Evangelos Simoudis
Managing Director at Trident Capital focusing on investments in Internet and software businesses.
Prior to entering venture capital, Evangelos had more than 20 years experience in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering.
Evangelos earned a PhD in computer science from Brandeis University and a BS in electrical engineering from Caltech.
1Q13 Performance for Trident Capital’s SaaS Portfolio; In-Line Quarter for the Enterprise
This was a mostly in-line quarter for our SaaS portfolio companies, very much along the lines of what we have gotten used to seeing every 1Q. It started slower than our adtech and enterprise SaaS companies would have preferred but ultimately ended on the right note. The mid-upper enterprise market segment that makes up the primary target [...]
Corporate Innovation, Startup Formation and Institutional Venture Capital
I have been trying to reconcile two trends I’m seeing. First, large companies are acquiring venture-backed startups to accelerate their innovation efforts. Even as the R&D budgets and associated efforts of large corporations are increasing, they have not been keeping up with the accelerating pace of technology and business model innovation. These acquisitions fall in two categories. First, acquisitions as a means of jump-starting corporate innovation efforts and getting corporations into the “innovation flow.” Good examples of such venture-backed company acquisitions include Avis’ acquisition of Zipcar, Walmart’s acquisition of Kosmix and of Small Society, Wellpoint’s acquisition of Resolution Health, and…
Big Data Strategies for Online Advertising
Online advertising is helping corporations monetize the Internet by transforming the way corporations are interacting with and marketing to their customers and prospects. The effectiveness of online advertising is so dramatic that corporations are constantly shifting their budgets to the digital channel, taking share away from other forms of advertising such as print and radio. [...]
Big Data and the Internet of Things
The physical world (from goods to equipment) is becoming digitally connected through a multitude of sensors. Sensors can be found today in most industrial equipment, from metal presses to airplane engines, shipping containers (RFID), and automobiles (telematics devices). Consumer mobile devices are essentially sensor platforms. These connected devices can automatically provide status updates, performance updates, [...]
4Q12 Performance for Trident Capital’s SaaS Portfolio; Nice Way to End the Year
The year ended well for our SaaS portfolio companies, and particularly well for our online marketing and advertising platform companies. While Europe remained soft, NA more than made up for it. All of online advertising platform companies exceeded their budgets, in some cases by as much as 40%. We also saw margin expansion as several [...]
CES 2013 Report
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year attracted about 153K attendees (flat compared to last year) and had 3000 exhibitors (about a 15% increase over last year). Building from last year’s trend, this year CES was dominated by mobility and wireless Internet connectivity solutions. My focus continues to be on the implications of these themes [...]
Reviewing 2012 and Preparing for a Successful 2013
Happy New Year! After a longer than normal holiday break, I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on 2012 and provide my early thoughts regarding investment activities in 2013. During 2012 50 companies went public, the most of any year since 2007, but only 8 venture-backed companies during 4Q12, the lowest number in any quarter since [...]
3Q12 Performance for Trident Capital’s SaaS Portfolio; the Enterprise is Still Holding Back
This time I waited longer than usual to write my commentary on the performance of our SaaS portfolio because I wanted to have the benefit of the quarterly results announcements by the public SaaS companies so that I can better compare it to that of our own portfolio. Also, starting with this post I will start including in my commentary our adtech platform companies, e.g., Turn, Brightroll, Exelate, Appia, JiWire and Sojern, which, as I mentioned in my previous post, we view as part of our cloud computing portfolio. These companies offer SaaS platforms that are being used by enterprises,…
Trident Capital Update and Areas of Investment Interest
It has been awhile since I provided an update on our firm, the overall venture capital investment environment and some of the areas where we will be looking to invest during 2013. We recently met with our SaaS and Internet advisory boards so it was a good time to reiterate our firm’s investing posture, assess the performance [...]
Analyzing Social Analytics
Social (media, technologies, applications) continues to penetrate the corporate world. To date the penetration has primarily been driven by the demand to take advantage of Facebook’s massive reach and enable companies to get closer to their customers. More recently, companies started taking similar advantage of Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. The quick adoption of social by [...]
