Shawn Carolan on being VC CEO at the same time

Dec 9, 2013, 12:29pm PST

Early Siri, Uber backer Shawn Carolan on being VC, CEO at same time

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Shawn Carolan, managing director at Menlo Ventures, talked about his early investments in Uber and Siri, as well as about his email management startup Handle, in a fireside chat last week.

Cromwell Schubarth

Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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Shawn Carolan, a managing director at Menlo Ventures, has been a very busy man over the past couple of years.
While juggling his responsibilities at the firm he joined in 2002, Carolan has been running an email management startup he founded — Handle.
He even managed to spare some time to answer questions from me in a "fireside chat" we did last week at the Silicon Valley Open Doors conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
Following are excerpts of that conversation in which we talked about Menlo, his startup, his early investments in on-demand ride startup Uber and voice-activated assistant Siri, as well as what he thinks about the wave of billion-dollar pre-exit startups that have popped up in recent years.
In addition to Uber, Carolan is also on the boards of IMVU, PlayPhone, Roku, TeleNav and YuMe.
You guys at Menlo are talking a lot about the concept of a "right now" economy. What is that?
That's a big investment theme of ours. A lot of really compelling opportunities come when technologies converge — in this case between mobile, Big Data, social and cloud. Those four forces come together into an infrastructure that allows you to essentially satiate demand in the moment when it happened in the consumer's mind.
Uber is a good example of that. Think of what it was like to prearrange a ride before them. I either had to go to a certain corner or wave a hand or call up a limo company and say, "When can you be here? Here's my credit card number, prearrange it." Now I pull up Uber on my phone, I hit order and by the time I walk down a flight of stairs and get to the street, most of the time the car is there. My credit card's on file. I get in, I get out and I say, "Thank you very much."

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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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Menlo Park, Venture capital, Startups, San Francisco