Private Equity
2 min read · 17 December 2008
The National Venture Capital Association this morning released its third-annual “Predictions Survey,” and the VCs polled aren’t anticipating their best year ever. Among the survey’s findings: * 92 percent of VCs predict a slowdown of investments. * 61 percent think the decline will be more than 10 percent, and that capital committed will fall below $27 billion in 2009. * 53 percent say they’ll invest in the same or more companies next year, though they’ll invest less money across the board. * 48 percent of VCs polled said they thought the clean tech sector would see the most growth in 2009.
1 min read · 17 December 2008
Last week, the venture firm @Ventures put together a presentation critical of the clean tech venture industry. In the slideshow, which has been making the rounds, @Ventures suggests there are a number of unsustainable trends in the sector right now, including a glut of late-stage funds putting excessive amounts of capital to work in companies with no exit opportunities on the horizon. (A full 80 percent of the “herd” is moving to late-stage and “balanced” investing, says @Ventures.) I thought it made sense to ask David Lincoln what he made of the presentation. Lincoln has been on the scene a lot longer than many of his peers in the industry, having cofounded EnerTech Capital in Wayne, Pa., in 1996 and before that, a private equity firm called Deven Resources that developed and acquired energy properties.
8 min read · 16 December 2008
Silicon Alley Insider has just taken its best shot at estimating who of the tech titans has, in this crummy economic climate, lost the most of their personal net worth. The biggest losers, according to SAI's calculations? Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who've seen their net worth reduced by half this year; they're down a stunning $12.1 billion. So sad. Former CEOs Meg Whitman and Jerry Yang aren't doing so well, either. You can see for yourself here.
1 min read · 16 December 2008
1 min read · 16 December 2008
Four-year-old BitTorrent -- whose free, open-source file-sharing applications are used by millions of people to distribute large software and media files -- looks to be in some pretty grave trouble. TechCrunch reported this morning that the company recently returned $17 million in funding that it had received last spring from Accel, DCM, and DAG Ventures. In a letter to shareholders, BitTorrent said that the move was made because it was “not gaining sufficient traction.” BitTorrent isn’t the first company to agree to unwind a funding, but it’s certainly not common, either. Foundry Group partner Jason Mendelson, a trained attorney who worked at Cooley Godward Kronish and then as general counsel for Mobius Venture Capital, tells me he’s only seen a “handful” of deals get undone in his career, saying that such dust-ups typically indicate that “this dog doesn’t hunt.” I chatted with Mendelson earlier today about how protected VCs are from companies that don't "gain sufficient traction." Read our conversation after the jump.
3 min read · 15 December 2008
2 min read · 12 December 2008
1 min read · 11 December 2008
Thanks to Portfolio for pointing out an incredible story about IBM’s largest individual shareholder, the inconspicuous director of a funeral parlor in Binghamton, New York, who died recently at age 90 after leading a happily frugal life with his recently deceased wife. Evidently, the mother of the man, Robert McDevitt, was secretary to the president of the precursor to IBM in the early 1900s. When she died, she passed her shares along to her son. Now, an inventory of his property suggests he was sitting on $250 million -- nearly all of which he willed away to schools and organizations dear to his heart. Georgetown University, McDevitt’s alma mater and the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university, is getting the lion’s share of his estate. He bequested $75 million to the school, its biggest gift ever. He also left a big chunk to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse, including
1 min read · 11 December 2008
Gurbaksh Chahal, the 26-year-old founder of ad network BlueLithium and, more recently, the e-commerce startup gWallet, stars tonight in the season premier of Fox's "Secret Millionaire." Here's the premise: Each week, a supremely wealthy someone is dropped into a poor, crime-infested neighborhood for a week. Going in undercover, his or her job is to meet as many people as possible and, hopefully, be lastingly transformed by them. As I've said before, it's exceedingly easy to mock “G” as Chahal refers to himself. Chahal, who sold BlueLithium to Yahoo last year for $300 million, is ostentatious, from his white Bentley to his $7 million gold-appointed San Francisco penthouse that he calls the "G Spot" to the um, immodest, picture featured here, which was up at his Website for a time. I'm reluctant to judge. I've only met him once briefly before, and he seemed nice (and surprisingly unassuming).
3 min read · 11 December 2008
