Breaking the VC Website Mold

In January, Fred Destin blogged about What’s in a (Venture Capital) Website. This blog did an excellent job of capturing the stereotypical VC website. For those of you less familiar with VC sites, they are likely to include:

• A lack of differentiation
  • “World class companies”, “World class entrepreneurs”, “Disruptive innovation”
• Generic Testimonials
  • “VC X has been [invaluable] [transformational] [momentously influential] [godlike in this abilities] and helped us transform our business from a dead end no hoper to a dominant world class player thanks to [an endless stream of incredibly valuable intros] [a relentless commitment to our success] [deep strategic insights delivered in an incredibly subtle and non patronizing manner].”

Something Destin didn’t touch on was the painfully bad web design of most VC sites. Whenever I am clicking around on the top 100 VC list I am shocked to see the ancient websites representing some of the nation’s top firms. The OpenView Venture Partners site was just as guilty if you clicked on our site just a week ago. Our design was dated, the interface was ancient and updates took a full week to implement.

Would we want our portfolio companies to follow this example? Certainly not. Was it a proper reflection of our firm? No way, José!

We are so proud to announce the launch of our new site which is a true reflection of our firm, our portfolio and our people. The site is content based and features case studies, research reports, videos and photos that tell the OpenView story through real examples. I love the tangible feel of the site. To me, it tells the user about OpenView in an authentic way that truly reflects our culture–the ultimate compliment for a website.

So I invite all of you to check out our new site and let us know what you think! Driving website traffic through an effective content marketing strategy. Gotta love it.