Throw in a series A round for the digital verification startup, Beyond Identity, co-led by GCV Rising Stars award winner Byron Knight at Koch Disruptive Technology, and it is almost a perfect story – just one with more of a background than can feasibly fit in this column. (Check out Michael Lewis’s book on the dot.com bubble era, The New New Thing, for Clark and NEA’s backstory and how TJ fits in from running @Home and Silicon Graphics that Clark had inspired.)
Beyond the headline excitement of Silicon Valley elite coming together is a deeper reflection on what it is becoming. A quarter of a century ago when Clark touted internet browser Netscape with a young engineer called Marc Andreessen in tow to NEA and then Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) winning the battle and sparking the dot.com frenzy that followed, Sand Hill Road was dominated by founder-run, independent VC firms raising money from institutional limited partners, such as east-coast pension funds. ‘Evil’ corporations, such as Microsoft tried to use their venture capital investments to force vulnerable startups, such as, well, Netscape, to cave to their demands – triggering Clark to kick off the epic anti-trust battle that helped enable Apple and Google to survive and take off, respectively.
Now, things are different.
KPCB has since struggled in its succession and is reinventing itself again while NEA has powered ahead to remain the largest independent VC with about $27bn under management. NEA’s managing partner, Scott Sandell, talked eloquently at our GCVI Summit in January on the changed mindset in the past decade on how corporations and VCs can work better together now.
The Beyond Identity deal is a reflection on exactly this given both firms are co-lead and bring substantial support to Beyond, of which TJ is CEO. NEA has added its venture partner, Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, to Beyond’s board and to bring a Salesforce-style sales and marketing playbook to bear with the startup’s “no passwords” tagline. Koch of course brings $100bn-plus in subsidiary company sales as a customer channel and its latest purchase, Infor, a cloud software provider.
The new, new thing is deal with few weaknesses as long as the egos stay in check – always a constant battle in the Valley so some things remain the same at least.
