Private Equity
At least so far. It was a little over a year ago -- the week the stock market tanked -- that Sequoia summoned Jive and its other portfolio companies to a secret meeting so they could lay out how bad the economy was and order their fledglings to cut costs. That meeting didn't remain secret long -- Sequoia's presentation, embedded below in case you've forgotten, was soon leaked all over the Internet. But it made a big impression on a lot of people, including the folks at Jive, who went back to Portland and laid people off.
2 min read · 20 October 2009
They rose to $4.8 billion last quarter -- up 17% from Q2, according to the latest MoneyTree report (based on data from Thomson Reuters, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association). Deals, meanwhile, fell only slightly to 637, a drop of just 3%. PwC's Tracy Lefteroff called the new numbers "very encouraging." So how come Dow Jones said on Saturday that venture investing was down third quarter to $5.1 billion, a 6% drop, in a trend that "points to prolonged correction, shakeout"? It depends on whose numbers -- and whose prognosis -- you believe.
2 min read · 20 October 2009
Accel has hired Neeraj Bharadwaj away from Apax, where he worked for a decade, to build up Accel's portfolio in India. So far, Accel has made early stage investments in India out of a $60 million seed stage fund it closed late last year. Now, however, it will also be making "growth equity" investments, meaning Bharadwaj will be authorized to write checks to mid-sized Indian companies for between $10 million and $50 million.
2 min read · 19 October 2009
Considering the billions of dollars the government is investing in this sector, you'd think venture capitalists would be angling to get a slice of it. But not all are enthusiastic. One firm that's wary is DCM, which has decided not to depend on government subsidies or renewable standards to drive the economics of their clean tech companies. "It reduces our field of investment opportunities, but that's what a VC is," said DCM's Tom Blaisdell, who talked to peHUB last week. "We're looking for a needle in a haystack anyway, and in any market it's our job to find those needles." Blaisdell wasn't enthusiastic when DCM first asked him to focus on clean tech,
2 min read · 19 October 2009
This is from Dow Jones VentureSource -- numbers from Thompson Reuters, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association come out Monday (and will be very different). A little over $5 billion was invested in U.S. venture backed companies last quarter -- a slight drop from second quarter and a bigger drop from last year. Six of the top nine deals were in healthcare, including Pacific Biosciences and Complete Genomics. The top three were WastePro, Facebook and Tesla Motors. Get data after the jump...
1 min read · 17 October 2009
Check out the federal complaint for insider trading against hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Management and several other people, including some of my Silicon Valley neighbors. Rajiv Goel, managing director at Intel Capital, has been charged in this case, as has Anil Kumar, director at McKinsey; Robert Moffatt, senior vice president at IBM; and Danielle Chiesi and Mark Kurland at New Castle hedge fund. They allegedly swapped and traded on insider information about Google, Intel, Clearwire, AMD, Akamai, IBM, Sun and several other companies
1 min read · 17 October 2009
That's because venture capitalists tend to underprice IPOs to benefit their own firms, according to the University of New Hampshire's Center for Venture Research, while the interests of angel investors are more closely aligned with entrepreneurs'. The center looked at all the companies that went public from 2001 to 2007 and figured out how they were funded -- whether their investors were angels, venture capitalists, both or none. Venture capitalists were prone to under-price IPOs (meaning the difference between the offering price and the closing price of shares was higher) because they hang on to their shares and distribute them to limited partners, said the center's director, Jeffrey Sohl.
1 min read · 16 October 2009
Almost no CEOs of emerging companies are planning to take them public, according to a survey by Foley & Lardner, and over 80% predict a stagnant IPO market for the next two years. (The law firm surveyed 230 people who either attended its bicoastal Emerging Technologies Conference in September or answered its invitation to be surveyed on Twitter). Not only are more executives planning to sell their companies, but more are accelerating the timing of a sale, a move that Foley attributes to their need for "survival capital."
1 min read · 16 October 2009
Steve Westly -- the former California gubernatorial candidate turned Silicon Valley venture capitalist -- issued a wake-up call today to U.S.entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who have hesitated to invest in clean tech -- especially in China. "No VC firm should be without a China strategy," he told an audience of several hundred people at a clean tech conference sponsored by Cooley Godward, a Silicon Valley law firm. "China will pass the U.S. in 20 years as the largest economy in the world. There are only two countries that matter -- the U.S. and China. They create 40% of the world's pollution, and the other 191 countries divvy up the rest....I go to China every 90 days -- China knows the big health issues they're facing." Despite the massive investments the U.S. has been making in alternative energy, smart grids and other clean technologies, the Chinese government is moving faster and is pushing the U.S. hard,
3 min read · 15 October 2009
NASDAQ OMX's Bruce Aust told peHUB on Tuesday that NASDAQ has a new "lower-tier listing market" in the works that will be aimed at emerging companies and at financially solid companies that can't meet the NASDAQ's listing requirements. The idea is to make it easier for companies to go public, which has been tough for over a year. Aust said NASDAQ has been working closely on this project -- which would operate in Boston -- with the National Venture Capital Association. Not so, says the NVCA.
2 min read · 15 October 2009
