Storm is excited for the Qumu team’s recent combination with Rimage (Nasdaq: RIMG).  Rimage viewed this acquisition as transformational ,and clearly validates the vision Qumu (fka Media Publisher) had over 5 years ago about the importance of on demand and real-time video in the enterprise. Video assets have become increasingly important in the workplace, and the ability to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time has become a strategic differentiator to several Fortune 100 companies. The market has shifted in Qumu’s direction, and we think this combination will help accelerate the rapid growth they have experienced over the last couple of years. Although the early vision was correct, the timing for the market to acknowledge this took longer and the Qumu team did a great job driving a “nice to have” to a “need to have” solution for several key customers.
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This afternoon LSI Corporation announced that it is acquiring SandForce for $400 million in cash and assumed options.

We are excited for the team at SandForce and proud to have been a part of building a company that is helping to usher in a new era of storage. SandForce delivers solid state disk (SSD) processors that power volume flash memory in both high-end storage as well as consumer applications. The primary advantages of flash memory are that it is much faster, more reliable and consumes less energy than hard disk drives. Many of our limited partners and investors that have looked at investing at SandForce over the years will likely remember us saying that flash memory is the most disruptive force in storage since the floppy disk drive. We truly believed that when we made the decision to invest in 2006 as we saw the use of flash becoming more ubiquitous in devices like the iPod. We believed that as more consumer devices took advantage of flash, the price of flash would decrease and its uses in enterprise applications would increase. As the price of flash per GB came closer to hard disk drives, more applications would take advantage of all it had to offer including dramatically faster performance.
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Congratulations to the EchoSign team starting with Jason Lemkin, the founder and CEO!  Here is a link to the EchoSign blog that has more of the specific details regarding the transaction. Jason started EchoSign as a Storm EIR with a vision to transform how all contracts get signed using SaaS.  Five years later after Storm provided the initial funding, Echosign has grown to almost 1m contracts a month. Great job team Echosign.
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While I may sound obvious, passion for markets and technologies and ultimately for building a business is incredibly important to us as investors. Passion has a clear emotional connotation and I choose that word deliberately. Building a business is an emotional endeavor. It takes blood, sweat and tears and it seems just about impossible to me that one would be able to come out the other side without having had the experience been an emotional one in addition to all the other things like selling to customers, hiring a great team, raising money from venture investors and hopefully building a tremendous amount of value for all stakeholders.  Passion can also have a strong mix of (blind) faith and determination.
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