 VENTURE CAPITAL FUND BROWSING SLO FOR START-UP IDEAS San Louis Obispo Tribune (Published May 14, 2003) Got money? A venture capital firm nosing around the Central Coast does. DFJ Frontier of Santa Barbara has $40 million to invest in promising high-tech ideas. "This is a place that has all the right vitals and very little attention from the venture community," said David Cremin, managing director of DFJ Frontier, who will be speaking at a Thursday mixer in Avila Beach intended to bring ideas and money together. "There's a great, smart, well-educated population here ... in desperate need of investment capital." Draper Fisher Jurvetson, based in the Silicon Valley, has invested in more than 150 high-tech companies, usually in the first round of financing. DFJ Frontier is an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, whose founder and CEO Tim Draper gave the keynote address at a Cal Poly entrepreneurial awards ceremony Friday. Among the successful investments made by DFJ are Hotmail e-mail service, Four11 Internet directory search, Interwoven content management software and Digidesign audio technology, he said. While Silicon Valley was previously the focus of venture capital funding, the Central Coast -- with Cal Poly and the Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California -- may have been overlooked, according to Cremin. He said the DFJ Frontier Fund has $40 million to spend in the region over the next three to four years and has already set its sights on one local venture -- although he declined to identify it. The investment firm is also looking in the Central Valley and Sacramento, where it has an office. Cremin hopes Thursday's 5:30 p.m. event at the Gardens of Avila restaurant will uncover more good ideas that provide "interdisciplinary interaction with engineering, computer science and the business school." It is sponsored by the Cal Poly Entrepreneurship Club and the California Central Coast Research Partnership. DFJ Frontier -- which counts among its investors wealthy individuals, institutions, banks and pension funds such as the California Public Employees Retirement System -- usually puts up between $100,000 and $500,000 during the initial round of funding in hopes of reaping profits down the line if start-ups meet their revenue and growth targets. "We expect that many of these will fail and fail quickly because we are doing really cutting edge technology at the seed stage of financing," he said. "It's the one or two or three innovations that really meet a market need and succeed in expectation that more than pay for the other experiments or bets."
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