Story from the Wall Street Journal
“I’m sure I’ll be seeing some mobile deals,” Rich Miner allowed Tuesday at an Xconomy conference in Cambridge, Mass., where he talked about his latest assignment, running Google Inc.’s new venture capital group.
Miner is one of two managing directors for the new program, to which Google has committed $100 million in the first year. Google Ventures aims to invest in everything from consumer Internet technology to health care to cleantech, but Miner is best known for his mobile chops. In his prior assignment, he worked on Google’s mobile platform, known as Android, which grew out of a company that Miner co-founded and which Google acquired in 2005. Before that, he headed R&D in North America for Orange, the mobile brand of France Telecom Group.
How many mobile deals Google Ventures backs depends on how many good business plans and ideas it sees, Miner said. “The investment community has been a little bit jaded on mobile” because despite some wins much of the promise of mobile Internet and applications has failed to materialize so far. “We’re certainly at a point where app stores and other vehicles are enabling people to truly get apps in large numbers out to consumers…as well as always-on broadband. So there’s definitely a confluence of things that I think are making mobile a bit more exciting.”
Asked if he’d like to finance a start-up focused on building Android apps, Miner said plenty of start-ups are building applications for Android, with more than 3,000 apps in the market so far, but that it’s hard to build a strong, big business around a successful app. “I’d be thrilled if I found a start-up that I believed could be a big company, that had a big innovative idea on top of Android, and I’m sure I’ll see some. But as an investor, with the agreement that I have, I’m not biasing Android or mobile anymore than any other platform.
“In fact, frankly, if I was talking to somebody today and they had a great idea, I might encourage them to look at Android as a place where you can quickly prototype and test out capabilities that you probably can’t on some of the other platforms, but if you want to have a mass-market successful business then you probably need to think about supporting some of those devices that have much more penetration.”
Miner also said he was surprised by how little he’s seen in the way of mobile business software, calling enterprise apps “another big and compelling opportunity.” He said Research In Motion Ltd. hasn’t done much beyond basic email despite its business relationships with many large corporations and that the BlackBerry platform could provide an opportunity for enterprise software developers. Android presents a similar opportunity, Miner said, because it allows developers “to build a very purposeful, work-flow oriented device right from the home screen for a particular company, a particular vertical.”
