Q&A: Louis Toth backs B2B startups for Comcast Ventures

Louis Toth invests in enterprise-focused startups for Comcast Ventures. He is based in Philadelphia but spends most of his time working out the unit's Palo Alto offices.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Comcast is known best as the provider of cable, Internet and telephone service to millions of residential customers across the country.
But the main focus of Louis Toth, a partner at its Comcast Venture investment unit, is on startups that focus on business customers.
Toth is based back at the Philadelphia headquarters of the telecom giant but spends most of his time in Silicon Valley. He spoke with me recently about what he is backing and how it fits into the future of Comcast.
Here is an excerpted Q&A of that conversation.
What industry areas do you focus on?
We have a pretty broad mandate and work with our two parent companies, Comcast and NBC Universal, in trying to identify interesting technologies and investments. Some of my colleagues are more focused on NBC-related sectors. I tend to be more focused on traditional Comcast-related areas and in the past I concentrated a fair amount on content delivery and additional home and communications technologies. Today I spend a lot of my time in cloud and data center technologies and secondly, really, around enterprise services and what it takes to deliver those.
Give me some examples of companies that you’ve invested in here in the Valley that you think are indicative of where you see Comcast is moving.
One that we unveiled fairly recently was a company called Nebula. They just launched a product called Nebula One which you can think of as Amazon in a box for the enterprise. It’s a private cloud controller that you’re able to create for internal work purposes.
If I’m a developer working on a piece of code or if I’m working on a gene sequencing project, or some other collaborative tool, I have to tell my IT department, “I need this many servers. I need them for this long. I need this amount of storage. I need this kind of horsepower in order to conduct my work.”

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Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.

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