Private Equity
Venerable San Francisco law firm Heller Ehrman voted to dissolve last September, ending a practice that was nearly 120 years old. Now we're starting to learn more details of why it collapsed. According to a document filed in bankruptcy court last week, what undid Heller Ehrman was an overambitious strategy to expand globally, including its 2003 acquisition of the Venture Law Group, a Silicon Valley law firm that specialized in high-tech startups. (Several of the VLG folks are now at Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto, which calls itself the number 2 firm in the nation for representing venture-backed companies in financings.)
2 min read · 12 August 2009
2 min read · 11 August 2009
1 min read · 11 August 2009
Alpha venture capitalist Mike Moritz quizzed California Controller John Chiang this morning about the state’s massive fiscal problems at a Churchill Club breakfast hosted by Microsoft Silicon Valley. Although Moritz declined to discuss how these problems might affect Sequoia Capital -- or say anything at all about the event to peHUB -- he asked Chiang whether he thought California was “ungovernable,” and how he proposed to fix a budget deficit that is now running $26 billion, the largest in the state’s history. In addition, California’s cash deficit is in danger of rising to $25 billion by April of next year, Chiang said. “When many of us came to California 30 or so years ago, California had a reputation around the world as the place that knows how. Today California is known as the ghost of the future of the U.S.,” Moritz said to Chiang. “How acute do you think the dilemma is?”
3 min read · 09 July 2009
