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Earlier this year we covered Henry Nothhaft’s speech at the Innovation Alliance Conference titled “Start-up Reality: No Patent = No Funding, No Business, No Jobs.” During the course of the speech Henry eluded to a book titled “Great Again, Revitalizing America’s Entrepreneurial Leadership” which was published earlier this year in which he was to offer proof that when manufacturing moves abroad so does research and development. Well, we all would like to set aside some time for reading books, but the reality is that between working, eating, working more, working out, and maybe even something remotely resembling a social life outside of social networking, time for reading books is sparse at best. Good thing then, that on occasion it is possible to take a shortcut and get some cliff-notes so to say, as is the case with the recently published manifesto by Henry titled “What If, They Listed to Entrepreneurs” over at changethis.com. On a side note, if you have not had a chance to visit changethis.com you are missing out on some great short articles on a variety of topics written by very reputable authors at no charge to you.

It is not very often that we run across a semiconductor startup out of Europe these days, most of them are either located in the US, particularly California, or Israel, so it is nice to see Baolab Microsystems makes some head waves recently. Founded in 2003, Baolab is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain and over the last few years the company has been developing Nano Embedded Mechanical System or NanoEMS for short. NanoEMS can be thought of as Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS), except smaller and embedded directly into a System-on-Chip (SoC) using a standard CMOS process.

A couple weeks ago, SuVolta, a semiconductor startup out of Los Gatos, CA emerged from stealth mode and announced their PowerShrink technology. The blogosphere and newswires went ablaze with the claims put forth by the company including the 50% reduction in active power while maintaining performance and the 5x reduction in leakage. The reputableVCs backing the company, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), August Capital and NEA, which helped the company raise $22M in funding last year, only added fuel to the fire. Further, the fact that semiconductor startup funding has been rather on the decline recently, funding for device and circuit technology specific startups has been virtually non-existent with the exception of a few specialized analog startups, further upped the hype surrounding the company. Now that the hype has passed, it is time to dig a little deeper and explore whether all this press attention has been warranted.

You don’t come across someone ranking venture capital firms very often, but this is precisely what Andrew Metrick from the Yale School of Management and Ayako Yasuda from the Graduate School of Managment at UC Davis attempt in the second edition of their book titled “Venture Capital & the Finance of Innovation.” Now we won’t pretend to have read the whole book, and although it might be an interesting read, Chapter 5 titled the “The Best VCs” is freely available and a quick and interesting read itself. In addition to listing the top venture capital firms as perceived by the authors you also get a bit of supply and demand side economic theory. Explaining such things as to why venture capital firms tend to be reluctant to increase fund sizes significantly, with the exception of the dot-com boom period, and also why the carried interest on new funds charged by the VCs has remained relatively stable between 25 to 30 percent. The authors selected a total of 15 firms which they dived into groups A and B, shown in the table below. Essentially, group A contains VCs which have funds with committed capital in excess of $100 million and value multiples of 10 or greater. VCs in group B are selected based on different criteria which are are explained in detail in the chapter.