Investing in Dynamic Markets Venture Capital in the Digital Age

A highly successful venture capitalist takes you behind the scenes of the private equity process.

Without venture capital, many of the companies whose technical innovations sparked the digital revolution would not exist. Venture investments funded these firms to develop their bright ideas into commercial products that created new business models and established whole new markets. In Investing in Dynamic Markets, Henry Kressel, a partner at multi-billion-dollar global investing company Warburg Pincus, takes you behind the scenes of the private equity process. He draws on his extensive experience to show how venture capital works, why venture capitalists fund certain companies and not others, and what factors influence the success or failure of their high-risk, high-reward investments. He also discusses venture capital's future, now that the commercialization of technology requires larger investments and global market access. Written in clear, non-technical language, the book features informative case studies of venture capital funding in a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, software and services, semiconductors, and the internet.

List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Hot markets, investment waves, bubbles, and charlatans; 2. Financing high-risk businesses; 3. Venture investing: an uncertain science; 4. Investing in a transformed market: telecommunications; 5. Investing in transformed markets: semiconductors; 6. Investing in early-stage technology: the internet in the 1990s; 7. Software products and services; 8. Venture capital: past and future; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

Without venture capital, many of the companies whose technical innovations sparked the digital revolution would not exist. This book shows how venture capital works, why venture capitalists fund certain companies and not others, and what factors influence the success or failure of their high-risk, high-reward investments.

Henry Kressel is a partner of Warburg Pincus, LLC where he has been responsible for investments in technology companies. He began his career at RCA Laboratories where he pioneered the first practical semiconductor lasers. He was the founding president of the IEEE Photonics Society and co-founded the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the IEEE, was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering and is the holder of thirty-one issued US patents for electronic and optoelectronic devices. He is the co-author of two previous books, Semiconductor Lasers and Heterojunction LEDs with J. K. Butler (1977) and Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World with Thomas V. Lento (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Thomas V. Lento is founder and President of Intercomm, Inc., a corporate communications consultancy specializing in technology companies. He has been a university professor, an ad agency executive, and director of communications for Sarnoff Corporation. In addition to collaborating with Henry Kressel on Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World, he was editor of Inventing the Future: 60 Years of Innovation at Sarnoff, and co-authored the forthcoming By Any Means Necessary: An Entrepreneur's Journey Into Space.