Silicon Valley venture capital firms want to invest in the world’s most innovative technology companies, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at their stultifying Web sites.
Venture capital firm Web sites remain surprisingly similar, static and unimaginative.
Why are these VC firms such fossils? Flash technology, the stuff that lets you run a video with animation, is dead cheap to use, and paying someone to create a decent site doesn’t take much. Yet, look at the sites of the valley’s leading Sand Hill Road firms. You’ll find sites coded in simple HTML, many with team pictures of the VC partners hamming it up. You’ll find none of the cool, yet inexpensive Web 2.0 tools that the VC firms talk so much about — for example RSS, or podcasting or other interactive technologies that let users engage more intimately with a site.
It is thus with two eyebrows raised that we greet the debut of a more dynamic kind of site at Mohr Davidow Ventures, one of the big Silicon Valley firms. There’s an image below, but if you go to the site you’ll see how images bounce up and down on the screen. If that were all, it would be silly, but if you click on one of the boxes in the middle, say the one that says “Driving the Digital World,” you’re taken to the digital Internet companies that the firm has invested in. And then, on the right, a slide show invites you to try each one of the companies. Or, click on “Initiating Innovations” and you’re taken to a page that has podcasts. You can subscribe to some of this with RSS. Nothing earth-shattering but a heck of a lot more than we’ve seen elsewhere from the stodgy VC world.
In fact, MDV’s site makes the legal fight between Sequoia Capital and ComVentures all the more ridiculous. Sequoia had an awfully clunky site, organized like most firms around sectors invested in (rather than investment themes, like MDV’s site) and bland green dots in a table which sector each partner invested in. It recently revamped its site (thumbnail at left), with a pleasing neon green, keeping the nice play on the color of money, and sporting an impressive grid of photos of its high-profile entrepreneurs. So, sure ComVentures may have wanted to do something similar, but why copy Sequoia’s site when they could have done something more original? Sequoia itself could have done so much more by using Flash. (Update: Some people are strongly disagreeing with me on this; see comments below).
What’s surprising is how lemming like the VC firm sites are. Take a look at Accel, which has an element of experimentation, but then look at NEA, CRV, Mayfield and Clearstone, each having a polite portion of their site dedicated to Flash — though nothing grabbing. And those are just the better ones. Goes downhill from there. Union Square Ventures, though, is somewhat original: Its site is a blog.
Did we miss any worth noting? We checked about two dozen sites, but didn’t do a definitive search. Feel free to comment below if you see any others that push the envelope. Or, for fun, any howlers?
12 Comments
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wag said:
yeah its slick, but it doesn’t work well on firefox. priorities, people.
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Scott Rafer said:
Sorry, Matt, but this is terrible advice. Flash might be ok for certain consumer apps, but VCs need to appeal to technical founders first. Flash sites repel most smart engineers and would serve only as an anti-marketing tool.
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Mark Wendman said:
Flash often Stinks !! It is often misused as a huge needless bandwidth HAWG and when you sit even at a broadband link it makes you WAIT and WAIT….. Yet there are times it is useful, but more often than not misused…
So if a good portion of your potential audience (?world wide) is not sitting on a 6 Mbit link, do you want to even go near flash if not an imperative? So you might impress your buddies??
The net is not a movie theatre. (yes I know YouTube…etc.) At least (mostly)not yet, nor are web sites meant to show your programming CHOPS needlessly.
Not until the majority of your potential audience is on 100mbit or greater fiberlinks….(and even many in the venture community are not there just yet)
Web sites are meant to inform, efficiently, and on occasion entertain when appropriate or desired.
FLASH for commercial sites, impedes GOOGLE and other indexing bots, and commercial folks who first got Flash sites coded for commercial industrial product companies.., and wondered why traffic was low, slowly very slowly, figured out that FLASH front pages and FLASH driven sites(worse) screwed up their obvious chances for easy product VISIBILITY in Google and Other Search Indexes.
And yes some folks purposely use flash to impede others from saving web pages (easily). Little do they know that simple (&free) screen grabbers make this “feature” merely silly, and mostly irrelevant.
Poor Suffering WebCoders…with often over featured pages.
