Software for sure. Life-sciences is an interesting area too but does not lend itself well to produce venture-style returns within, say, seven years. Venture capital is not the proper investment vehicle for life-sciences as the asset unless explicitly redefined for it, as I wrote early when renowned venture capital investor Vinod Khosla jumped foolishly head-first into green-tech, equally ignorant to the pertinent rule below.
A big mistake made by many asset-managers and other limited partners, and subsequently by aspiring venture capitalists, is that the investment vehicle must follow the nature of the asset, not the other way around.
Software is ideally suited to produce venture-style returns because its impact is immediate (in the cloud), its distribution is cheap, and its capacity for renewal is constant. Not so with life-sciences, bogged down by much more lengthy acceptance and maturation trajectories outgrowing the vintage of many a venture capital fund.
