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Photo
15th May 2012
Directed by Emmy-Award-winning filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Ballets Russes), this entertaining and inspiring documentary nimbly maps the creation of an industry that went on to become the single greatest engine of innovation and economic growth in the 20th century. Told by the visionary risk-takers who dared to make it happen—Tom Perkins, Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Dick Kramlich and others—the film also features the audacious industrialists behind such groundbreaking companies as Intel, Apple, Cisco, Atari, Genentech, PowerPoint and Tandem. Our lives would be dramatically different without the contributions that these venture capitalist pioneers and their entrepreneurial partners have made to the creation of life-saving drugs, personal computers and the Internet.
Reblog for the chance to win Something Ventured on DVD!
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Note
1st November 2011
Napa Valley Film Festival - aka There Will be Wine
November is here, ladies and gents. It is cold and it is terrible - unless you live in California! (We* hear there are parts of California that do get cold, but refuse to believe).
You’re probably looking for a way to zip through this, the second-most pointless of months (if you have to ask what the first is, you’ve clearly never lived through an April). Well. Well well. If you happen to be one of those fortunate California-dwellers, we have an activity for you - one might even call it a historic activity (or “an historic activity”**).
YOU should attend the FIRST ANNUAL Napa Valley Film Festival! It starts in a little over a week (going from November 9-13), and is a great opportunity for you to catch some great shorts (films not pants) and features… one of which is Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s Something Ventured.
The documentary is a look at the origins of some of the world’s most well-known companies (Atari, Apple, Intel, and so on), featuring interviews with many of the men (yeah, mostly men) who gambled to make them what they are (or were).
It’s screening thrice during the festival, and present at each screening will be the directors along with Jimmy Treybig and Dick Kramlich, both of whom were interviewed about the companies they founded (Tandem Computers and New Enterprise Associates, respectively) in the film.
You can see Something Ventured on:
Friday, November 11 at 2PM
Saturday, November 12 at 11AM, or
Sunday, November 13 at 8:30PM.
Locations vary, but we hear there will be WINE TASTING PAVILIONS.
As a fabulous bonus, if you send us a screenshot of your ticket purchase confirmation (on twitter, facebook, or here), we’ll enter you to win a copy of the film (not yet available for consumer purchase, i.e. EXCLUSIVE) on DVD!
Hear that? You can win a copy of Something Ventured on DVD! Just send us a screenshot proving you’ve purchased a ticket to the Napa Valley Film Festival.
Here’s hoping you squeeze some meaning into this November.
* Rachel has never been to California and is only vaguely familiar with the concepts of geography and meteorology.
** a monocle was donned by the author of this parenthetical suggestion.
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Video
7th October 2011
If you’re like me, you probably find money really confusing (other things you find confusing: most things). Making it, saving it, not spending it on The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath or some other book I’ll never get to (so I can, I dunno, PAY MY RENT) - these concepts are only peripherally familiar to me. Directors Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller (both responsible for the 2005’s Ballet Russes), however, have oodles of knowledge on the subject (informed in part, no doubt, by executive producers Paul Holland and Molly Davis). Their latest film, Something Ventured, tells the fascinating stories of the entrepreneurial gambles that resulted in some of the biggest successes in the history of business… ever.
As a nod to the (controversial, but ubiquitous) late Steve Jobs, we bring you this clip from Something Ventured in which Mike Markkula, one of Apple’s first investors (and CEOs), talks about the origins of Apple and his first impression of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. A note to all the gentlemen out there: investors do NOT like goatees*. Markulla isn’t the only man in the film to wrinkle his nose at the inexplicably controversial facial hair of Jobs and Wozniak (but for more complaints, you must see the film!).
Something Ventured is currently only available via educational screenings (for info on how to obtain an educational DVD, see our site)… but will be available for consumer purchase in April 2012. Stay tuned, and get to a screening in your area!
See executive producer Molly Davis discuss the film here, and for the full trailer, click here. While you’re at it, follow the film on Twitter!
*may only apply to 1970’s era investors
