Adam Messinger

Innovation in Business Models

I've spent most of my life thinking that value was generally created by technical innovation–a view I suspect is shared by many of my engineering brethren. Over the past year I've had the distinct pleasure of studying at the Stanford GSB and my perspective on this has started to change. As usual, Tim beat me to the punch, but for…

A start-up airline?

Most of us don’t think of the airline industry — which is extremely capital intensive, has seen little technical innovation, and has chronically unprofitable big players — as fertile start-up ground. That is why I was so pleasantly surprised when I recently had the distinct pleasure of meeting Ray Webster, who was until this year the CEO of easyJet. For…

Bill Miller on Silicon Valley

I had the good fortune of seeing Prof. Bill Miller speak recently as part of a lecture series hosted by the Sloan Fellows. He is something of a legend of Silicon Valley, having been involved in the start-up the Mayfield fund, the CEO of SRI, on the boards of several start-ups, the Provost of Stanford, and a Professor in…

Applying Technology to Energy Efficiency

Observers of the VC industry might have noticed that clean technology has been attracting ever larger amounts of financing. In the most recent quarter it received $843 MM, trailing only software and biotech. We're quite interested in the space at OATV as well. However, primary investments in fuels and generation don't meet our parameters for capital efficiency. As a result,…