The funny thing is, my friend Jo's friend Bill Arkinstall is
really a famous allergy Dr. About two years ago, I told him that
he could easily start the world's greatest vortal (ack!! 8-P) on
allergies including online allergy consulting and e-commerce/e-prescriptions.
Since then, Dr. Koop is worth billions, Gazoontite has gotten their
mezzanine funding, and most of the major VC firms have spun
out their funds to do e-health. So all I can say is, start listening. 8-)
BTW, I saw a really interesting series of VC presentations on the state
of the capital. Do you know how many biomedical device companies had IPOs
last year? 50-something. Do you know how many biomedical device companies
had IPOs this year ('99)? Zero, nada, zilch, nuhthang, not-one. I was
laughing like hell. I can remember in the late 80's when biotech was
sucking up all the capital and VCs were investing in a 10 year horizon
for these companies. It was impossible to get any decent software funding
for longer than 3 months. We all decried the discrepancy. When the Web
came along, it sucked up all the biotech capital. "Just desserts." The problem
now is that all these dot com companies are leaving no room for any
software tools/development or infrastructure companies. Starving software,
biomedical devices, infrastructure, development tools, pharmaceuticals, etc.
for years at a time in response to always looking for the quick kill in
any Internet play has, is, and will have serious long-term effects. These
effects translate into stodgyness--at least until the next big
thing comes along. HP thinks it's e-services, IBM thinks it's EON,
Nokia thinks it's wireless handheld, Microsoft thinks it's Microsoft,
Sony thinks it's graphics appliances, Sun thinks it's Jini, Novell NDS,
Apple shiny-happy boxes, Dell Web PCs, 3com wireless e-commerce.....
Greg
Adam Rifkin -4K wrote:
>
> Rohit wrote:
> > Among the new Web sites catering to nasal drip is Gazoontite. The
> > six-month-old startup announced this week it raised $26.5 million
> > from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners...
>
> So Gazoontite got a Hummer? Hmmm... I'm feeling nostalgic for the time
> when $26.5 million was a lot of money to plunk down on a startup. And
> now it's the kind of money people will chuck at "breathing market"
> upstarts (here's the 13th-floor pitch: "Our research shows that 97% of
> Internet users are currently breathing..." :)