The business of funding tech companies has gone gaga for brand names and boffo deals. Institutional Venture Partners. Frankly, it didn't sound like the name that financial cowboys, used to throwing money on bonfires, would come up with. Institutional Venture Partners sounded like the corporate equivalent of the accountant who corners you at a party to talk about retirement annuities. This seemed, until recently, like a fair enough picture of venture capital as a whole.
Venture capitalists are the people who finance start-up technology ventures.
They lived in quiet wooded houses in expensive suburbs. They dressed in polo shirts with the names of their star companies. Yet the money in venture capital kept piling up. Not long ago, I found myself in the IVP office again. The code name, of course, was something of a calculated swipe at the staid old images that names like Institutional Venture Partners and Brentwood Venture Capital projected.