Venture Watch
By Ben Freeman JGSM '11
Issue date: 10/1/09 Section: Features
I read an article last week on TechCrunch by Vivek Wadhwa entitled "What Have VCs Really Done for Innovation?" In the article he claimed that venture-backed companies generally did worse than those that were funded through other means. This got me thinking, how are VCs doing these days?
Venture Capital
Last month, the biggest news in the venture capital (and PE, LBO firms, etc.) world was the release of the CalPERS (the California state pension fund) performance data. CalPERS measures performance the usual way: Net IRR and investment multiple. As one might expect in a year such as this, the performance of most of the funds has been less than exemplary; only about 250 of the 620 funds had positive IRRs of which only about 130 broke 10%. The average performance (not weighted) was a meager -7. The big winners in the VC category were:
I won't go into the biggest losers, but if you were to look, you'd find many of the biggest names in private equity. Yup, it's a recession.
M&A
Mergers and Acquisitions activity has been pretty low since the market crash, but there have been some bargain hunters out there (like Nokia). Shutterfly is one such company. Earlier last month, Shutterfly bought Tiny Pictures for a meager $1.3 million. Not good news for Tiny's investors, who invested over $12 million in the company.
Tiny Pictures runs a site called Radar.net, which is a neat little mobile app for browsing and posting photos. Users and non-users alike can comment on the posted photos. Their software can be integrated with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and other social networks.
Venture Watch Entrepreneur of the Month
Many of you may have seen the post on JSMisc, but don't really know what first-year entrepreneur and web guru, Aaron Mannenbach, has been up to recently. In addition to a very successful web hosting and design business, Aaron and his partner have been working on iMeetzu.
iMeetzu, which is currently undergoing a redesign, allows you to…meet a stranger. You might be asking yourself, Why would I want to do this? Who would want to waste time talking to someone they don't know, in a completely anonymous forum? I'm not really sure. But, it works pretty seamlessly, and the conversations can get fairly amusing (see the blog section).
The site's redesign will integrate a social networking aspect into the site. Users will be able to register, complete a profile, add friends, etc. The most intriguing new feature is the ability to publish one's conversations and shared photos. Following, users will be able to rate them via Hot or Not.com and read the highest rated conversations. In the future, expect it to integrate with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and iPhone.
So, if you brought your laptop to Sage and have some time between classes, check it out at http://www.imeetzu.com!
Venture Capital
Last month, the biggest news in the venture capital (and PE, LBO firms, etc.) world was the release of the CalPERS (the California state pension fund) performance data. CalPERS measures performance the usual way: Net IRR and investment multiple. As one might expect in a year such as this, the performance of most of the funds has been less than exemplary; only about 250 of the 620 funds had positive IRRs of which only about 130 broke 10%. The average performance (not weighted) was a meager -7. The big winners in the VC category were:
- Clearstone Venture Partners I-this is an old fund which hasn't completely exited, so I feel like it doesn't really count. However, it returned a whopping 154% Net IRR (probably all from PayPal).
- Clessidra Capital Partners, an Italian fund, had stellar performance, returning 83%. From what I can glean with my poor Italian, this is a much later stage fund, but it's notable because it's one of the few funds that both did well through the recession and was recently raised (2005).
- Index Ventures, also an older fund with some great investments such as MySQL, Joost, Skype, etc., returned 29%.
I won't go into the biggest losers, but if you were to look, you'd find many of the biggest names in private equity. Yup, it's a recession.
M&A
Mergers and Acquisitions activity has been pretty low since the market crash, but there have been some bargain hunters out there (like Nokia). Shutterfly is one such company. Earlier last month, Shutterfly bought Tiny Pictures for a meager $1.3 million. Not good news for Tiny's investors, who invested over $12 million in the company.
Tiny Pictures runs a site called Radar.net, which is a neat little mobile app for browsing and posting photos. Users and non-users alike can comment on the posted photos. Their software can be integrated with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and other social networks.
Venture Watch Entrepreneur of the Month
Many of you may have seen the post on JSMisc, but don't really know what first-year entrepreneur and web guru, Aaron Mannenbach, has been up to recently. In addition to a very successful web hosting and design business, Aaron and his partner have been working on iMeetzu.
iMeetzu, which is currently undergoing a redesign, allows you to…meet a stranger. You might be asking yourself, Why would I want to do this? Who would want to waste time talking to someone they don't know, in a completely anonymous forum? I'm not really sure. But, it works pretty seamlessly, and the conversations can get fairly amusing (see the blog section).
The site's redesign will integrate a social networking aspect into the site. Users will be able to register, complete a profile, add friends, etc. The most intriguing new feature is the ability to publish one's conversations and shared photos. Following, users will be able to rate them via Hot or Not.com and read the highest rated conversations. In the future, expect it to integrate with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and iPhone.
So, if you brought your laptop to Sage and have some time between classes, check it out at http://www.imeetzu.com!
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Cardiovascular Health
posted 10/02/09 @ 4:08 PM EST
I read that Facebook, Twitter and MySpace were among the top websites on the internet. Twitter, with 6 million people, is dwarfed by MySpace and Facebook. (Continued…)
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