Private Equity
While most of Silicon Valley has resigned itself to a future with three options—sell, acquire or fail—Lise Buyer has spent the last two years counseling companies on how to go public at her consultancy, Class V Group. I just spoke with Buyer, who first made her name as an Internet analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston in the ‘90s and later helped architect Google’s IPO. Among other things, we discussed the IPO picture going forward, and how a severe recession might impact her own path.
5 min read · 01 October 2008
Jeffrey Sohl, the Director of the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire has a proposition for VCs, and, well, they aren’t going to like it. His suggestion? That they return part of their funds.
2 min read · 30 September 2008
The NVCA and many VCs have complained for years about the IPO market. This year, when just seven venture-backed issuers have gone out, there's plenty of reason to feel disillusioned. But even in 2006, the best year for venture-backed IPOs since the bubble's burst, complaints were commonplace: the IPO market is hamstrung because of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, growing international competition for stock listings has made it tougher to pull off IPOs in the United States, etc., etc. Those claims are disputable. Less disputable is that VCs haven't been helping to create the Apples, the Googles -- companies with game-changing market capitalizations -- they once did. The numbers tell the story: of the most recent 100 venture-backed IPOs, a full 70 percent of them are under water, and 10 of them are trading 70 percent below their offering prices. That's not good for VCs, or anyone else. The full spreadsheet of issuers, IPO dates and where their stocks stood as of the end of yesterday, are right here. Take a look, and let us know what your take is.
1 min read · 30 September 2008
In the midst of what's been repeatedly referred to as the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, people are questioning the sanity of home shopping right now -- while at the same time becoming more obsessed with depreciating home prices.
1 min read · 30 September 2008
Steven Fletcher, a San Francisco-based managing director at the boutique investment bank GCA Savvian, talks with peHUB about what Wall Street’s meltdown means to smaller banks like his own.
3 min read · 29 September 2008
It's hard to believe, but some of the richest VCs in California -- power-broker billionaires -- didn't make Forbes's 400 list of the richest people in the United States.
1 min read · 29 September 2008
Fluidigm -- a South San Francisco-based biotech firm whose IPO plans coincided, not so nicely, with the blow-up on Wall Street nearly two weeks ago -- has finally withdrawn its registration statement after several postponements. In a release today, the company said that it will "wait for markets to stabilize." I hope for their sake and everyone else's that that wait isn't as long as it's looking right now.
1 min read · 26 September 2008
1 min read · 26 September 2008
With Washington bickering over a bailout package, the largest bank seizure in history, and general unease in the country about what comes next, I wondered how online advertising -- on which so many Valley companies are now depending -- might be impacted. For more insight, I phoned John Durham, formerly head of business development for marketing powerhouse Carat North America and today cofounder of Catalyst:SF, a consultancy brought into startups through their venture capital backers, including Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Battery Ventures. Read our Q&A after the jump...
5 min read · 26 September 2008
It’s hard to feel sorry for Hank Greenberg, who turned A.I.G. into one of the world’s biggest insurance company giants before getting the boot in 2005, during an accounting scandal. Still, watching his glorious mountain of money quickly disappear, it’s also hard not to experience an emotion that distantly borders sympathy right now.
1 min read · 25 September 2008
