Yesterday morning, Internet analyst Mary Meeker told colleagues at Morgan Stanley’s Monday meeting that after two decades with the bank, she had decided to leave New York for Silicon Valley and become a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Given Meeker’s reputation for brilliantly capturing where the Web is headed, the announcement couldn’t come at a better time for Kleiner Perkins. The firm has been working tirelessly to heighten its credibility in the social media world, after missing occasions to back Twitter, Facebook, Groupon, and LinkedIn, among others. Last month, most notably, the firm captured the world’s attention when it announced the formation of sFund, a $250 million fund created to invest in social Web companies. The question isn’t whether Kleiner Perkins will benefit from this marriage; it is what gains Meeker will see.
2 min read · 30 November 2010
Yesterday, I was able to catch up with Rob Chandra, a 10-year veteran of Bessemer Venture Partners, and its lead investor in India, which has attracted $40 billion in foreign capital this year and provided Bessemer with two IPOs. I asked Chandra to make the case for why more investors should refocus attention on the country; he did so easily. Our conversation, edited for length, follows. What's one of the biggest differences between investing in Indian companies versus those in the U.S.? In a lot of emerging markets, the investment opportunities tend to be working with families. In the U.S. context, you tend not to fund families.
5 min read · 26 November 2010
3 min read · 24 November 2010
2 min read · 23 November 2010
3 min read · 23 November 2010
Yesterday, I caught up with Doug Chu, a former investment banker turned head of the NYSE’s Silicon Valley office. It was a candid discussion that touched on a number of interesting data points, not all of them encouraging for the NYSE. 1.) Unsurprisingly, Chu agreed with Bill Gurley about there being a disconnect between what’s happening in Silicon Valley and elsewhere on the IPO front. In his widely read blog post of earlier this week, Gurley observed that the Valley has come to believe there’s a dearth of IPOs in part because many companies going public are based elsewhere in the country. Chu suggests Gurley should have included China in the conversation. There’ve been 122 IPOs in the U.S. this year, and 25 have been China-based companies listing in the U.S. – a huge percentage.
3 min read · 19 November 2010
Amy Cuddy has received widespread attention for her work in investigating snap judgments, an area on which she's been focused on since 1998. Interestingly, her most recent research suggests that you can get a lot further by connecting with people than trying to outsmart them. To glean more about Cuddy's latest findings and how to seize on them, I called Cuddy today at Harvard Business School, where she teaches courses in power and influence. Our conversation was edited for length. You believe there are really two critical variables that shape how we view other people. What are they?
6 min read · 19 November 2010
3 min read · 18 November 2010
Last week in New York, everyone was abuzz about one thing: Union Square Venture’s third fund. Multiple sources tell peHUB the New York-based venture firm is in the market, and there’s no end to speculation over the amount of money it plans to raise. Several sources told me they’d heard the fund was going to be twice the size as its second -- a $156 million fund that closed in 2008 -- with one source pegging the amount at $500 million.
3 min read · 16 November 2010
3 min read · 15 November 2010
