Private Equity
3 min read · 25 January 2011
3 min read · 20 January 2011
2 min read · 13 January 2011
Traditional venture capital firms are struggling to remain relevant to new company formation, the development of new technologies, and the capability of bringing new medical device technologies to market. Although my comments are specific to medical device venture investing, my friends in Silicon Valley will agree, if even only in a quiet moment of reflection, that the same applies in biotechnology and general technology investing.
2 min read · 05 January 2011
3 min read · 31 December 2010
As a super angel fund, our primary objective is to identify companies poised for extraordinary growth in markets that have huge potential headroom to fuel that growth. The three core markets I see for 2011 are: mobile, e-commerce and enterprise. Mobile is the way to go The dizzying explosion of mobile usage reminds me of the heady days of the internet in the early ‘90s. In roughly 12 quarters since their launch, the combined unit shipments of the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad alone have approached 120 million, easily eclipsing the 27 million unit reach of the Netscape browser in the same time period.
3 min read · 27 December 2010
3 min read · 20 December 2010
3 min read · 14 December 2010
Carried interest, essentially performance fees, for private equity firms should be taxed as income rather than capital gains. But Blackstone boss Stephen Schwarzman and many of his friends unsurprisingly object, sometimes to hyperbolic extreme. And the additional revenue wouldn't make much of a dent in the U.S. deficit. So despite the symbolic value, the idea is losing out to politics. The latest Senate plan to remove the carried interest loophole last week became a victim of the horse-trading around extension of Bush-era tax cuts that would otherwise expire at the end of the year - a negotiation that brought a tentative deal between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans on Tuesday.
2 min read · 08 December 2010
You know it’s a busy December when bank meetings are outnumbering holiday parties. By one calculation, thirty-one leveraged transactions launched last week, twelve on Wednesday alone. There were the de rigueur dividend recaps – Decision Resources, Earthbound Farm, Flexera Software, Harbor Freight, HDT Worldwide, Hyland Software, Novelis, and TARGUS. But there were also some genuine LBOs in the mix: Advantage Sales, FilmYard, Sunquest, Syniverse, Transtar, and UTEX. We run through the roll call for a subtle corporate finance point: That’s a lot of deals.
3 min read · 06 December 2010
