Team

Q&A with Larry Marcus

Q: What is your mission as a venture capitalist? And what brought you to this point in your career?

A: My mission is to find and nurture great entrepreneurs and companies that have a real opportunity to change their industries. I have a passion for what I do, for technology and change. I've been really fortunate to be able to follow my passion into the investing world and to have some excellent mentors along the way, including my family and colleagues.

Q: Who gave you your biggest break?

A: Paul Stephens turned me on to the excitement and complexity of investing. He taught the Investing Analysis course at Berkeley and had great speakers and case studies, like John Doerr and 3DO. (I'm dating myself.) I loved the course and ended up as a Research Associate at Robertson Stevens, focusing on PC and video games. Steve Eskenazi recruited me twice, first to Alex Brown and then to WaldenVC. My father and brother are also mentors, as are Art Berliner and George Sarlo, the founders of Walden.

Q: What drives you to be successful?

A: I just love technology. It's a great personal interest of mine, and I've always been an early adopter - from the TRS 80 to Pong, to early digital audio editing, to owning one of the first Tivos, to my Tablet PC, to equipping my house with solar power and driving a Prius. When I started my career as a media planner in advertising, I became the default IT person for the group. I also ran a computer store in New York City, and that brought me really close to consumers. In my investment career, I have found that using technology and observing others was the best way to spot trends and winners. Back in my early days of research, that meant playing a lot of video games.

Q: What do you consider to be your sweet spot?

A: My sweet spot is consumer services with a media twist, although WaldenVC does invest in the enterprise space, as well. One of the areas that I'm really excited about is IP delivery of content and services. For the very first time, content providers have a means of reaching consumers directly without a middleman. There's no gatekeeper. In the cable and satellite industry, you have to go through the operator to launch your channel. On mobile phones, you need to go through a carrier. But now with IP, broadband users can directly access content. So, there is a tremendous opportunity to develop new services leveraging this new platform. While there has been tremendous progress in building out an installed base of platforms and infrastructure for digital media, there are still many big problems that need to be solved and many opportunities to create value for consumers, such as how can consumers discover, share, manage, buy, consumer media in easier ways? How can they get more control?