The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was keep. Consensus was that the additional sources presented prove notability and that the article should be retained. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 18:29, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Single self-sourced reference. Couldn't find much more other than TV appearances of the founder in a WP:BEFORE. Drewmutt(^ᴥ^)talk 18:07, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Agree with nom, my own BEFORE turns up nothing that passes SIGCOV. Appears to be WP:CORPSPAM. Chetsford (talk) 18:21, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Fails the test for notability DBlogger1970 (talk) 23:57, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Significant coverage in late 1990s and early 2000s in NYT, LAT, WSJ, and so on. Added a few refs to article, search finds many more, not only the usual quotes and deal coverage, but profiles of company and founders. Notability doesn't expire. Bakazaka (talk) 08:51, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - is the company still going? If it is, it hasn't done much lately. I know notability is not temporary, but any earlier notability looks borderline. I might suggest merging with the Ann Winblad or John Hummer articles. He was an NBA player so his article might not fit as well. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:25, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The firm was widely covered in the 1990s for its technology-only investment strategy, then again in early 2000s for failing huge with early dotcoms and also the Napster fallout (which threatened the existence of the firm, see [1]). After some partner shuffles (e.g. [2]) it rebranded as HWVP and is still active, e.g. in the recent round of funding for Stackery [3]. Bakazaka (talk) 00:27, 18 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, MBisanztalk 01:24, 23 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete does not meet WP:NCORP; significant RS coverage not found. K.e.coffman (talk) 05:41, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per the significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.
Hummer Winblad Venture Partners may not be among the super tier of VC firms, but it certainly gets just about as much publicity. That’s due largely to the high profile of founder and partner Ann Winblad, who was one of the first women entrepreneurs in technology when she cofounded an accounting software firm in 1976, and one of the first women in venture capital when she cofounded Hummer Winblad in 1989.
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Hummer Winblad was one of the first VC firms to specialize: In 1989 it made a prescient choice to invest solely in software, now expanded to encompass Internet services and content. The San Francisco firm doesn't shy away from controversial investments. Portfolio companies include both Napster, whose music-swapping program earned theire of big-name bands and a lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America, and Pets.com, the pet supply site whose spendthrift ads featured a singing sockpuppet. The proliferation of pet-related sites on the Internet is almost universally derided by competitors as an example of the sloppy investing of the B2C era. Winblad defends Pets.com, pointing out that as of mid-2000, it's the only pet food seller that was able to go public. At the time, she noted, Pets.com was less than 300 days from a three-person start-up. “We built a distribution channel from scratch. It'stoo soon to judge its success.” (A few months after this interview, Pets.com, plagued by widening losses and a deteriorating share price, shut down after it couldn't find a merger partner. Napster, on the other hand, cut a stunning deal with Bertelsmann that could prove the basis of its salvation.
...
Among those at the meeting are cofounders Winblad and Hummer, who present a study in contrasts. She is petite, with blonde shoulder-length hair, while Hummer has gray hair and a former basketball player's towering height, with a deep, penetrating voice. Two other partners, Mark Gorenberg and Dan Beldy, also attend, along with Hummer Winblad's newest partner and chief operating officer, Chuck Robel, just hired from PricewaterhouseCoopers. One partner is missing: Hank Barry, a lawyer who's the acting CEO of beleaguered Napster.
In 1989, Ann Winblad cofounded Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the first venture capital firm dedicated solely to software businesses.
The book notes on page 239:
A Humdinger of a Firm
During a consulting job in the late 1980s, Winblad met John Hummer, a former center for the Seattle Supersonics. Hummer had earned his MBA after retiring from the NBA in the 1970s and was an experienced venture capitalist. He took to Winblad almost immediately and suggested that they start a firm together. Winblad, however, had little interest in venture capital, jokingly telling Hummer that she did not even like venture capitalists. Eventually, though, Hummer's persistence and monthly phone calls won her over. In 1987, Winblad joined Hummer to develop the first venture capital firm focused solely on the software industry.
... Their firm, initially located in Emeryville, on the unfashionable side of San Francisco Bay, sat far from the primary locus of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, which had sprung up along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. ...
Eighteen months, 110 investors and $35 million later—in early 1988—Hummer Winblad Venture Partners had its first venture capital fund. By the late 1990s, the ten-year fund had returned more than $350 million to its major investors, and the firm's early detractors were well aware of what Hummer Winblad believed all along—software was the economy's next big thing.
The book notes on page 240:
Amid such early success, failure wasn't unknown. In 1990, Winblad poured $400,000 into Slate, a pen-based computing company. … By the time, Slate was acquired by Compaq, Hummer Winblad had lost more than $1.2 million.
