Private Equity
The Institutional Limited Partner Association (ILPA) today released "a set of best practices to address important issues relating to the alignment of interest between general partners and limited partners, fund governance and providing greater transparency to investors." I'm still working through it, but have posted it after the jump so that you can read along...
1 min read · 08 September 2009
Kai-Fu Lee, who last week resigned as president of Google China, has launched Innovation Works, an incubator for Chinese IT startups. It has been funded with $115 million, including from lead investor WI Harper Group. Other backers include Steve Chen (co-founder of YouTube), Terry Gou (chairman of Foxconn), Liu Chuanzhi (chairman of Legend Group) and Yu Minhong (chairman of New Oriental).
5 min read · 07 September 2009
Prism VentureWorks has closed its West Coast office, several months after the Needham, Mass.-based firm suspended efforts to raise its sixth fund. Prism originally opened the Venice, Calif.-based satellite to accomodate partner Gordie Nye, who wanted to move west. He will continue to serve as a general partner with Prism, but will be based out of a home office. Venture partner Tony Natale will relocate east, while principal Bong Koh will spend most of his time on
1 min read · 04 September 2009
Cisco Systems has committed $32 million to an $80 million VC fund being managed by SkyLake Incuvest & Co., with a focus on South Korea.
3 min read · 04 September 2009
A bunch of changes over at Battery Ventures: Mark Sherman and Battery have “come to the mutual conclusion” that Sherman will leave the firm once the new investment period of Battery VIII is concluded. That apparently will be at the end of Q1 2010, which means that new blue books might be out before year-end (seems a bit fast to me -- considering that the firm raised $1 billion in 07/08 -- but this is straight from a firm spokeswoman). Sherman had been part of the firm’s push into India, but that now will be scaled back significantly. Battery will no longer build a team in Mumbai, instead focusing on India investments out of Silicon Valley. Guatam Patel, currently Battery’s sole employee in Mumbai, will leave to “seek other opportunities.” That move also is expected to occur at the end of Q1 2010.
2 min read · 03 September 2009
Three months ago, Steve Gillmor wrote that "it's time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter." Sam Diaz piled on last week, calling RSS a Web 1.0 application whose time has passed. And things got even worse today, when news leaked that former Feedburner chief Dick Costello has agreed to join Twitter as chief operating officer. All of this made me wonder whatever happened to RSS Investors, a venture capital firm formed in 2005 to focus exclusvely on real simple syndication. What I learned was that RSS Investors is even deader than RSS.
2 min read · 02 September 2009
Michael Marks made the business of manufacture and supply-chain outsourcing safe for Silicon Valley to embrace, by building Singapore-based Flextronics into a global giant. During Marks' reign, Flextronics made products as diverse as Legos to Microsoft Zune to XBox, and few people know more about how technology goes from concept to product. Now he’s turned his substantial expertise, and that of his Flextronics CFO and CTO, toward private equity. Marks is a founder of Riverwood Capital, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm that last year began raising its debut fund with a $1.25 billion target.
2 min read · 02 September 2009
The British Venture Capital and Private Equity Association and state-backed technology fund NESTA today released a study questioning the way UK taxpayer money is used to support startup businesses. It found that six government-backed VC programs created jobs between 1995 and 2008, but that the effect had been small in relation to the amount of money committed: Many of the problems arise from the structure and limitations of government-backed schemes established in the UK to date. Too often they have been too small, too regionally focused, poorly managed, or unable to provide enough capital or effective follow-on funding. You can download the full report here, or read it after the jump:
1 min read · 02 September 2009
The big news this morning is that eBay has agreed to sell a 65% stake in Internet calling company Skype to a group of private investors, at an enterprise value of $2.75 billion. The buyers include Silver Lake Partners, Canada Pension Plan, Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Here’s my question: Does this mean that Index and Andreessen Horowitz are no longer venture capital firms? This might sound like an academic question, but I mean it as a follow-up to Alan Patricof’s op-ed from Sunday’s NY Times. For the uninitiated, Patricof and former regulator Eric Dinallo argued that venture capital firms should be excluded from proposed requirements to register as investment advisors. They argued that VC firms do not pose the types of systemic risks that the rules are designed to guard against, and that imposition of such requirements could damage venture capital firms from a cost perspective. It’s also a case that the NVCA has been making on Capitol Hill. I agree with Patricof and the NVCA, that venture capital does not pose systemic risk. It is true that the economy would be severely harmed if most VC firms went belly-up tomorrow, but there is no
2 min read · 01 September 2009
Khosla Ventures has closed two new funds with more than $1 billion in capital commitments. Khosla Ventures III was targeted at $750 million, and will focus on early and mid-stage venture investments in the cleantech and IT spaces. Khosla Ventures also was targeting $250 million for its first seed-stage fund. The two new partners are: Gideon Yu, former CFO for Facebook, and Jim Kim, previously a senior partner with CMEA Capital (peHUB reported Kim's hiring last month).
4 min read · 01 September 2009
