Private Equity
A new seed-stage fund has quietly emerged in Silicon Valley called Quest Venture Partners. Based in Menlo Park and managed by brothers Andrew and Marcus Ogawa, the firm invests between $100,000 and $1.5 million in nascent digital media companies. Here's what's unusual: the brothers, who were born and raised in Japan, hadn't previously worked for a venture firm. They weren’t seasoned entrepreneurs before opening Quest. Thirty-seven-year-old Andrew spent more than a decade as a manager at Daimler AG, while Marcus, 30, had developed Web apps for various companies and was co-founder of a small, now-defunct startup called Enterprise Great Solutions. Their backgrounds don’t necessarily stand out in competitive, clubby Silicon Valley. Yet some helpful introductions, an impressive array of co-investors, and deep family pockets have won them a seat at the table, and it’s a game they now intend to play for life, if they can play their cards right.
4 min read · 16 April 2009
New Atlantic Ventures has closed its third fund with $115 million in capital commitments. The firm focuses on early-stage IT opportunities, and has offices in Cambridge, Mass. and Reston, Virginia.
2 min read · 16 April 2009
Mark Solon, a general partner at Highway 12 Ventures in Boise, Idaho, sums up his firm’s social networking strategy in one sentence. “If you’re not on Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networking sites, communicating with your investors and entrepreneurs, then you’re going to be left behind,” he says. Such was the reason why on April 5, Highway 12 launched a blog on its website for Solon and his fellow GPs to regularly post their musings. Solon partly attributes the firm’s start of a blog to the hiring last year of Tac Anderson as an EIR. Anderson previously led social media activities at Hewlett-Packard. Solon also says
1 min read · 15 April 2009
2 min read · 15 April 2009
Aydin Senkut decided to quit Google in 2005, after six years as a senor manager responsible for Asia Pacific strategic partner development and account management. He wasn’t fed up. He simply didn’t need to work at Google any more. Like many of his peers at the time, the now-39-year-old became supremely wealthy almost overnight when the company went public in 2004. Still, Senkut didn't hit the beach (for long). Instead, he almost immediately began working again, this time on his own investment firm called Felicis Ventures. He designed his own logo and website, set up his own phones, had business cards made and set up informational interviews for himself all over the Valley, including with Sequoia’s Mike Moritz. At the heart of his questions was this: Is it possible to break into VC without first working for an established venture fund?
5 min read · 14 April 2009
You probably haven’t heard of Palo Alto-based K9 Ventures, but it may sound familiar all the same. It’s been founded by Manu Kumar, a serial entrepreneur who’s done some angel investing and who, like a growing number of founders, isn’t letting his lack of traditional venture capital experience stop him from diving headlong into the industry with a new shop of his own. I spoke today with the industry’s newest entrepreneur-turned-investor to find out more about what he's planning, and why he thinks he can pull it off. Our Q&A is after the jump:
5 min read · 14 April 2009
Forty U.S.-based venture capital firms raised just $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2009, according to data released this morning by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. The downside is that this represents the lowest number of funds to raise capital since Q3 2003. The upside is that the actual amount of capital raised was higher than the $3.5 billion raised in Q4 2008 (slight solace, but solace nonetheless). Just three of the funds were first-timers, while the largest raiser was August Capital ($650m for Fund V). In a prepared statement, NVCA president Mark Heesen said: "First, the majority of venture firms are not actively fundraising at this time because they have either recently raised a fund
1 min read · 13 April 2009
Numoda Corp., a Philadelphia-based product development company, is raising $150 million in third-party capital for its debut venture capital fund, according to VentureWire. It previously had made small investments off of its balance sheet. www.numoda.com
1 min read · 13 April 2009
Goldman Sachs has closed its fifth secondaries fund with approximately $5.5 billion in capital commitments. Its previous secondaries fund closed in 2006 with $3 billion.
2 min read · 13 April 2009
Earlier this year, Tom Friedman got knocked around for suggesting that some of the stimulus cash be redirected to venture capital firms. Now, a version of that idea might actually be gaining some traction. Innovation America, a nonprofit public/private partnership, and The National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) are lobbying for a $2 billion fund-of-funds that would be used to shore up state investment programs and angel groups. Richard Bendis of Innovation America says that the groups had initial talks with the Obama transition team back in December, at which point the proposed program stood at just $1 billion. Bendis says that the government reps requested additional information, at which point Innovation America and NAVSF conducted a survey to demonstrate the difficulty young companies face in raising venture capital. Even though the survey was unscientific, the feds responded that $2 billion sounded like a more appropriate figure (insert jaded sadness here). Bendis says that the first $1 billion would come out of the stimulus package, perhaps from an organization like the Small Business Administration. It would then be allocated to various groups under the auspices of Innovation America, with third-party investors being asked to match the federal contributions on a dollar for dollar basis (bring us to the $2b figure). Kind of like PPIP for the entrepreneurial set.
4 min read · 13 April 2009
