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Randal leeb-du Toit
Metarand
75 Comments
Randal is a lawyer, venture capitalist and self-confessed serial entrepreneur. Running his own legal practice he worked as general counsel for Email Limited, where he worked on a number of mergers and acquisitions including the takeover of Atlas Steels for $130 million. From 1998 he was the Executive Chairman of Tribalweave Capital. From 2004 he was the Director of Business Development for NICTA, a research centre where he oversaw a high successful Entrepreneurs in Residence program. Rand is currently the Virtual CEO of Metarand.
What kinds of companies or technologies are you most excited about right now?
I am very bullish about companies playing in the mobile and web arenas, and especially those who are embracing social aspects, presence and virtual/real world elements. It’s all about the QuadPlay - web, mobile, virtual and real world. I also strongly believe in mashing up and leveraging infrastructure, for example there is a lot of potential to build businesses on top of platforms like Google Maps, Microsoft’s Live Earth and Facebook’s developer platform.
Time Magazine’s person of the year was “You” because User-Generated-Content on sites like Flickr, Myspace and Youtube has really taken off in the past year. Why is user generated content so popular?
UGC is a key part of the CICS equation (connecting, interacting, creating and sharing), which, as social beings, we have an innate desire to participate in. Sites that enable and empower ugc are able to tap into the collective energy and collective consciousness of the masses - the balance for them is between extracting and giving value to their community of users. The more they balance the equation in favor of giving value, the higher will be their return on investment.
There are many companies springing up overnight on platforms such as Facebook when somebody who has had an idea has quickly released a version one - do business plans still have a place in the IT world or is an agile iterative process more important?
Business plans as a communication tool for expressing a company’s strategy at a particular point in time and monitoring execution are always useful. However, a lot of emphasis has been placed on them as an investment document - there is no perfect business plan format that will secure funding - it is horses for courses and in relation to web apps a full 40 page bplan is overkill. Make sure you have a strategy in mind and ideally a business case (however rudimentary) and then massively iterate — throw your code up against the Internet wall and if it sticks move forward, if not, change course and try again.
How has venture capital in Australia changed between 1997 and 2007?
The cycle in Australia over the past decade has moved away from early stage venture capital with most active, institutional investors playing in the private equity arena. There is a small group of venture capitalists left, and many of those are not focused on early stage. Not many of them have specialist experience in web or mobile and so even though a venture may secure funding from them there is minimal value add over and above the capital infusion - a key differentiator to Silicon Valley where VCs are able to specialise.
In addition, the vast majority of Australian VCs have not yet grasped the reality that, given the advanced state of the web infrastructure, ventures can get a long ways down the track on a small investment round. As such they are not focused on assisting early stage ventures, many of whom are totally bypassing Australian investors in favor of more in tune Silicon Valley investors. This is a situation that needs to come to the attention of the Australian institutional investors (the superannuation funds and their gatekeepers), who are not putting Australian capital to work in the Australian innovation arena - they can do so much to boost the ecosystem if done in the right way.
You have mentioned on your blog that you are working with a group to bring the concepts of Y Combinator/Seedcamp downunder to Australia, how’s that going and how will it be different to the other options in the market today?
I can confirm that I have been exploring the creation of a y combinator / seedcamp - like program, but will hold off on commenting any further until we have finalised it further. I have had strong interest from Australians developers which has confirmed there is a demand for a seed program of this nature.
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