Elevation Partners is denying a Fortune report that it is in the midst of raising its second fund. Kevin Albert, head of investor relations for elevation, tells me that a new fundraising is “likely sometime next year,” but that stories of a current effort seem to have been incorrectly extrapolated from last month’s hiring of ex-eBay executive Rajiv Dutta.
1 min read · 16 December 2009
1 min read · 16 December 2009
Kevin Delbridge is planning to transition out of his senior managing director role with HarbourVest Partners, the fund-of-funds and secondary fund manager he has been with for more than 20 years. He will remain with the firm in a part-time capacity, as a senior advisor. The move comes several months after Delbridge was named chairman of his alma matter, Western New England College. “It’s not a fulltime job, but it’s at least a serious part-time job,” Delbridge says of the chairmanship. “I know some people would have just said that they are fulltime and worked fewer hours, but I just can’t operate that way.” Delbridge’s transition becomes effective on January 1, and his LP advisory board positions will be filled by other HarbourVest staffers. Those relationships include: Accel Partners, Alta Communications, Camden
1 min read · 16 December 2009
My weekly video segment for Reuters Small Business was about university entrepreneurship, which David Lerner recently wrote is poised to take off. Per usual, I'm filming just a few paces from the home office:
1 min read · 15 December 2009
Shareholder Representative Services is the latest financial services firm to bring the funny with a holiday video. Yes it chooses a six-year-old song to parody, but at least includes a much more recent pop culture moment toward the end. Far from the year's best, but A for effort...
1 min read · 15 December 2009
Stanford University has called off a proposed secondary sale of alternative investment interests, which originally was aimed at providing around $1 billion in near-term liquidity. It's the topic of my weekly video spot with Reuters, where we discuss what the cancellation means for private equity, the secondary business and Stanford itself: Get more peHUB videos here
1 min read · 15 December 2009
Early last month I requested that CalPERS release the most recent carrying values of its ownership positions in Apollo Global Management, The Carlyle Group and Silver Lake Partners. Not in the funds, but in the management companies. These were huge investments, and one of them is smeared with Al Villalobos’ fingerprints. The public should know how they’re doing. CalPERS initially replied by saying that the information is released each year in CalPERS annual investment report (under the “expansion capital” section, for some reason). But here’s the problem: That information is absurdly out of date. Not just today, but as of the time of release. The pension system puts out its annual investment report in late January or early February of each year, but only reports carrying values for Carlyle, et. all though June 30 of the previous year. This is reporting lag on steroids (or perhaps on dope), and means that the data is largely irrelevant by the time it’s released. Moreover, it means that the latest information currently available is more than 18 months old! We’ve gone back and forth with CalPERS’ lawyers – who basically are doing the bidding of an embarrassed investment staff – and were most recently given two more detailed reasons for the lack of transparency:
2 min read · 15 December 2009
2009 is fast coming to an end, so we figured it was time to take a chronological look back at the year's top private equity stories. Consider it a timeline of sorts (a venture capital one will be posted later this month). Lots of scandals and failures, with a smattering of successes mixed in. Get it after the jump...
6 min read · 14 December 2009
Earlier this month, Markstone Capital Partners co-founder and chairman Elliott Broidy pled guilty to a felony count of rewarding official misconduct, as part of the New York pay-to-play scandal. According to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Broidy had bribed state pension officials with around $1 million worth of gifts, in order to secure a $250 million investment for Markstone. Not a bad barter, if you have no scruples and can get away with it (Broidy didn't, and he couldn't). Broidy immediately resigned from Markstone, and was replaced as chairman by a former Israeli ambassador to the UN. What remains unclear, however, is if Markstone investors will pull the plug. peHUB has obtained a copy of Markstone's fund PPM, which includes the following passage about early termination:
2 min read · 14 December 2009
Michael Kim announced this morning that he is leaving VC firm Rustic Canyon Partners, in order to launch a fund-of-funds shop called Cendana Capital. "I look at this as moving up the food chain," says Kim, who helped launch Rustic Canyon ten years ago. "I've really enjoyed by time as a venture capitalist, but now I'll be able to invest in the best managers across a wider spectrum of investment strategies." Cendana will begin raising its inaugural fund-of-funds early next year, with a $250 million target. It will be opportunistic in terms of investments, with no pre-determined allocations. "There are plenty of funds-of-funds focused on VC or focused on distressed, but we plan to be flexible and allocate on where we think the best opportunities are," Kim explains. "If that means international early-stage, then that's what we'll commit to."
1 min read · 14 December 2009
