Private Equity
An IPO market return won’t kill off private share trading sites. But it could cause a broader shift from buy-and-hold investments to more arbitrage-type transactions, with investors looking to profit from spreads between public and private valuations. So says Greg Brogger, CEO of SharesPost, the five-month-old site for buying and selling private company stock. The company just launched a new set of analyst reports on some closely watched venture-backed companies. When I spoke to Brogger, about the announcement, he told me that the site is also seeing a big increase in the size of transactions. “When we started, the average transaction size was $5k to $50k,” Brogger explains. But over the last few transactions, he adds, the size has increased substantially, to $200k to $250k.
2 min read · 15 December 2009
In this tough fund-raising climate, venture capital, venture debt and private equity firms are increasingly turning to the federal government’s Small Business Investment Co. (SBIC) program as a source of capital. In fact, this may be one of the best times to apply for SBIC funding, since the economic stimulus bill increased the maximum amount of SBIC leverage to $225 million for affiliated funds, up from $137 million previously. As such, next week, Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB.com) are hosting a webinar to help guide prospective applicants through the SBIC process. More information about the webinar can be accessed here. For a little more background, here’s a Q&A with Alan Roth, a partner at Wildman Harrold and one of the four panelists.
2 min read · 03 December 2009
Mission Bay Capital plans to seed bioinformatics startups, draws Brook Byers and other top VCs to its advisory board
3 min read · 01 December 2009
VCs share their war stories about raising money in the worst fund-raising market in 15 years
10 min read · 01 December 2009
Investment banker says he has been deluged with calls from companies seeking to register to go public
3 min read · 01 December 2009
2 min read · 26 November 2009
With consumer loans increasingly difficult to obtain, Americans are putting more effort into attracting lenders by monitoring and improving their credit scores. That's led to more traffic for monitoring sites. And it's resulted in an increasing amount of interest in the credit score industry from investors. Over the past two years, venture and angel investors have funded at least a half-dozen startups offering tools to track credit scores, view offers from lenders, and protect against identity theft. Last week, the latest credit score-focused funding recipient, San Francisco-based CreditKarma.com, announced that it raised $2.5 million in a Series A investment round to build up its advertising-supported business.
2 min read · 12 November 2009
Everyone knows the cost of starting up an Internet company has dropped precipitously over the past few years. But if current trends keep up, it could be so cheap that no one will need venture or angel funding to do it. That was a takeaway from a recent conversation with David Rose, the chairman of the New York Angels and head of early stage firm Rose Tech Ventures. Every few years, he says, the cost of starting an Internet company has dropped tenfold. Years ago, it cost about $2 million to get a strong concept to product launch. Shortly after the burst of the Internet bubble, the cost got down to a couple hundred thousand. Recent angel-funded companies have gotten there on $20k. And now, the cost is heading lower.
1 min read · 12 November 2009
More and more VCs face the difficult task of deciding when and how to wind down a portfolio company
10 min read · 01 November 2009
A123 and Echo Logistics pay off for backers, but Omeros disappoints
3 min read · 01 November 2009
