Private Equity
Even though co-founder and CEO Jack Abraham doesn't yet know how the company is going to make money. Milo.com's Web site lets you search the inventories of local stores to see whether they have products you're looking for -- then you can go to the store, touch them and buy them if you still want them. Abraham said he started the site out of frustration. "I do the majority of my shopping locally, and it's hard to figure out what's available without driving to the stores or calling them." So far Milo.com has partnered with 42,000 stores in 30,000 U.S. communities -- Costco is still missing, and so are mom-and-pop stores.
1 min read · 25 November 2009
What the company does exactly is still a mystery, but it was founded in December by two veterans of Facebook -- Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. A couple of former Google engineers are also involved. Benchmark's Matt Cohler, himself a Facebook veteran, joined the board and has invested personally in Asana in addition to leading the Series A round. Andreessen Horowitz -- Andreessen and Horowitz have also invested personally -- is the other venture capital firm backing Asana. Cohler said that while it's too early to say much about the software, it will "enable individuals and groups, especially groups, to manage knowledge work -- a problem that hasn't been well addressed by existing solutions, despite e-mail, wikis, Lotus Notes."
2 min read · 24 November 2009
Who knew that the world of renting college textbooks could be so competitive -- or so dramatic? Following Chegg.com's announcement last week of its whopping $112 million in funding -- $57 million in Series D equity led by Insight Venture Partners, plus $25 million in credit and $30 million in debt -- BookRenter.com rushed out a press release today announcing that it too had raised funding: A $6 million Series A round from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital. BookRenter's round was really raised back in September, and both BookRenter's CEO, Mehdi Maghsoodnia, and one of Bookrenter's venture backers say they were wary of announcing it at all.
3 min read · 24 November 2009
Two weeks ago it was AdMob, and today it's Teracent, a three-year-old startup with technology that automatically customizes display ads depending on which geography they're being shown in, when they're being viewed and so on. Teracent had raised nearly $7 million, according to Thomson Reuters -- around $5 million of that in Series A funding from NEA back in March 2007. Neither NEA's Krishna "Kittu" Kolluri nor Peter Sonsini, who are on Teracent's board, was available for comment, and Google is not disclosing the terms of the acquisition or many details. But one VC who's invested in advertising startups -- Bo Peabody of Village Ventures -- told me recently that Google has been behind in display ads, partly because of the difference in how companies and VCs on the East and West Coasts view advertising. So is Google catching up there too?
2 min read · 23 November 2009
So says the Bay Area Council, which is talking up a 3,000-page report documenting the ever shifting relationship between India and the San Francisco Bay Area -- home to the second-largest population of Indians in the U.S. after New Jersey-New York. Indian technologists who came to work in Silicon Valley in the 1980s would often stay on and sometimes start companies. Vinod Khosla, for example, not only co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 but also became one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists. By 1999, nearly a quarter of Silicon Valley's engineers were Indian, according to AnnaLee Saxenian at U.C. Berkeley. and around 6% of valley companies had Indian CEOs. Things changed after 9/11, when the tech bubble collapsed and restrictions on visas tightened, and Indians who came to work in Silicon Valley more often returned home. Now, despite the very close ties between the two regions --
2 min read · 23 November 2009
This is one conclusion of a study from UC Davis and the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives in Palo Alto, which looked at 400 of the largest publicly held companies in California to see how many of them had women board members or executives. They didn't find many -- women hold only 10.6% of the board seats and executive jobs at these companies, and only 15 of the companies have women CEOs. At 30% of the companies, both board members and executives were all male. One of the counties that ranked the lowest for women-led companies, by the way, was Santa Clara, which is in the heart of Silicon Valley. Still, companies that do have women in leadership positions also had better environmental records.
1 min read · 21 November 2009
All week, Startuphire.com and the National Venture Capital Association have been sending out press releases highlighting U.S. jobs created this year by venture-backed companies -- more than 35,000 to date. They also asked employees of these startups to submit 140-character testimonials on what inspires them to get up and go to work each day. Here are some of them: "Our CEO is wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt right now. At bulbstorm.com, we're too busy innovating to iron!" Bart Steiner, CEO, Bulbstorm
2 min read · 20 November 2009
Or at least partially with credit and debt... Insight Venture Partners led a $57 million Series D round of equity funding into the company this week, plus helped provide a $25 million credit facility. In addition, Chegg.com got a separate $30 million debt facility from Pinnacle Ventures and TriplePoint Capital. Total equity funding is now over $90 million, according to Thomson Reuters. Chegg.com bills itself as the Netflix for college textbooks -- students order books from its website and receive them in the mail, along with a prepaid envelope to return them -- and it needs enough financial flexibility to be able to accommodate its fast growth, according to Insight's Deven Parekh.
2 min read · 20 November 2009
"This is the transaction everybody is watching," said Philip Yau, managing director of UBS Private Funds Group, at Buyouts West here in Beverly Hills, "and this trade is driven completely by the upcoming next couple of years of capital calls." Stanford's capital calls haven't happened yet, Yau says, and he estimates that the university needs to raise anywhere from $700 million to north of $1 billion, despite raising $1 billion in a bond offering last spring. "These are big numbers, so they've set up a process (where) if you're not a meaningful buyer it doesn't make sense to participate. So secondary funds should be coming in -- that's probably what's going to happen. "The portfolio is a very good portfolio on the private equity side --
2 min read · 19 November 2009
The Forbes Midas List may be gone, but AlwaysOn has stepped into the breach with what founder Tony Perkins says will be its first annual VC100 list of top performing venture capitalists. Winners were selected based on four years worth of data -- from Oct. 1, 2005 through Sept. 30, 2009 -- and were judged on "total number and dollar amounts of successful M&A and IPO deals from their portfolio companies. For IPOs, AlwaysOn examined opening market capitalization as well as subsequent stock performance, relative to the Nasdaq. For each investment, AlwaysOn counted one lead investor per firm, in order to identify the true dealmakers. Much of the data required for a thorough evaluation remains private and inaccessible..." No one from Kleiner Perkins made the list, which is unusual, and it isn't ranked -- the copy I have is in alphabetical order. Get it after the jump:
1 min read · 18 November 2009