(the funny part is often these coding folks only tested their sites using internal corporate links at ungodly and unrealistic link speeds…., and then wondered why real world customers were pissed)
I’d put FLASH in the same league as Acrobat PDFs that contain (sometimes questionable or worse) executable code, as PDFs were meant to be portable, and safe!!! (and not intrusive)
The worst PDFs are those that require you to be connected to the net to read (and often download the document or parts thereof, to get your web IP).
Portable??? Mostly. But no excuse for ANY executable codes in PDFs, nor outside links embedded. Worse than viruses or spyware, but “legit”.
Now PDFs are brought to you by the SAME folks as Flash…..with almost the same overcomplicated obtuse agenda.
I remember CORELs competing version for PDFs of a self contained readable document, with a 50kbyte reader…
Corel’s version was more like the intended static document reader that PDFs were originally sold to the user (reading) community…(so you might not need MS Word with its then prior high cost and security risks from macros and the like)
CODE BLOAT ALERT !!!
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John Roberts said:
I think your idea of comparing the websites of the VCs is a great one. Like some others here, I find the idea of checking for Flash to be irrelevant. Flash is a tool, just like HTML or Ajax or anything else.
Why not track down Jakob Nielsen or Don Norman or the like and ask for some thoughts on the websites of the top VCs?
John Roberts
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Tumka said:
No firefox issues that I can see… did you (WAG) have NoScript blocking it??
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Pamela Mahoney said:
We welcome the feeback and comments! To WAG in particular, I’m a devoted Firefox user and have never had any issues with it during development or launch. You might have hit the site as it was loading for the first time last night. In any event, we haven’t seen the issue you’re describing. Drop me a note if you have more more information or trouble: pmahoney@mdv.com
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Matt Marshall said:
To be clear, the homepage features a large Flash video on top of a wider static page. I agree that fully Flash sites are extremely frustrating.
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Eric Manlunas said:
Forget FLASH…their target audience would prefer substance over form. It would be more useful if VCs published their actual results…good and bad…so entrepreneurs can judge for themselves if these guys are worth having as investors.
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Marcus said:
If people only gave a shit about a product getting them from point a to point b.. and never cared about brands, marketing, “the sizzle”.. then we wouldn’t have any designer brands… luxury cars… etc…
To those of you who think an entrepenuer visiting a VC page only cares about the substance.. you’re wrong.. and I’m not sure how many of you have been to a VC Office.. but they invest god knows how much money into flag ship video conferencing rooms, herman miller chairs for every desk.. marble floors.. plasma’s every where.. etc.. so trust me when I say its not like theirs a vc firm out there thats thinking, “Boy we shouldn’t make our website flashy, people only care about the content, not the presentation”.
I wish I knew why most VC Firm’s websites were trash.. it makes no sense to me considering their offices..
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Nathan Schmidt said:
[disclaimer: i'm part of a portfolio company, but this applies anyway]
This design does four things for me, with exactly the right voice:
“Yep, DNA, they’re doing bio-info-genomic-things and personalizing equals high margins, good. Digital… whatever, sure. Solar, ah, good, a bit bandwagony but par for the course — but wait, that’s the Nanosolar logo, and they’re probably going to win the sector. Finally, ah, Stanley — that’s right, MDV are the guys funding primary research because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s robot cars with freaking lasers. That last logo panel doubles or triples their geek-entrepreneur cred.”
True the audience consists of entrepreneurs, but only to a point. A founder who steps away based on the ideological impurity of a firm’s website’s implementation isn’t serious enough to waste time on anyway.
The real audience, institutional investors, don’t care a bit about whether it uses tables or java or whatever. It’s got to look and feel serious, successful, and leading-edge, and this design does the job.
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David Gong said:
This topic also brings up the intricate relationship among usability, usefulness and desirability of the web. I like fishing, so if there are good fishes for me to catch, I might very well be careless about other things. Substance is more critical: simple is the best.
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Dean Richardson said:
Personally, I’m fond of the Sandbox Industries (www.sandboxindustries.com) site. It doesn’t overdo the Flash, but it’s consistent thematically and pleasant to look at.
