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"Considering Salesforce is sitting on top of $1.9 billion in cash, the amount they spent on venture capital is still pretty small. The $145 million cash they invested last quarter is only a fraction of the $731 million it generated in operating cash flow, too. But the fact that Salesforce is increasingly looking for ways to find the next future growth engine through these investments sends a positive sign to the market, Stifel's Rodericks says, especially as Salesforce becomes a more mature company. "They're sitting on a ton of money on their balance sheet, so to a certain degree, investors would like to see them make these strategic investments in companies around this space," Roderick said. And that could potentially lead to more acquisitions, he noted, as Salesforce Ventures has been more active on the buy side too lately. It acquired sales intelligence software RelateIQ for $390 million last year, after spending $2.5 billion on marketing software ExactTarget two years ago. "This certainly gives them more visibility in the companies that they might look at as partners or potential acquisitions down the road," he said. We should be able to get to find out more about it on Thursday, when Salesforce reports its second quarter earnings. Analyst estimates are pretty much in line with Salesforce's forecasts at $1.6 billion in revenue for an EPS of $0.18."

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon

"I'm thrilled to announce the public launch of Usermind, my first investment at Menlo Ventures, and one that I'm particularly excited about. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting Michel Feaster, founder and CEO of Usermind, I knew I had to invest. Michel is an impressive entrepreneur - smart, high-energy, passionate, thoughtful, and a big product thinker - and she just happens to be addressing an incredibly important problem in the enterprise that is getting more pronounced by the day."