Private Equity
he fact that Twitter hasn’t figured out a way to monetize itself yet is no big thing to newly-minted VC Marc Andreessen, but media mogul Rupert Murdoch says it’s very much an issue. At an investor conference today, Murdoch, CEO of News Corp., told Reuters that he has no interest in buying Twitter because it hasn’t figured out a way to make money. “Be careful of investing here," he said. Then again, we're not sure if Murdoch has any credibility with regard to the Web. Remember, this is the same guy who bought MySpace and ran it into the ground.
2 min read · 08 July 2009
Lost in the shuffle of the July 4th holiday, the LogMeIn IPO produced one of the biggest returns for VCs this year—at least on paper. Mind you, there have only been six VC-backed IPOs so far. But still... LogMeIn (Nasdaq: LOGM) priced at $16 on July 1 and shot up to $20.02 by the end of the trading day. That was the second best debut of a VC-backed offering this year, behind only restaurant reservation service OpenTable (Nasdaq: OPEN), which rose over 59% on its first day. Following the IPO, five venture firms collectively held 10.8 million shares worth over $209 million at yesterday’s closing price $19.32. In addition, three of the VCs sold shares in the IPO for proceeds of more than $21 million.
2 min read · 08 July 2009
4 min read · 06 July 2009
3 min read · 06 July 2009
2 min read · 06 July 2009
Navin Chaddha joined Mayfield Fund less than three years ago, but he is already one of the firm’s most recognizable faces. The 38-year-old got his start as an entrepreneur at the age of 25 and successfully co-founded three VC-backed companies that were eventually acquired or went public: VXtreme, a VC-backed streaming media software company; iBeam Broadcasting, an Internet streaming media provider; and Rivio, which provided Web-based services to optimize operations for small businesses. Chaddha made the shift to venture in 2003, joining Mobius Venture Capital as an EIR, then transitioning to venture partner. A year later, he became a general partner at Gabriel Venture Partners, then joined Mayfield as a managing director in September 2006.
2 min read · 01 July 2009
A cleantech-focused VC fund can still draw them in
2 min read · 29 June 2009
From the Irony Dep't: Wired magazine E-i-C Chris Anderson has been accused of lifting material from Wikpedia for his new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review blogs today that he found “almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources,” including several from Wikipedia. Even though the content on Wikipedia is free, Jaquith notes that Anderson still would have been required to get a “creative commons attribution” license from the site and credit the Wikipedia contributors whose work he cited, which Jaquith says Anderson did not do. Anderson didn’t dispute Jaquith’s report, telling VQR in part: “All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…”
1 min read · 24 June 2009
2 min read · 08 June 2009
It’s common knowledge that VC funds have gotten considerably smaller over the past few years, but it’s always interesting to look at hard numbers. The recently issued “2009 NVCA Yearbook” shows that a little over 60% of U.S. venture firms (or 532 out of a total of 882 funds) managed $100 million or less in 2008. That’s quite a change from five years ago. As of 2003, about 50% of all U.S. venture funds (or (455 out of a total of 919 funds) managed $100 million or less.
1 min read · 28 May 2009
