Private Equity
3 min read · 04 December 2008
2 min read · 04 December 2008
"When Chambers was paying the prices he was back in ’99, an acquisition was a good out. Today, a private sale doesn’t get us the returns we need to make us attractive to LPs as an alternative asset class." --Joe Schoendorf, a venture partner at Accel Partners, speaking both about the venture industry and specifically Accel -- which turns 25 this month -- at today's AlwaysOn conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif.
1 min read · 04 December 2008
2 min read · 03 December 2008
1 min read · 02 December 2008
First Round Capital, a four-year old venture firm based in suburban Philadelphia, is so far among the most active Internet investors of 2008. It has backed 17 new startups, and is tied only with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a much larger fund. As 2008 winds to a close, and the National Bureau of Economic Research officially declares a recession, I thought it made sense to check in Josh Kopelman, who founded First Round and whose past accomplishments include cofounding the companies Infonautics Corp., which went public in 1996, and Half.com, which sold to eBay in 2000. I wondered where he thought Internet investing might head from here, and how he plans to approach 2009. The economy is in a tailspin. Where does it make sense to invest online right now? The deals we think are the most attractive now are capital efficient and somewhat counter cyclical. Mint Software is a perfect example of a counter-recessionary business, one to which people are turning as they focus on their portfolios and saving money.
5 min read · 02 December 2008
The world’s only rehab clinic for patients believed to be online gaming junkies soon may be out of business. The two-year-old Smith & Jones Centre, based in Amsterdam, has concluded that just 10% of gaming “addicts” suffer from actual addiction issues, and that the rest are merely outcasts who can be rehabilitated with some tender loving care from friends and family. As clinic’s founder Keith Bakker said to the BBC: “The more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers - this is a social problem."
1 min read · 01 December 2008
While much of the country was happily preparing to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their families, Stacy Nicholas, the ex-wife of billionaire Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas, was suing to take control of her family's $600 million joint trust. Among her allegations are that Nicholas ordered his private investigators, who once dressed in gorilla masks, to follow her, and that he once said he was going to have her “whacked.” The Orange County Register, which has been following the travails of Nicholas and Henry Samueli, Broadcom’s other co-founder, broke the news last week. The suit is filled with the sort of shocking allegations that have become nearly synonymous with Nicholas, who was indicted in June
2 min read · 01 December 2008
A former designer who last month lost his job at Seattle-based Entellium has filed suit, saying he was told that if he didn’t sign a document waiving away his rights to wages, he would lose his eligibility to COBRA health insurance benefits. The designer, Leif Jensen, says he was given just 30 minutes to make a decision. As readers may recall, the software startup’s former CEO and CFO -- Paul Johnston and Parrish Jones -- were arrested in October and charged with having cooked the books in an effort to attract, and keep attracting, venture capital funding. Based partly on the perceived strength of its numbers, Entellium received financing totaling almost $50 million, nearly $19 million of which came from Ignition Partners. Entellium's other investors include Sigma Partners and Intel Capital. Jensen says that just before Johnston and Parrish were charged with fraud, he and others were let go
2 min read · 01 December 2008
4 min read · 27 November 2008
