Qualified Investors in Northern VA

I know, I know—this post has a really lame title. I had wanted to call it VC’s which actively invest in the DC metro area but I’ve included angels in this list as well. I’ve tried to be as thorough as possible, but this research was done several months ago when I was looking for a new job and desperately wanted to work at a startup. Unfortunately, I was not willing to relocate and the number of startups in Northern VA whose domains overlap with my interests and skills is rather low. So, without any further ado, here’s the list in no particular order:

If you know of any more VCs/Angels in our area, please leave comments. Also if you have opinions on any of these VCs, I’d be interested to hear those as well. I’ve only dealt indirectly with two of the VCs from this list.

What I’ve Been Up To

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had to place this blog offline for a bit. That was because I was looking for a job and any company that I’d want to work for would be savvy enough to google me and find this blog. Thus I didn’t want my previous writings interfering with my job search. I had what I believe is an excellent process for my job search which I’d like to detail in another post, in fact there are many things I want to post about related to my short break. I also took the Sean & JoEllen Mountcastle Foundation and Pyralid offline temporarily too. In the case of Pyralid, I stopped the consulting work when I accepted my new job (though the two products/services under development have been handed off to my business partner). Here are several of the topics I need to blog about soon:

Goodbye Cisco

My previous employer, Cisco Systems, has decided to restructure my business unit and as a result my choices were to either move or leave and since my family is quite happy in Northern Virginia, I decided to find employment elsewhere. The restructuring was necessary for Cisco, and personally I thought they should’ve taken action much sooner than they did. The company made a series of bad business decisions in the optical business, not the least of which was paying $6.9 billion for the start-up at which I worked. The world is moving to ethernet and IP and the focus should’ve been on leveraging the team’s existing experience in telecom (and SONET/SDH, in particular) to move to an IP-based platform. I was eager to see Cisco’s shift its image to a consumer-focused company—even though I think the new logo looks considerably worse than the old one. Even though I’m planning to get rid of my cable service in favor of FiOS TV, it would’ve been nice to see the Cisco enhancements to the SciAtl set-top boxes. And as a Cisco share-holder, the fact that consumer companies seem to have higher multiples has given the stock a nice little rise since early August. I’ll continue to keep my eye on Cisco and now that I’m no longer an employee I can blog about them much more freely.

Bye Bye Typo

Well, I finally decided to dump Typo. I was headed for Mephisto as I’ve been hacking on it quite a bit recently. But I decided that I may post more frequently if I didn’t start playing with the source code to my blog everytime I want to post. Thus I’ve switched back to WordPress which originally powered this site (when it was known as sean.mountcastle.org). I’ll post shortly about why my blog was ‘down for maintenance’ for the past month and I’ll also be working to get the old posts from Typo imported here.