab. Finally, the presence of the space program in Brevard County created a culture of technology that has supported privately-owned Florida Institute of Technology for 50 years and led to the formation of the Technology Research Development Authority which is an incubator of small companies.
Phil’s Take. Metaphorically, as well as physically, Florida is thousands of miles distant from Silicon Valley. For example, those of us regularly using a gym find that the locker room talk “in these parts” is a steady diet of real-estate and lawyer chatter. But there are changes.
I attended the Florida Venture Capital Forum Conference in late January and was pleased to see that a number of VCs have become active in the state during the past five years. More importantly, it seems there’s a growing number of technology-centric companies in Florida that can compete in today’s Worldwide economy.
Categories: Podcast Video
Tags: Dan Rua, digital media, Florida, Inflexion Partners, Intellectual Property, Phil Leigh, University of Florida, Venture Capital
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[…] Media caught me at the Florida Venture Capital Conference and we sat down to discuss the state of Florida entrepreneurship and venture capital. While at the same conference, Phil also sat down with David Bayer, co-founder of Inflexion […]
Phil,
Thanks for raising some important issues regarding the state of the VC market in FL. I was personally involved in an Orlando-based high-tech “win”, a company called MeshNetworks. We proved that it is possible to raise $ in FL ($57m), and had investors from CA, MA as well as local high net worth individuals, and to attract strategic interest and liquidity via a $211m exit with Motorola in 12/04.
Notwithstanding our success at Mesh, my subsequent venture has struggled to raise sufficient capital locally to move from prototype to product. The west coast guys look at FL as a backwater, and are loathe to travel across country for Board meetings, and the Boston guys tend also to be very regionally focused. There is a dearth of true VCs in this state, notwithstanding the efforts of a few committed guys like Dan. However the funds that are here don’t have the capitalisation necessary to do much more than early stage seed stuff, and rarely at that.
I blog about the issues facing high tech start-ups and the use of IP licensing as a go-to-market alternative (http://www.iplicensing.net). In the case of my last start-up, we ended up signing a seven figure deal to fund productisation that was non-dilutative to our early shareholders. But it’s a slow, tough slog out there!
Looking at my next one right now…a mobile handset application with global market implications…Hundreds of millions of units p.a. in addressable market…Now only if I can find the VC that gets it!
Martin Suter
Phil,
Thanks for putting up this video. It got my mind turning and thinking about the Florida VC scene. As we get ready to take our product out of planning and into development, there are a great deal of road blocks. The knowledge that Dan Rua gives in this quick video sheds some light into the possibilities that Florida has. Thanks again.
I did not now students at the University of (Central) Florida were responsible for the Blair Witch Project. Kudos to them!