VC Peter Solvik on how Sigma West spinoff is going

Peter Solvik and two other West Coast partners formed Sigma West about two years ago after a number of years of investing with Sigma Partners.

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

It's been a couple of years since Pete Solvik and the others at Sigma Partners decided to a split into smaller East Coast and West Coast firms.
The former Apple and Cisco Systems exec took some time to talk last week about how that is going after his latest investment in content management startup Seismic of San Diego.
The following is an excerpted Q&A from that conversation.
Tell me a bit about how and why Sigma West was created.
Sigma Partners is a firm that was around for about 27 years. We operated bi-coastally in Boston and in the Bay Area in Menlo Park. We invested eight funds totaling about $2 billion. About two years ago the partnership, both the East Coast and the West Coast, really saw a shift in venture where being more nimble and a smaller team — more focused — we thought would serve our entrepreneurs better and enable us to be more effective.
We saw a bit of a of a bifurcation in the VC industry. You’ve got a small number of firms that are getting quite large, adding lots of resources, adding lots of partners and managing billion-dollar funds. You know who they are. I don’t need to name them. It's really not the direction we want to go.
We prefer to be nimble and hands on and on our feet and very involved on a personal level without a lot of staff. So we decided to go the opposite direction, as did our brethren in the East Coast. We created Sigma West located out here in the Bay Area and Sigma Prime located in Boston. We also continue to manage in excess of 70 or 80 legacy portfolio companies from Sigma’s previous investments.
When did you raise the fund for Sigma West and how much was it?