The firm regrouped, and, by fall of 1996, Hummer Winblad had yieled a 50 percent annual return for its investors. Competing firms averaged returns of aroud 20 percent. Riding high from its early accomplishments, Hummer Winblad opened a second fund, focusing on Internet companies, worth $65 million in 1994. A third fund of around $100 million, begun in mid-1997, would earn Hummer Winblad's limited partners twice their original investment in just two years. Their fourth fund of $320 million, begun in 1999, coincided with the peak—and the ensuing crash—of the Internet boom.
The rest of pages 240 and 241 discuss how Hummer Winblad fared with Napster as well as how it fared during the dot-com boom and bust.
The offices of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners are located in a listed building in the old Embarcadero port of San Francisco. As spectular as the building is today, especially because of its spaciousness and beautiful restoration, it still exudes the utilitarian spirit of its warehouse past. It was built in 1895 for the Merchants Ice and Cold Storage Company.
This is fitting because Hummer Winblad was founded in 1989 as one of the first venture capital funds to invest exclusively in software companies. As Mark Gorenberg, managing director of the fund, says, "we invest in the shovels and the pick axes of the web." As a consequence of its investment focus, Hummer Winblad deeply involved in the latest trend of cloud computing – the provision of software as a service (abbreviated SaaS).
If professional achievement alone induces high visibility, then you would expect to see a greater number of firms ranking above Hummer Winblad in the limelight queue. Hummer's portfolio of sixty-four software companies—the number listed as of spring 2000 in the firm's promotional brochure—doesn't include any of the stand-out, legendary investments that have grown into household names. Eventually some may. For the most part these are still young companies. More than half of them are Internet software houses. Hummer Winblad was founded only in 1989, when Ann Winblad joined the profession and teamed with John Hummer, who has been a VC since 1982. But as of today the portfolio includes no accomplishments that approach Henry McCance's Continental Cablevision, or Don Valentine's Apple Computer, or even the more recent Yahoo buy-in by Mike Moritz, Valentine's colleague at Sequoia.
If Ann Winblad hunts down emerging software companies with as much finesse as she works on finding us a decent restaurant, she deserves her reputation as one of the most important venture capitalists in the US$45 billion domestic software industry, the fastest-growing sector of the US economy. She and John Hummer, a former center for the Seattle SuperSonics, launched their first venture fund in 1989 with $35 million. Since then, the Hummer Winblad Venture Partners fund has returned $250 million, yielding an astonishing 50 percent annual return for its investors. By comparison, the average VC produces only an 18 to 20 percent annual yield.
The unlikely pair did it using an equally unorthodox strategy: investing only in software companies. Together, they are responsible for getting such successes as PowerSoft, Berkeley Systems, and Wind River Systems off the ground. Sensing immense opportunity, they have also created a second $60 million fund that will focus on investing in Internet companies.
...
Hummer Winblad's track record is impressive. Out of 33 software companies funded, only one has failed: Slate, a pioneer in pen-based computing. "We violated our first rule: choose large-market real estate," she says. Unfortunately, the pen computing market never got off the ground. Slate sank, despite boasting a roster of industry luminaries, including Dan Bricklin, creator of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Slate was eventually acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. Hummer Winblad lost almost $1.2 million in the deal.
The Internet hasn't been kind to venture capitalists lately. It's been downright brutal to Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
After more than a decade of investing, the San Francisco venture-capital firm earned a reputation as a top financier of high-tech companies. But a combination of bad timing and an overindulgence in Internet companies with a mass-market bent has left Hummer Winblad with a collection of high-profile duds -- and a cautionary tale.
A tally of the damage to Hummer Winblad's portfolio of Internet companies: Pets.com Inc., a pet-supply merchant, shut down and liquidated its assets; allergy-products retailer Gazoontite Inc. (www.gazoontite.com ) and real-estate-listings site Homes.com Inc. (www.homes.com ) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; advice site eHow Inc. (www.ehow.com ) filed a Chapter 7 liquidation petition; HomeGrocer.com Inc. was acquired by Internet grocer Webvan Group Inc. (www.webvan.com ). Last week, Rival Networks Inc. (www.rivals.com ), a network of sports Web sites, said it would cease operations after failing to sell the company.
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Mr. Hummer, a former professional basketball player with the Seattle Supersonics, and Ms. Winblad, a software engineer and entrepreneur, founded their firm in 1989, deciding to invest only in the software industry. The firm made successful early investments in PowerSoft Corp., a maker of database tools acquired by Sybase Inc., and software maker Wind River Systems Inc. Later investments in software companies focused on the Internet market performed well.
Regis Philbin might get all the applause, but Hummer Winblad Venture Partners makes real millionaires.
Founded by Anne Winblad and John Hummer 10 years ago, the San Francisco-based venture capital fund has distributed over $500 million among 60 companies.
In the feeding frenzy environment of the Internet, Hummer Winblad has spread its wealth among all manner of companies, like a gambler covering his bets.
