Dell Takes Venture Arm Out of Stealth, Aims to Spend $100M Annually | Hacker News Reader

Dell Takes Venture Arm Out of Stealth, Aims to Spend $100M Annually

bloomberg.com

134 pointsartsandsci38 comments

The lingering question with corporate venture arms: How do they perform compared to "regular" vc's? as corporate managers will have relative limited upside and zero skin in the game.

I believe Intel's VC arm has been very successful, and there's the added benefit that Intel gets a better preview into technologies it may want to acquire outright -- however, I'd like to see the numbers, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Capital

Haven't look at their portfolio extensively, but their Basis acquisition, one of the earlier fitness tracker watches with optical heart rate sensor, comes to mind, which was just south of $100M, and was basically shuttered with their flagship product pulled of the market after serious issues. Like most corporate VC's Intel pursues synergy deals, For intel these are categorized as "more Moore" and "more than Moore" i.e. as long as it contains silicon it could expand their markets

not sure why this is downvoted - Intel was ranked #1 in at least one major VC rankings list for like 3 years in a row (2012-2015ish). not sure how they have done recently but for a while they were def at the top.

Since VC is such a #s game it's hard to analyze by example. (Did they get the one outlier that pays for the fund?)

I would still like to look at Cloudera as an interesting example. As an investment, they most certainly lost money on it. But if their investment helped Cloudera grow, they may have sold a ton of chips that Cloudera ran on. Big data requires chips. Being able to make money indirectly allows them to benefit from otherwise seemingly unprofitable deals. (And allows execs to hide from mistakes - even less skin in the game)

I think they mean invest rather than spend?

After reading the article they do make investments but it seems like if you partner with Dell they would offer parts of the ecosystem or consulting experience. So spend would be not only investments but also technologies or expertise.

I was going to suggest gamble.

SPEND in this case means essentially what their budget is for the group, while INVEST would be a smaller portion (essentially, the budgeted spend minus overhead).

Merely asking and answering the question "Who should we invest in?" takes a considerable amount of money by itself.

That $100M clearly is dominated by the capital that is to be invested. The use of the verb "spend" is perhaps a slip indicating an opinion on the chance of positive ROI...

"The company is spending about $100 million annually on the funding of startups, he said."

"All told, Dell Technologies Capital has invested in more than 70 startups. It puts in around $3 million to $10 million initially and usually in the A or B rounds, Darling said. The company provides more money in later rounds."

If your investment team that answers the question "Who should we invest in?" is consuming $100M itself... I need to change jobs.

It's the other side of the quasi-doublespeak that looks at raises and new divisions and side projects as "investments". They're going to spend $100M this year that they can't easily get back, so it's a fair way to put it.

Everything the business does is finding investments to spend their money on.

Start with an Apple-TV-like device that we can plug to our TVs and allow us to browse the web from our couches. Compete with Google and Apple in that arena and let us developers build tools for the world to enjoy the computer ten feet away, any mobile phone can be used as remote and keyboard but you are welcome to build one for less than $50, it's just an IR remote with a keyboard, not a mobile phone.

From mainframes, to desktops, to the web, to mobile. The next revolution will be televised. Be prepared.

Could you elaborate on a use case that you'd like to see.

I mostly use my TV only to watch videos, which Chromecast handles pretty well. But I'm curious to see what use case I'm missing out on.

Sure, Youtube would be the first app no doubt about it, I'd like to see Casey Neistat on TV every night, but now imagine instagram, snapchat, twitter, facebook and all social apps on your TV. Phones will still be widely used on the go, but once people get home they get splatted on the couch and TV would become the main screen from where to enjoy all possible entertainment.

I personally was thinking as a developer, I'd like to code on my TV, I'm sick of the desktop and the laptop, my eyes and back are suffering the most. I need a comfortable chair LazyBoy-style ten feet away from the screen with a wireless keyboard and trackpad which can be used as remote, that's it, nothing else. So for me it would be Xcode and Sublime on my TV, HN and Reddit, and the possibility to develop a million apps just like your iPhone/Android. One single box, the size of a soap bar, attached to your TV, and let developers make it the new platform. Desktops and laptops would be the first casualties (except for enterprises). That's my vision.

