Data scientists at Kaggle, a pattern recognition start-up in which Mr. Elbaz has invested, have matched previously separate data sets on buyers, colors and after-purchase problems.
Open Kernel Labs, a start-up in which Citrix has a stake, already lets smartphones run applications, multimedia and radio functions on a single processor, cutting manufacturing costs.
Koala is a mattress start-up in which Smith invests and whose logo he carries on the back of his very heavily-used bat.
Earlier this year, France's industrial renewal minister, Arnaud Montebourg, scuttled a deal by Yahoo to take a 75 percent stake in DailyMotion, a French Web video start-up in which the government holds a 27 percent share.
Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.
"I think his impact on green technology is huge," says Bill Gross, the serial technology entrepreneur and founder of eSolar, a solar power start-up in which Mr. Gelbaum has invested.
Several workers said that after working so much overtime they had tired of Mr. Bezos's mantra that it is Day 1 and Amazon is a start-up in which workers need to work hard.
"Marc has a view of the entire tech ecosystem that very few people have," says David Lieb, the boss of Bump, a wireless start-up in which Andreessen Horowitz has invested.His fans claim that Mr Andreessen's ability to draw insightful conclusions from these trends helps Andreessen Horowitz stand out from the crowd.
Tesco is one of the few companies that says it makes money from delivering groceries ordered online, and it recently exported its system to the United States in a deal with Grocery Works an online start-up in which Safeway owns 50percentt.
"It really makes a difference to the entrepreneurs and helps us attract some of the best deals and get them at the earliest stage," said Donna Novitsky, the Mohr partner who serves as the temporary chief executive of InLeague, an Internet payroll and benefits start-up in which Mohr has a stake.
I've signed a number of those forms myself, and I'll admit I've never thought about it until recently, when I read that Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center had been criticized for licensing patients' personal data to a for-profit artificial intelligence start-up in which the hospital holds an equity stake.
