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June 30, 2009
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| A shoutout to sponsor Stone Ridge, a family-oriented community in Loudoun County. It's growing quickly: selling 20 homes per month, even in this environment. Might you be next? Call it great for kids. Call it great for parents. Better yet, call it home. More info here. |
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The cheap pun in our headline is actually quite serious: Grotech partner Don Rainey, who visited our office for lunch this afternoon, makes it his business to push money out to early stage IT firms.
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Don shows off the fine sandwich wrap from Chop’t we offer visitors. Based in Baltimore and Tysons, Grotech closed its seventh fund last year (so far supporting 16 companies, 12 of them local) and has raised $1.1 billion since ‘84. Among them: Living Social, the #1 Facebook application, used by 30 million people a month, in which they’ve invested $3 million; Clarabridge (text mining of unstructured data); and Arpu of Georgetown, which “monetizes confirmation pages,” meaning they offer you a “fade in ad” for a related product just as you have supplied your credit card for another purchase (Arpu stands for average revenue per user, which naturally they want to increase).
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“I never woke up thinking I’d be a venture capitalist,” says Don, who grew up in Vienna but went to Utah to work for Novell, in charge of setting up channel resellers and working in “unheated warehouse space in mobile homes at the foot of Geneva Steel.” (He said our office brought back memories.) The town had one stoplight but he got to work with a management consultant named Stephen Covey and has long been swearing by Steve’s famed 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He also worked at start ups like Accipiter in North Carolina, one of first companies to put ad banners on pages, that sold to CMGI in the late 90s and is still pumping out ads today.
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Don started working for NC’s Intersouth after the sale as a one man outpost in Reston until 2007, when he jumped to Grotech. He lives and breathes tech, and here demonstrates (we’re serious) the “11:00 to 1:00 o’clock” motion required by his favorite pastime, fly fishing, which he does with fellow techies. Each August for the last six years, he’s organized a trip to Wyoming or Idaho with friends, like Tige Savage of Revolution, Gary Roberts from Cabot, Scott Meza of Greenberg Traurig, and Brian Hayhurst of Carlyle. Oh, and he’s got a blog.
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| Stimulating Fairfax |
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Thanks to President Obama’s stimulus bill, Fairfax County CIO and Deputy Executive Dave Molchany has some money to spend on upgrading the county’s technology. One big spot is energy where he’s proposed spending $9.6 million of federal funds on things like lighting control software, server consolidation and building energy auditing. Dave tells us he looks to similar counties for ideas, e.g. Dade County in Florida for disaster relief: “We’ll take something that works really well and then try to tailor it for our needs.” He also says the county is working to increase its use of social media to help engage citizens at destinations like MyFairfax.
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Dave is a techie at heart: The Johnstown, Pa., native spent the early part of his career at EDS, CGI (then CGI-AMS), and Sallie Mae before coming to gov’t work. “I started as a program analyst very focused on a given technology, and my jobs have let me keep expanding to the point I can doing things outside of IT as well, which I really enjoy,” he says. Dave is a big fan of the arts, a useful hobby considering he oversees the county’s arts programs. He also just returned from a trip to Italy and has plans of visiting Greece sometime soon.
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| The New Team Handshake? |
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Exciting news: CFO services giant Tatum LLC and leading Microsoft reseller Pleasant Valley Business Solutions (PVBS) officially teamed up yesterday. We snapped this last week of Tatum Mid-Atlantic Managing Partner Peter Pfeiffer and PVBS CEO Bernard Mustafa because we can see the future. PVBS and Tatum, which has more than 1,000 financial execs in 37 offices nationwide, developed solutions for government contractors by combining PVBS financial management software with Tatum’s knowledge of the needs of CFOs. “We’d been working together for years, so a partnership only made sense,” Peter says.
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This newsletter is a journalistic news source which accepts no payment for featured interviews. It is supported by conventional advertisers clearly identified in the right hand column. You have been selected to receive it either through prior contact or professional association. If you have received it in error, please accept our apologies and unsubscribe below. © 2009, Bisnow on Business, Inc., 1323 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. All rights reserved.
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