Private Equity
Both TechCrunch and VentureBeat transcribed an interesting interview this weekend with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who spoke at Y Combinator's School for Startups in Berkeley on how Facebook got started. I think that intentionally or not, Zuckerberg, now 25, has done a lot of things right. He said he launched Facebook at schools that were "least receptive" to test the product; always works to build something that users want (investor Peter Thiel told him, "Don't mess it up"); limited growth when the economy got bad so Facebook could get cash-flow positive; and tries to make sure that employees are always learning -- even when that means they might not stay at Facebook forever. What interested me most, though, was the advice that Zuckerberg said he took from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.
2 min read · 26 October 2009
The DOE's newly formed ARPA-E -- an Advanced Research Projects Agency for energy modeled after the Defense Department's DARPA, which created the Internet -- handed out $151 million in funding today to 37 companies and projects. Some are venture-funded -- companies backed by Khosla Ventures, Polaris, North Bridge, incTANK Ventures and the secretive X/Seed Capital are on the list. But most are still projects inside universities, federal labs or big companies. Some are in stealth mode, and some don't even have Web sites.
1 min read · 26 October 2009
Or hadn't you noticed? Maybe that's because you don't work with enough women, who also speak in code -- a different one. In the interest of helping men and women solve the age-old problem of how to communicate better, so they can work together better, so women can make as much money as men, Claire Damken Brown and Audrey Nelson have written a book: "Code Switching: How to Talk So Men Will Listen." It's a primer for working women on how to speak, dress, and behave in a way that will make men take them seriously at the office. Nelson has spent her career studying women's issues and says nearly half of the clients for her consulting business are technology companies. She also works with government agencies, lawyers, financial companies and accounting firms. ("The worst," she says).
2 min read · 24 October 2009
The company raised another $7.1 million this month from its current investors -- Draper Fisher and U.S. Venture Partners -- but kept mum, allowing the new money to be revealed instead by an SEC filing. Marketing VP Jen Grant told me it's not a new round, but an extension of the $6 million Series B that Box.net raised nearly two years ago, in January 2008. (There was also a $1.5 million Series A round in 2006). "We decided not to go for a Series C given the economic climate," she said. "It's not the valuation we would want."
2 min read · 23 October 2009
In the wake of the uproar lately over Jason Calacanis and his demands that angel groups like the Keiretsu Forum let entrepreneurs pitch companies for free, Keiretsu's Silicon Valley chapter invited me to have breakfast with them this morning and attend one of their pitch sessions. It featured five entrepreneurs who'd made it through Keiretsu's screening process and on to the next hurdle -- a roomful of very tough judges. Setting aside the verbal gymnastics over whether Calacanis also charges entrepreneurs -- they can pitch at his and Michael Arrington's TechCrunch50 conference for free, but most of them pay to attend -- the two events could not have been more different. Going to TechCrunch50 was like hanging around with my kids -- who are noisy, energetic, and seem to be always eating -- while going to the Keiretsu Forum reminded me of the time I went to a Kiwanis Club lunch with my dad.
3 min read · 23 October 2009
A paper prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission by Northrop Grummon has some disturbing details on how Chinese hackers exploited "zero-day" flaws -- meaning flaws for which the manufacturer has no patch -- in Adobe's Acrobat Reader and Microsoft's WordPad, which just about everybody with a computer has, to steal information from U.S. corporate and government computers. The flaws were so serious that U.S. CERT (the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team) issued warnings on them. Apparently Adobe's took a month to fix. I raise this because even though there are several venture-backed companies selling protection against inevitable and all-too-common software flaws, the problem keeps getting worse.
1 min read · 23 October 2009
Grant Thornton confirmed that the study will be rolled out at a press conference on November 9th. It's been in the works for two years. One VC who's aware of it, Pascal Levensohn, said he was "shocked" when he learned what's in it. "It has really scary statistics about the secular decline in marketshare, globally, that all listed markets in the U.S. have been experiencing since 1997," he said. "This proves that (the IPO drought) has nothing to do with Sarbanes Oxley and the tech bubble. The reality is that America peaked in 1997 as a capital markets force in equities, and since then it's gone straight down and every other market has gone up."
3 min read · 22 October 2009
VCs investing in healthcare, medical device and biotech companies have to figure their charges will be impacted by Congress not just this year, but over the next decade, says ScaleVP's Mark Brooks. So planning investments in these areas can be tricky. On the one hand, he figures, 20 million to 40 million more people could have health insurance, which is good because they'd be buying more healthcare. On the other hand, details on how to pay for this extra insurance and stop ever rising healthcare costs have been scarce. One proposal in Washington is to tax insurance, medical device and pharmaceutical companies --
2 min read · 22 October 2009
The angel network is asking chapters to waive their presentation fees for "true startups" -- companies that have no revenue and less than $500,000 in capital and are trying to raise less than $500,000 from investors, said Randy Williams, Keiretsu's founder and CEO. Williams said the change is not a response to the recent attacks on the fees launched by investor Jason Calacanis -- who has promised to start his own angel network on Monday, November 16, unless Keiretsu and several other angel groups drop their fees -- but have been in the works for several months. Keiretsu also has no plans to drop fees for other entrepreneurs.
2 min read · 21 October 2009
Setting aside the fact that Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters/the NVCA/PricewaterhouseCoopers don't agree on what they are, you get an interesting batch of companies when you combine the two lists. Seventy percent of them (12/17) are in California, and nearly half -- (8/17) -- are in healthcare, most of them developing drugs or medical devices. There are four clean tech companies, two social networks and three outliers -- a wireless IT company, a company in Iowa that sells software for fundraising, and an oil and gas exploration company working in Africa. Only one (Solyndra) has raised over $100 million.
2 min read · 20 October 2009