You name it, a Hummer Winblad-funded company does it. Getting married? Check out The Knot. Music's your thing? Tune in to Liquid Audio. Running low on dog food? Log on to Pets.com.
A handful of top-tier venture firms boast annual returns higher than 40 percent on some of their funds. Hummer Winblad of San Francisco, for example, returned $260 million in four years on a $35 million investment made in 1990. Historically, the annual returns have hovered around 20 percent for the industry, according to Venture One Corporation, a San Francisco-based venture capital research group.
The venture firm, Hummer Win blad Venture Partners, said it had led a $15 million round of investment in Napster, which enables Internet users to exchange music files kept on their own home and office computers. The company, founded last September, had previously raised only $2 million in capital.
Hummer Winblad also said it had placed one of its partners, Hank Barry, as the company's interim chief executive.
...
Hummer Winblad is also an investor in Liquid Audio, which is working with recording companies to develop technologies for the secure transfer of digital music over the Internet.
...
The level of Hummer Winblad's investment is not unusual, though it is atypical for a venture capital firm to install one of its own partners as an interim chief.
The university was not nearly so lucky in 1997, when records show that it invested in a single fund, raised by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. That was a very good year for venture capital, with the average fund raised that year earning 53.5 percent annually, according to the research firm Cambridge Associates.
Yet Hummer Winblad fell into the lowest quartile that year, providing a negative annual return of 15.3 percent over the life of its fund. The endowment lost $3.6 million on its $10 million investment in Hummer.
Sending a chill over the embattled venture-capital industry, Universal Music Group and a unit of EMI Group PLC have sued Hummer Winblad Venture Partners for its investment in Napster Inc., the now-defunct music-sharing service.
The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeks unspecified damages and alleges that the venture-capital firm contributed to copyright infringement through its financial support of Napster. It is the latest salvo by the music industry to target not just users, but backers of file-sharing technology. In February, a group of music publishers sued Bertelsmann AG over the German media company's $85 million investment in Napster.
Hummer Winblad, a well-known San Francisco-based venture capital firm invested far less, some $13 million, in May 2000. The plaintiffs allege in their complaint that the investment was made at a time when Napster already was embroiled in a legal controversy over copyright infringement.
When it comes to venture capital investing, it pays to think small and boring.
That seems to be the lesson from a rare inside look at the track record of one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent software investors. Set up 17 years ago by a former basketball star and a software veteran, Hummer Winblad has racked up a compound internal rate of return of 41 per cent for anyone lucky enough to have been with it from the start, according to data shown to the FT.
During that time, though, it has also foundered on some of the technology industry’s biggest follies, including making nearly $300m worth of investments at the time of the dotcom boom that have so far brought returns of only $21m. It has also seen a general deterioration in its returns as the scale of its investments has grown.
In late May, Hummer Winblad poured $13 million into Napster, for which it got a 20% interest in a Website with 20 million fanatical young customers but no revenues, no business model, and half a dozen pending lawsuits. As a bonus, the purchase put John Hummer at the center of one of the defining battles of the Internet.
Arrayed against Napster are the giants of the music industry, the five "majors"--Sony, Bertelsmann, Universal, EMI, and Warner (owned by FORTUNE's parent, Time Warner)--representing a collective $250 billion in market value. Their trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is seeking an injunction that could put Napster out of business by the end of summer. Most of Silicon Valley thinks Napster is doomed.
...
In many ways Napster is a huge departure for Hummer Winblad, which has never before taken on this kind of high-profile crusade. The firm was the first VC outfit to specialize in software. (Hummer's named partner is Ann Winblad, a successful software entrepreneur who may be most famous for being Bill Gates' former girlfriend.) Hummer Winblad tends to play a conservative game: Of the 70 investments the partnership has made since 1989, Hummer counts only half a dozen failures; on more than 40, he's cashed in via IPOs or acquisitions. Among the big scores: Wind River (market cap: $2.4 billion), a pioneer in operating systems for everything from cell phones to auto brakes; $870 million HomeGrocer.com; and $270 million Liquid Audio, which ironically enough makes digital security to prevent the pirating of recorded music. Overall, Hummer Winblad has provided its investors with a decade of respectable (though not sensational, in the VC world) annual returns of 50%.
Now Hummer Winblad is creating a worldwide tournament modeled after college basketball's March Madness--complete with Final Four playoffs. The winner gets an unspecified amount of funding. (The model is no coincidence: Partner John Hummer played center for Princeton University in the 1969 NCAA tournament before going on to the NBA with the Buffalo Braves and Seattle Supersonics.)
Malone, Michael S.; Pannill, Shelley; Frankel, Alex; Freiburghouse, Andrew; Kinik, Karina; Logan, Toni (2000-05-29). "The Best VCs". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2018-08-29. Retrieved 2018-08-29.
