Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.
“In the Studio” kicks off some special holiday episodes this weekend by hosting a repeat entrepreneur, a product maker and marketer, a technology operator, a venture capitalist, an innovator in the venture model space, and a longtime friend of TechCrunch.
Ron Palmeri, founder of MkII Ventures (pronounced “Mark 2” Ventures) is one of my favorite kind of entrepreneurs, the type who has throughout his career helped start, incubate, and bring new ventures to market, all while not trying to seek too much attention for himself. After a career in business development in Silicon Valley, Palmeri helped Minor Ventures help start companies from scratch for about five years, and as that fund closed, he wanted his next fund to be a more interwoven into the startup community.
The result is MkII Ventures, where Palmeri launched the model alongside co-founding a company, Prism Skylabs, to prove out the concept. As Palmeri sees it, his latest move is a generational variant on his time at Minor, but now MkII can build deeper relationships with founders in the community, take outside money, and still make a small handful of investments each year to launch new companies, like they did with Prism. Overall, Palmeri’s moves fit into the narrative of the evolution of venture capital, especially as it pertains to early-stage investors. Earlier this year, in fact, Palmeri moderated a great panel at TechCrunch Disrupt with Harj Taggar of Y Combinator and John Borthwick of Betaworks where many of these issues were discussed. All in all, the traditional venture model continues to undergo changes, especially at the early stages, and innovators like Palmeri are pushing the limits of what new models can do in the future.