Overshooting and Undershooting: Scale Venture Partners’ Kate Mitchell and Rory O’Driscoll on the VC Pendulum Swing

By Wade Roush

Part of the point of opening Xconomy San Francisco last month was to put our ear to the ground in the world capital of venture investing. Toward that end, I sat down earlier this week with Kate Mitchell and Rory O’Driscoll. They’re both general partners at Scale Venture Partners, a Foster City, CA-based firm that focuses on helping startups through the middle stage of their growth—after they’ve proved that there are at least a few customers for their products, but before they’ve shown that there are lots of them.

That’s an unusual and tricky place for a venture firm to dwell, and it means that Scale’s team is heavy on partners with operating experience, especially in sales, marketing, and business development. In fact, Mitchell herself co-founded the firm in 1996 after working at Bank of America, where she had guided the development of the bank’s first Internet offerings. (Scale was known as BA Venture Partners through 2006, reflecting Bank of America’s majority ownership in its early funds. The bank has been a minority partner in Scale’s last two funds, a $400 million fund launched in 2007 and a $255 million fund launched this year.) O’Driscoll, meanwhile, has a background in manufacturing and has been a venture investor for nearly two decades, working with mobile, Internet, and enterprise software companies from Omniture to Box.net. More   

Money for the Middle Stage: Part Two of a Conversation with Scale Venture Partners

I sat down last week with Kate Mitchell and Rory O’Driscoll, both general partners at mid-stage venture firm Scale Venture Partners in Foster City, CA. The firm was interesting to me because it lives up to the name: The folks at Scale don’t invest in early-stage startups, where the nature of the product is often still murky, and they don’t invest in late-stage companies, where often all that’s needed to achieve big time success is more capital. Rather, they specialize in that crucial middle stage, where a company has a proven concept but needs to find the ideal market and scale up its sales process. More