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QCon Keynote: Techie VCs Talk About Trends & Opportunities

Posted by Ryan Slobojan on Oct 05, 2009

Sections: Enterprise Architecture,; Process & Practices,; Architecture & Design,; Development
Topics: Ruby ,; Java ,; Dynamic Languages ,; QCon San Francisco 2009 ,; SOA ,; .NET ,; Languages ,; QCon ,; Business ,; Programming ,; Architecture ,; Enterprise Architecture ,; Agile ,; Conferences

Salil Deshpande of Bay Partners and Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners are not ordinary VCs: they are super technical. In the first keynote at QCon San Francisco on Wednesday Nov. 18th, Salil and Kevin will be discussing trends and opportunities that they have seen in the software development space. By drawing upon their technical background, their experience in the Venture Capital (VC) space, and their instincts for future trends, they will cover several topics:

What trends are affecting software development, and why
What differentiates the successes from the failures
Why they did or didn't invest in certain firms
Which investments were missed that they wish they had made
Lessons from their past experiences as both entrepreneurs and VCs
Advice to entrepreneurs based on their experience, including when the perfect time to raise money is
Questions from the audience

As a starting point for the audience questions, Salil and Kevin have requested that any questions which the community has for them be added to this article as comments. If you have any questions or comments that you would like to pass along please add them to this article, and Salil and Kevin may address them in the keynote.

Salil Deshpande is General Partner at Bay Partners, where among other things, he invests in Java, enterprise software, open source, middleware, and application frameworks. His recent investments in the space have been around Groovy and Grails (G2One), Spring (SpringSource), continuous performance management (dynaTrace), Maven (Sonatype), Ruby on Rails (Engine Yard) and others, with several more in the works. Bay Partners, a 33-year old early-stage venture firm based in Palo Alto, has created over 200 successful businesses, over 11 funds. Salil joined Bay four years ago, prior to which he co-founded and sold several companies including The Middleware Company, which operated TheServerSide.com network of developer sites. Salil has an MSEE from Stanford University and BSEE from Cornell University.

Kevin Efrusy is General Partner at Accel Partners, where he focuses primarily on two areas for investment: consumer internet services and SaaS/open source software. Within SaaS/open source software, he led investments or serves on the boards of Xensource (acquired by Citrix), Genius, SpringSource, Terracotta, and Aptana. Prior to venture, Kevin started Corio, an ASP/SaaS pioneer which went public on Nasdaq and was acquired by IBM in 2005. Later he served as the first CEO of IronPlanet, an online marketplace for heavy equipment with current annual gross sales over $360M. Kevin has an MSEE, BSEE, and BA in Economics from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.