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Stimulated by a lively conversation on a Venture Beat post, “Filmloop’s demise, the reputation of VCs, and how you can help,” I explored the Silicon Valley Board ties of ComVentures’ Roland Van der Meer.  I have no opinion on this subject and only wish to illustrate his board relationships.  I filtered-in inactive companies and his former boards.  The resultant relational map is below:

The above map illuminates the close-knit relationship between ComVentures and Roland Van der Meer.  Only Newfire, Softway Systems, and RangeStar Wireless are not linked to both (and they are all inactive companies).  From the map, there are 5 inactive acquired companies, 4 inactive public companies, and 6 active private companies - there are no active acquired or public companies on the map.  Of Van der Meer’s 17 total board memberships, 10 are former board memberships on inactive companies.  Only two VC Firms (Intel Capital and U.S. Partners) are co-investors in more than one active company and one person (Steve Foster, TPG Ventures) is currently on more than one board with Van der Meer.  Thus, the relational map indicates that Van der Meer’s current Valley connections are relatively sparse.  I next examined his Person-Investor map and removed Van der Meer as the target node to help identify person-investor clusters.

 The above map indicates how VC firms and board members are related to Van Der Meer (both current and past boards).  There is a current board tie to Steve Foster/TPG Ventures (as noted earlier), but also past board ties to Bruce Bourbon/Telos Ventures, Ho Nam/Altos Ventures, and Arnold Silverman/Discovery Ventures, as well as a tie to Partech International (Van der Meer’s previous VC firm).  All of the board members are representatives of VC firms.  Only Silverman and Bourbon are not directly tied to ComVentures.  This map illustrates the lack of Person-Investor ties in Van der Meer’s Silicon Valley network, particularly when factoring out direct ties to ComVentures.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Investor Analysis, In the news, Board Member Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.