To kick off the new year, Battery and its partner Silicon Valley Bank hosted roughly 25 top technology executives at a two-day Innovation Summit in Napa Valley. The summit was a forum for CIOs, CTOs, …
Innovation in the Oil Patch: Thoughts on Digital Transformation from BP
On a recent visit to Battery Ventures’ Boston office, BP’s Bob Flint sat down with me for a conversation on emerging technology. This is a space that Bob knows well, as he serves as the technology dir…
How Your Business-Focused Startup Can Snag a “Big-Fish” Client—Without Missing the Other Fish in the Sea
The story of early-stage start-ups selling to global titans can sometimes read like Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea: The unlucky fisherman Santiago returns to port exhausted after battling a huge marl…
Way More Than Cybersecurity: An Up-Close Look at the Startup Nation
Eight years ago, a book called “Start-up Nation” opened the world’s eyes to the breathtaking pace of startup activity in Israel. Today, an Israel-based nonprofit called Start-Up Nation Central estimat…
How Open Source Ate Samsung, and Lessons for Smaller Companies
Powered by Battery recently sat down with Ibrahim Haddad, a vice president of R&D and head of the Open Source Group at technology giant Samsung. In this role, Haddad oversees all the company’s ope…
The Lion and the Mouse: How Big and Small Companies Can Help Each Other—and Navigate the Tech Wilderness
Aesop’s fable “The Lion and the Mouse” teaches us that little friends ultimately may prove to be great friends. In the fable, a lion captures and then releases a mouse on the rodent’s claim that somed…
The Seeds of Success: Considering a Company’s Stage When Partnering with Start-Ups
Inside large, Fortune 500 companies, there are early adopters of technology and late adopters. Some IT executives and groups inside big banks, retail companies, telecom providers and even government a…
Avoiding the Pitfalls of ‘Innovation Tourism’
Big companies can too easily become victims of what I call “innovation tourism”: They partner with startups and VCs in an effort to innovate, but they wind up merely sampling new technologies and prac…
Avoiding “Innovation Tourism”: How to Successfully Partner With Venture Capitalists and Tap the Innovation Economy
Most large companies know they need to stay on top of emerging technology trends, and closely track the startups successfully commercializing them. One way to narrow the universe of potential startup …