Private Equity
2 min read · 16 November 2010
3 min read · 16 November 2010
Fresh off of its sale of storage provider 3PAR to Hewlett-Packard, Menlo Ventures is backing Coraid Inc., a cloud-based storage solutions provider. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company announced this morning that it has raised a $25 million Series B investment led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners. Coraid, which develops Ethernet-based storage products, previously raised a $10 million Series A round from Azure and Allegis in late 2009. As part of the deal, John Jarve, managing director of Menlo Ventures, has joined the board of Coraid, which already includes Lara Druyan, a GP with Allegis, and Paul Weinstein, a GP with Azure. Menlo was interested in taking part in Coraid's Series A round, but it was still an investor in 3PAR at the time and “we tend not to back companies that are competitive to others in our portfolio,” Jarve says.
2 min read · 15 November 2010
My take on some notable PE and VC-related events and news in the past week. Questioning the Fanboy Fascination with Andreessen Horowitz In the last few weeks, I’ve friended an employee at Andreessen Horowitz, who I consider a smart guy and someone worth knowing and who always has smart tweets. By no fault of his own, he may be working at an overhyped firm. Or, at the very least, it’s a firm that has not yet generated the cash-on-cash returns that justify the amount of attention it has been getting. At least that was my takeaway from reading a story about the firm from my colleague Connie Loizos, who took a look at the media frenzy surrounding Andreessen Horowitz since it was launched in mid-2009 with a $300 million fund. Connie talked to social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School, who recently produced research suggesting that people are likely to see someone as competent if they’ve demonstrated expertise in just one area, even if they later display incompetence elsewhere. So whereas Andreessen and Horowitz are great technologists, the jury is still out on whether they’re investment geniuses. You be the judge on whether they’re overhyped. The post drew 17 responses, most of them in agreement with Connie's assessment. Reader Eric wrote: "Nice balanced article, Connie. It’s good to have at least one rational voice out there willing to do their own thinking, rather than simply serving up the pre-packaged PR flak that we seem to be getting from others. Kudos to Andreessen Horowitz for the savvy to tap the LP’s while they are enthusiastic for the unproven product, rather than waiting for the (possibly good, possibly bad) performance to manifest itself."
5 min read · 13 November 2010
2 min read · 11 November 2010
2 min read · 10 November 2010
1 min read · 09 November 2010
6 min read · 08 November 2010
2 min read · 08 November 2010
4 min read · 05 November 2010
