TiEcon 2011: What's luring VC dollars

From how-to panels on fundraising for tech startups to sessions addressing trends in mobile technology and social media, TiEcon Silicon Valley 2011 , which started on Friday, is a glimpse into the enterprises that are luring venture capital dollars.

The conference is focused on inspiring and educating entrepreneurs, and AOL Founder Steve Case kicked off the conference with a valentine to the crowd: He told the audience, many of whom were of Indian descent, that “entrepreneurs are the heroes of America.”

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Case is the chair of the Startup America Partnership , the White House’s effort to boost private-sector investment in startups as a way to create jobs and grow the economy.

“We need to up our game to position America as a place for the best and brightest to build great companies,” he told the audience of more than 800 people. He also said thatimmigration for high-skilled workers ought to be a top priority for America.

The day’s sessions addressed trends in five verticals: Internet and social media, mobile, cloud and software, and energy, and life sciences.

Panels addressed topics such as how technology is being used in the healthcare industry, how mobile phone and the mobile cloud are impacting enterprise, and the economics and use cases of cloud computing.

“We based the areas of focus on where there was the most innovation going on right now,” Jai Rawat , TiE conference chair and the founder/CEO of ShopSocially told Firstpost. “We looked to where the innovation and investments were happening in the venture capital community.”

Lessons learned

Some takeaways from the day:

• Q1 of 2011 was the most active period for startups in the Bay Area since 2000, said Gerald Brady of the Silicon Valley Bank’s Venture Capital Group. But he cautioned that this pickup was sector and geographic specific: “It’s pretty unique to the Valley and it’s driven by mobile and cloud,” he said.

• When it comes to finding investors, Navin Chaddha , managing partner of the Mayfield Fund said he looks for startups that listen to their customers and have a “learning DNA”. They need to take the information they have learned from their customers and constantly iterate based on new input, he said.

• On social media innovations, Mike Maples , managing partner of FLOODGATE said that while it “it is still early in the game”, if entrepreneurs are creating things that have already been done-yet another social deal site or a mobile app that identifies local restaurants, for example-then you’re “too damn late”. He observed that the first wave of social media entrepreneurship involved developing platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which connected people in a new say; the next wave will be an “app-centered wave” where companies will leverage the fact that everyone is connected and savvy entrepreneurs will re-imagine business processes to harness these connections.

• Social media innovation and entrepreneurship should seek to connect people, added Ethan Kurzweil , the vice president of Bessemer Venture Funds. “There is lots of room for social media to enhance our lives,” he said.

• And don’t discount emerging markets, said Radha Ramaswami Basu , a Silicon Valley veteran, Santa Clara University professor, and the founder of the Anudip Foundation. “There is a lot of innovation happening in rural places that we don’t think of as markets,” she said. “There is a lot of entrepreneurship with women happening in India, China Africa, and Brazil.” She said micro-enterprises are starting to get access to capital markets through social venture capital. She also pointed to recent study that found that in 2009 and 2010, the internal rate of return (IRR) on social venture capital is higher than the IRR in Silicon Valley.

Khosla: Ignore the experts

Venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla closed the day by discussing clean energy. “The thing with energy is we have a problem that is much worse than we think,” he said. “In my view we have solutions mostly because of technologists like many of you in the audience. … Look at the simple facts, about 500 million people on this planet, mostly rich people, have an energy-rich life style mostly in the western world, at least 5 billion people want an energy-rich lifestyle, that’s a 10x at least.”

He encouraged attendees to not allow themselves to be hindered by so-called experts that promote myopic, traditional thinking. “The thing that most gets in the way of solving the energy problem is this whole notion of what the experts tell you is possible or not. … My point is the following: When you see the models and experts…they take the past and extrapolate into the future. That’s not a good thing and buried in that are assumptions. … So extrapolating of the facts doesn’t work, what does? What works is inventing the future.”

The conference is sponsored by TiE, or Talent, Ideas and Enterprise. The organisation was formly known as The Indus Entrepreneurs, signaling the roots of its founders. “TiE did start as an ethnic South Asian organisation,” conference chair Rawat said. “Indian folks who were very highly successful wanted to create an organization to impart that knowledge to younger entrepreneurs in the early ’90s when entrepreneurs were not as prevalent in the Indian community, and there was a glass ceiling. They took this initiative and said, ‘Let us help other people, as well.’ Obviously, it has helped tremendously, and it has spawned a new generation of entrepreneurs who, in turn, are ready to give back so the trend continues.”

Click below to listen to more takeaways from conference attendees.

Aditi Banerjee:

Deepak Mandhari:

Yogesh Agrawal:

Sam Jhans:

The number of attendees at Steve Case’s keynote address was misstated in an earlier version of this article. Firstpost regrets the error.