Private Equity
2 min read · 06 June 2011
(Reuters) - Groupon CEO Andrew Mason once thought of the hundreds of companies copying his business plan as plagiarists. Now, he joked to a crowd of investors and analysts this week, he just thinks of them as the competition. The 30-year-old executive's light touch belies the serious threat that Google, LivingSocial and any other company with a daily deals website poses to Groupon, which on Thursday filed to go public. But it is also the sort of quip that helped Mason win
4 min read · 04 June 2011
(Reuters) - Online radio company Pandora Media Inc. filed terms for $109.5 million IPO on Thursday, as it moves ahead with an offering that could tap into the recent investor enthusiasm for Internet stocks. The company and its owners will sell 13.68 million shares at $7 to $9 apiece, according to an amended filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Pandora will sell 5 million of the shares. At the mid-point of the proposed range, the offering would fetch $109.4 million, more than the $100 million the company had used as a preliminary amount in its first filing in February. Pandora has raised about $65 million in venture capital since its founding in 2000, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). The Hearst Corp. and five VC firms now own 72% of the
2 min read · 03 June 2011
(Reuters) - Struggling to wean herself off soft drinks, Kara Goldin inadvertently discovered her own bottled water business. "I was drinking a ton of Diet Coke, vitamin waters, a lot of things that I thought were actually hydrating me, but were not," said Goldin, the 43-year-old founder and CEO of Hint, whose business started innocently with her adding fruits such as lemons, limes and raspberries to "boring" bottled water. What began at her kitchen table six years ago as a way to get healthier has morphed into a serious business with 26 employees and millions in revenues. (See video interview below.) Hint, which was initially bootstrapped with $50,000 of Kara Goldin's personal savings, has raised more than $10 million in outside capital
3 min read · 03 June 2011
1 min read · 02 June 2011
1 min read · 02 June 2011
2 min read · 02 June 2011
2 min read · 02 June 2011
2 min read · 01 June 2011
3 min read · 01 June 2011
