Venture capital, done the Google way

From CNET News.com: After a little over a year in the venture capital business, Google now has 10 start-ups under its wing and plans further growth in 2010.

A mobile payments company called Corduro became the latest start-up to accept funding from Google Ventures on Monday, as fund executives hosted a wide-ranging discussion on the state of Google Ventures at Google headquarters. Google wants to invest about $100 million this year in interesting emerging start-ups, said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures.

Google Ventures launched in March 2009, but the company had not said very much about its activities in the intervening year. Over the weekend, Google Ventures launched a new Web site and disclosed that its team of full-time employees had grown to 16.

A company most known lately for snapping up start-ups left and right, Google has separate goals in mind when considering venture investments, said CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt, who is an assistant instructor for a venture capital class at Stanford University, said Google wants to emulate the strategies and tactics followed by the traditional venture capital firms that turned groves of fruit orchards in the southern Bay Area into Silicon Valley, but with a Google twist.

Google is interested in compelling start-ups that have computational problems, be they risk analysis, algorithmic processing, or some other complicated type of numerical challenge that is hard for a small company to pull off but second nature to Google. Companies that accept investment from Google can draw upon individuals from among Google's engineering team for specific needs: one Google user-interface design engineer, Braden Kowitz, helped an image-recognition company called Pixazza improve the usability of their Web site and tools.

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