Private Equity
1 min read · 28 February 2009
Hard hit by Wall Street’s collapse, devauled public companies are proving too irresistible for VCs to ignore. “We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in interest by venture capitalists in small cap issuers,” says Steve Fletcher, a managing director at GCA Savvian in San Francisco, who says his investment bank began receiving “many more calls” from VCs beginning in November and December. “Especially in life sciences, biotechnology, and the IT space, we’ve seen a proliferation of venture firms, coming to us and saying, 'We’d love to see the PIPES you’re doing,” says Mark Weissman, vice president of equity capital markets at the investment bank Jeffries & Co. “We’ve done at least a dozen PIPE deals involving VCs in recent months.”
2 min read · 27 February 2009
In the midst of a deepening financial crisis, media training may not be top of mind for most VCs and CEOs, but Vickie Jenkins, a media maven who has worked with dozens of companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, says it’s more important than ever to know what you’re going to say before you say it. I just spoke with Jenkins, who spent 20 years as a radio morning news reporter, anchor and director in San Francisco before setting up her company, Performance Power Media Coaching, in 1999. Among other things, I asked her where CEOs tend to need the most help, how they can justify hiring her in today’s climate and what she charges.
6 min read · 26 February 2009
2 min read · 26 February 2009
Last night, while President Obama made his address to the joint session of Congress, some lawmakers in the room were apparently less interested in hearing his plans than in providing their Twitter followers with mundane streams of consciousness. As the Washington Post hilariously reports, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) tweeted as Obama entered the chamber, "One doesn't want to sound snarky, but it is nice not to see Cheney up there." "Capt Sully is here -- awesome!" typed Representative John Culberson (R-Tex.), who also live-streamed his breathless walk to the House floor for the speech using his camera phone and Qik, a Marc Andreessen-backed startup.
2 min read · 25 February 2009
Today, at a two-day conference in Miami called the Future of Web Apps, the Virgin Group revealed that Virgin Air is working on a Facebook Connect implementation so passengers can visit Facebook in the air, including to see if any of their Facebook "friends" are also on the flight. Imagine the status updates. "I'm in the exit aisle right now." "Waiting for in-flight sandwich." "I smell like airplane bathroom." For more details, click here.
1 min read · 24 February 2009
2 min read · 24 February 2009
I'd guess a few VCs and buyout pros wiped their brows after reading the latest report to conclude that index funds are the best place for investors to park their money. (PE funds escaped notice, while hedge funds and mutual funds were called out for their aggressive management fees -- expenses that often render outperformance meaningless.) More here on the new study, whose author, Mark Kritzman, president and chief executive of Windham Capital Management of Boston, says in its pages that “it is very hard, if not impossible to justify active management for most individual, taxable investors, if their goal is to grow wealth.”
1 min read · 24 February 2009
1 min read · 24 February 2009
University of Massachusetts professor and former derivatives trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who in 2007 published the best-selling book"The Black Swan" -- a term for unpredictable happenings, like suddenly seeing a black swan when you're expecting to see white ones -- has just predicted on Bloomberg News that our current financial crisis will be much harder to resolve than that of the Great Depression. Let's hope Taleb proves less prescient than his last two books. (His first book, "Fooled by Randomness" was published in 2001, months after the Sept. 11 attack.) Here's the video.
1 min read · 23 February 2009