Never underestimate the imagination of a million developers with new and shiny toys. TV is the next wave.

YouTube: https://itunes.apple.com/bb/app/youtube-watch-upload-and-sha...

Twitter: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitter/id333903271

Facebook: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/facebook/id284882215

Email Instagram and Snapchat and if there is enough demand I am sure they will build an AppleTV app if they aren't already in the process. Now if you want to code on your TV then just buy an AppleTV and use AirPlay to project your Mac's screen to the TV.

Your "vision" is literally just the AppleTV. Go build the future: https://www.apple.com/tv/

> Now if you want to code on your TV then just buy an AppleTV and use AirPlay to project your Mac's screen to the TV

So I need a thousand dollar device relaying to my hundred dollar device? I see.

I'd be interested in coding on my TV only if it had the same resolution and visual acuity at a 10 foot viewing distance as my 5K retina iMac has at it's current 1.5 foot viewing distance. This would require about a 200 inch diagonal TV which is sadly a bit outside of my budget.

Why not just connect your TV to your computer as a second monitor using an HDMI cable? Everything you described is already possible.

If you really want to go crazy get a graphics card that has 3 concurrent monitor support (they start at 30 bucks at microcenter) and hook up TWO tvs as extra monitors to your computer

So like webtv 2.0?

I think that'll end the same as the first version

Yeah, Microsoft's WebTV unit morphed into a conventional set top box business and was sold off to Ericsson.

odd wikipedia doesnt mention any of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV

Feel free to update it :-). My GF worked for WebTV/MS and then Ericsson and traveled to various countries to do research on their STB usage so I observed this process directly. But if I wrote that it would be original research.

Here's an article I just found about the acquisition: http://www.lightreading.com/cable-video/video-software/erics...

Just like the Apple Newton the first time, the world wasn't prepared, now the content providers are a dime a dozen, just bring in the apps. I would be writing this from my TV instead of my laptop and finally Facetime would be like in the Jetsons.

That makes me laugh.. As it so happens, I actually used a webtv when they were first announced. The problem wasnt a lack of apps. Around the same time I also connected a computer to a tv.

It's difficult to understate just how terrible attempting to use a computer on a tv screen is.

Isn't that just a UI problem? The different between the iPhone and PDAs was the improved UI.

Part of it.. but not entirely.

To me there's something very irritating about trying to focus on details (like a mouse pointer, or reading a page of text) from a distance. There's also the low PPI and size of tv screens; the viewing angle of the TV; the fact that your keyboard and mouse are sitting on your lap or whatever surface is near you (that's not at the proper height); that your chair/couch was designed for relaxing, and not sitting up and typing.

A small part of the could be fixed with a different UI.. but its still a bad experience.

No it is a resolution problem and a distance-from-the-tv problem. Text is basically unreadable, or if it's large enough to be readable, you can hardly fit anything on the screen

Ahhh, WebTV. Brings me back to the glorious late nineties. So much $$$ was wasted trying to get people to use a computer on their TV screen and trying to get people to watch TV on their computer screens. Reminds me of that classic Onion article: [1]

1: http://www.theonion.com/article/new-5000-multimedia-computer...

Except pretty much everybody under a certain cutoff age watches tv on their computer, exclusively. So the entire media revolutions the cable companies feared, happened.

Ouya and Roku have both taken a shot at this with no and mild success, respectfully.

PS4 and Xbox One have this as well. No one really cares.

They lack the ecosystem and the army of developers to build it. Apple and Google are the best positioned at the moment with tvOS and Android but they're lacking vision. Samsung could enter the arena and then Huawei, LG, Sony, etc. I never thought about Dell, but since they rode the desktop/laptop wave they should invest in new technologies or undoubtedly face extinction. This is their last chance and stubbornness won't save them.

Every Playstation 3 and PS4 has had a decent browser. Not a killer app. Everyone would rather do all of this stuff on their phones.

I think it's called a Raspberry Pi

Sooo... Intel nuc with hdmi?

You are just describing a well-designed media center computer.

I read title and thought that they were withdrawing funds from Stealth Technology. That would have been more interesting.

So... similar to Hewlett Packard Pathfinder for Hewlett Packard Enterprise?

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