Venture firm,Mohr, Davidow, closing its satellite site in Seattle

Silicon Valley-based Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a top-tier venture-capital firm, is closing its downtown Seattle satellite office — the third such closure announcement in a month.

By Tricia Duryee
Seattle Times Eastside business reporter

Similar decisions recently were made by European-based Atlas Venture, which is closing its Seattle and Menlo Park, Calif., offices to focus more on its roots on the East Coast and in Europe. Cooley Godward, a California law firm serving the high-tech community, also closed its office in Kirkland this month, citing poor economic conditions.

Bill Ericson, who has been Mohr Davidow’s general partner since the office opened in April 2000, said the decision to close the office this summer was a matter of geography and time.

He tried video conferencing for partners’ meetings every Monday but preferred to attend them in person. He also sits on the boards of companies in the Bay Area and has to fly to the Bay Area headquarters two to three times a week.

"I have young kids (7 and 3), and they don’t like it, and I don’t like it much either," Ericson said. He will move his family to the Bay Area this summer and commute to Seattle from there.

"That’s the message I want to get across. I want to be very specific. We are not pulling out of the companies in Seattle. You will see us continue to come up here on a regular basis," he said.

Not so for Atlas Venture, which said it would stop investing in the Northwest, or Cooley Godward, which said Seattle’s tech community had been hit much harder than Silicon Valley and it didn’t want to wait for a recovery.

In addition to the move, Ericson said Mohr Davidow’s current investment fund will be cut to $450 million. The fund started at $850 million and was reduced last year to $650 million.

That follows trends by other funds, which have favored returning money to investors rather than having the pressure to invest that much capital in a poor economy.

In the Seattle area, Ericson has board seats at two companies Mohr Davidow invested in: digiMine and Vykor. In the Portland/Vancouver, Wash., area he sits on the boards of Sabrix, which just relocated to the Bay Area, and nLight Photonics.

The only other nonclerical staff at Mohr Davidow’s Seattle office — venture partner Bill Gossman and Entrepreneur-in-Residence Rowan Chapman — will leave the company when the office closes.

Tricia Duryee: 206-464-3283 or [email protected].

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