The article notes:
Even her childhood nickname, "Tecky," was an augury of what was to come. Once known primarily as a journalist, software company founder, and Bill Gates' vacation pal, Winblad (who is a columnist for this magazine) has proven herself among the most capable--and, as our survey found, most admired--VCs in the industry. Her rare high school combination of cheerleader and valedictorian seems to have made Winblad uniquely suited to Hummer Winblad's greatest strength: taking on small, early-round startup teams and teaching them to act like real companies. She isn't short on guts, either. When she and John Hummer (a former center for the Seattle Supersonics) founded HumWin in 1989, their $35 million software-company-only fund was met with skepticism. After all, how could anybody make money with code? Well, just ask Wind River, Berkeley Systems, and Powersoft, some of Winblad's biggest plays of the era. Her current hits? Liquid Audio, Net Perceptions, and MyPrimeTime. Though some entrepreneurs complain that her high profile--as one of the first women in the VC industry--saps her effectiveness, Winblad is quick to point out that she pushes her portfolio companies in virtually every TV and press interview.
Taking its toll. Even some traditional venture firms brought companies to market without much evidence that they would fly. Consider Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, a San Francisco firm that invested in Pets.com as well as the controversial music-sharing service Napster. It has backed seven companies that have gone public since 1997, and the average return for investors was -89%, according to Venture Economics.
Pets.com was a prime example. Hummer Winblad invested its first $500,000 in the company in March, 1999, the same month that Wainwright joined as chief executive. Then, with several rivals rolling out similar sites, Pets.com boosted its workforce from four in March to 270 at the end of 1999.
…
All this didn't stop Hummer Winblad and Merrill Lynch from taking the company public in February, 2000. Blodget put his first buy recommendation on the stock in March, then reiterated his recommendation three more times before he finally downgraded the stock to accumulate in August. The stock, which had gone public at $11 a share, was then at $1.31. "We were definitely late in downgrading the stocks," he admits. Wainwright says Pets.com was "extremely well-managed" and that its return rate was less than 5% of sales.
[Ann Winblad] worked as a corporate strategy consultant for a few years and then, in September 1989, co-founded Hummer Winblad Venture Partners with former pro basketball player John Hummer.
As venture capitalists, they heard pitches from people who thought they had promising business ideas and needed cash. VCs raise money to back young companies, hoping for big returns when a firm gets purchased or launches an initial public offering of stock. Early on, Hummer Winblad established itself as a discerning specialist firm backing softwaremakers and database firms such as Wind River Systems Inc. and PowerSoft Corp. The 1990s dot-com boom was less kind, however, as Winblad's firm sank millions into such eventual clunkers as Pets.com, Gazoontite Inc. and Homes.com. Since the downturn, Hummer Winblad has shifted its focus back to software -- a dramatically more crowded sector than when Winblad first became a programmer.
Even at her firm, meanwhile, the VC gender imbalance is extreme. There are two principals and seven investing partners, and all are men except for Winblad.
In total, Hummer Winblad has collected about $200 million from pension funds and institutional investors and distributed the money to nearly 50 startups.
Hummer Winblad's top picks have included Berkeley Systems, the makers of After Dark screensavers that was sold to CUC International for $13.8 million last year, and Arbor Software, a Sunnyvale database software firm that has doubled in market value since it went public in 1995.
Hummer Winblad also nurtured the growth of Wind River Systems, an Alameda firm whose stock has soared eight-fold to $36.38 yesterday from a opening of price in 1993 of $4.22, adjusted for stock splits.
Talking about technology and the workplace is a bit of a stretch for Ann Winblad and Bill Gurley, partners in Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms.
For them, technology is the workplace, and trying to distinguish between the terms is almost futile.
Both are utterly immersed in technology. It is not just a tool for getting work done, but the subject of almost every work-related conversation they have. It is what they use to plan their leisure time, the way they keep in touch with relatives, and the source of their wealth.
Bill Gates has gone into business with a woman he reportedly dated in the 1980s, writes John Cassy
Mr Gates, who is married and has two small children, has become a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, a venture capital firm set up by longterm friend Ann Winblad. Ms Winblad founded San Francisco based Hummer Winblad with the help of a former NBA basketball star in 1989 to invest in start-up software and technology companies.
...
Hummer Winblad was set up by Ms Winblad and John Hummer, a venture capitalist who spent six seasons playing professional basketball for the Seattle Supersonics and the Buffalo Braves. The pair manage an estimated £300m in funds and recently invested around £10m in theknot.com, a website devoted to weddings.
Keep passes WP:CORPDEPTH as per the multiple independent reliable sources coverage as shown above by Cunard including rs book sources, newspaper sources, magazine articles, regards Atlantic306 (talk) 17:50, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
KeepWP:HEY persuasive sourcing added during this discussion.E.M.Gregory (talk) 14:20, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
