Private Equity
With its bustling startup community, Utah offers more than just great skiing to entrepreneurs and VCs
10 min read · 01 November 2009
3 min read · 28 October 2009
Angel investors spent fewer dollars in the first half of the year, but stretched to fund a larger number of companies, according to a report released today by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. The report estimates that angel investments in the first half of 2009 totaled $9.1 billion -- a decrease of 27 percent over the first half of 2008. However, a total of 24,500 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in the period, a 6 percent increase from the same period a year ago. Jeffrey Sohl, director of the Center for Venture Research, says the data “indicates that while angels have not significantly decreased their investment activity, they are committing less dollars resulting from lower valuations and a cautious approach to investing.”
1 min read · 27 October 2009
1 min read · 23 October 2009
2 min read · 20 October 2009
The market’s positive reception to last month's IPO of battery maker A123 Systems has venture capitalists abuzz with optimism about doing more cleantech IPOs. Jim Watson, managing general partner of CMEA Capital, is part of that group. The firm, which was a later-stage investor in A123, has about 15 active cleantech investments in its portfolio. Watson says a couple of those are looking at filing to go public in the “in the next couple months.” Which ones? Watson didn’t say. One obvious candidate, based on others’ IPO predictions, is solar panel maker Solyndra, which has raised a whopping $512 million in venture funding to date. The firm also fits the criteria that Watson says a cleantech firm needs to go public in the current environment: a proven technology, a product that’s attracted customers and long term contracts, as well “considerable government funding.”
2 min read · 14 October 2009
2 min read · 07 October 2009
Grant Thornton put out a white paper today about why the IPO crisis is in fact structural, not cyclical. Much of it is familiar territory for those who’ve followed the what’s-wrong-with-the-IPO-market debate over the past year. Key culprits: A lack of research and marketing of research for small-caps, momentum-trading hedge funds squeezing out long term investors, cumbersome regulation, and even technology, for pushing out the profitable retail broker model. (Full report here) So what to do? I spoke to David Weild, co-author of the report, a senior advisor at Grant Thornton and former NASDAQ vice-chairman. He suggests turning the clock back, at least in some ways, to the idyllic IPO market days of the mid-1990s.
3 min read · 06 October 2009
Seven VC-backed companies have gone public this year, one more than last year
3 min read · 01 October 2009
It seemed to me that more of companies getting venture funding lately have names that begin with the least-used letters of the alphabet. But after wasting time trying to confirm this on ill-conceived database searches, I figured it’d be better to talk to someone who actually follows this stuff. So, I talked to Atoll Foden, president of Silicon Valley branding consultancy Brighter Naming, who says obscure letters are indeed in vogue. That’s largely because, with a million-plus domains getting registered each month, all the obvious ones are already taken. “X, Y, Z and Q names are fabulous names right now,” Foden says. “It solves a lot of legal problems because there aren’t many words in the dictionary beginning with those letters.”
2 min read · 30 September 2009
