Private Equity
4 min read · 31 December 2008
6 min read · 19 December 2008
4 min read · 16 December 2008
3 min read · 15 December 2008
3 min read · 09 December 2008
I am a big fan of The Daily Show, particularly of the segments that question WTF is going on (I will save you the #*% spelling that gets used). I have up close and personal experience with that, as I lost my job last week. Yikes, 35 years in the business and involuntary departure for the first time. The economy stinks, but it's difficult to grasp unless it hits close. Now the 35 years of networking starts to pay off a bit differently. The thing is, uncertainty is part of life, and change can be exciting. But, a lot of uncertainty and the accompanying changes, like we have going on right now, can be a bit disorienting. Why? For one thing, we are facing a new administration, which depending on your view is going to be better or worse than what we have had for the last eight years. My first observation is that we all are impacted, whether we know it or not, by global relationships. We collectively cannot continue to operate
3 min read · 09 December 2008
3 min read · 07 December 2008
David Weild and Edward Kim recently produced a report for Grant Thornton, titled IPOs in the ICU. The entire report is available here, but David has permitted us to reprint this conclusion about current and future alternatives to IPOs for private companies: There has been no shortage of effort to find an alternative to an IPO for private U.S. companies. Among these are the NASDAQ Portal Alliance (144A PIPO), InsideVenture and Entrex markets. To date, most of the major U.S. investment banking initiatives have been focused on the 144A PIPO market in efforts to create institutional-only markets for private placements of equity that would be issued to qualified institutional buyers
3 min read · 03 December 2008
Everyone in the VC business is looking hard at their fund reserves right now. Very hard. That's because the two key assumptions regarding how much money a portfolio company would require from start to finish (the exit) have changed: (1) The length of time before exit; and (2) The number of portfolio companies that would attract outside capital to lead follow-on financing rounds. The new planning assumption being embraced by VC fund CFOs and senior partners is that each portfolio company's exit forecast should be pushed out two to three years. Moreover, funds should assume that inside rounds will be the prevailing method for raising additional capital within the portfolio. For the strongest portfolio companies, it will be a privilege to close a flat round with an outsider. In other words, "flat is the new up.”
4 min read · 01 December 2008
3 min read · 25 November 2008
