IPOs are hot again. Naturally, the press is focused on high-profile offerings like Facebook’s. But, I think there is a more important group of companies going public: Smaller, less sexy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups. Think of it as the Sexy IPOs versus the SaaS-y IPOs.
They aren’t household names, but the most recent SaaS IPOs (Cornerstone, Jive, Brightcove and Bazaarvoice) are doing… → Read More
For Yelp, this has been a very good day. The restaurant review site was received exceptionally well by Wall Street during its first day as a publicly traded company, closing at a price of $24.58 per share, up a full 63 percent from its $15 IPO price. → Read More
In this video interview, I ask VC Jim Breyer what he thinks about the current IPO market and whether he agrees with Steve Case, who argues that we need more IPOs to create more jobs—“90% of job growth is after a company goes public.”
Breyer disagrees with Case that IPOs are the answer. At About the 2:35 mark, he says that the IPO process could be made a little bit easier, but ushering in… → Read More
Silicon Valley loves to dismiss Asian companies as nothing more than copycats who thrive, particularly in China, because the government protects them and punishes Western competitors. Even when the businesses in question are dramatically different in practice and scale, they are described as the “eBay of China”, “The Google of China” and “the YouTube of China,” not Alibaba, Baidu and YouKu. I’ve… → Read More
In Silicon Valley the terms of venture capital deals, the prices of valuations and the real stories of ousters are routinely dished, whether they always show up in the press or not. Sure it’s all off the record or on background or whispered at a coffee shop, but people who live here love what they do and when companies and valuations grow this quickly, it’s hard to keep the juicy details under… → Read More
Boutique tech investment bank Pacific Crest Securities has purchased Pacific Epoch, a Shanghai-based investment research firm specializing in technology. This gives Pacific Crest fifty more bodies on the ground in China to deliver investors better investment research than “This is the (fill-in-the-blank-Western-Internet-company) of China.”
That lazy marketing strategy has helped companies like … → Read More
(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series about the late stage, secondary investing craze sweeping the venture capital business. For the first two installments go here and here.)
On May 26, 2009 Mike sat down with Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and a Flipcam to talk about the then-scandalous $200 million investment DST made in Facebook, at a price that valued the company at about… → Read More
Around 2006 there was a sudden increase in so-called “partial liquidations,” where entrepreneurs could take some money off the table during a mid-stage funding round. Considered unheard of at the time, now they’re the norm for companies doing well.
Then in 2009, we saw the rise of secondary markets, which allowed early stage investors and employees to take some money off the table at more… → Read More
There is a lot of hype swirling that 2011 is going to be the big comeback year for the venture-backed IPO. And we’re talking about big, gaudy IPOs, not small ones that essentially function as another funding round. And interestingly, pundits and investors expect some new $1 billion companies to debut in both cleantech and Internet sectors.
So maybe the fourth quarter was just the calm before the… → Read More
Back in August we reported that Elevation Partners had signed a letter of intent to buy secondary shares in Pandora, the long-suffering, now-hot online radio station. I wondered what ever happened to that deal, so I started digging. As it turned out, shares were sold but Elevation didn’t get them.
Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together, from several sources on different sides of the… → Read More
The biggest difference between the Internet scenes in Silicon Valley and China this year? We’re all still asking when Facebook will go public, while Chinese companies are filing left and right. Part of this is an investor demand to get a chunk of that 400 million person strong and growing Chinese Internet market.
But part of this is cultural. American Internet entrepreneurs are more likely to… → Read More
A few weeks ago we flagged a growing trend of Chinese Internet companies going public on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange and getting pretty good valuations. At the time I was surprised more people weren’t paying attention– especially given how few Internet IPOs we’re having in the US and how much of the returns from those Chinese deals were flowing back to Silicon Valley. (At least on… → Read More
In the peak of the Internet bubble, a company’s valuation– and press attention– would soar simply by whispering the words “John Doerr is an investor.” But in early Web 2.0 days, the once-everywhere venture capitalist seemed to fall off of the tech press’s radar, at least when it came to Internet investing.
But boy, has Doerr made up for lost time this year: Keynoting both of our Disrupt… → Read More
Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures thinks that 2011 will be the year of the cleantech IPO…finally. So does that mean that America hasn’t totally lost the cleantech race after all?
The most optimistic case is that we’re in a clump of countries leading the pack. The glass-half-empty version: Politics, boneheaded legislation and our lousy capital markets will saddle America’s culture of… → Read More
In retrospect, Tesla may have been cleantech’s Netscape moment. It didn’t get off to the world’s greatest start, but like a few other venture-backed IPOs, lately it has been trading at nearly double its opening price.
Meanwhile, a few other cleantech companies have filed S-1s and several more are waiting in the wings, watching to see what the market does. To continue the Netscape analogy, 2011… → Read More
Yes, China is taking over the world. Or at least the Internet. No, this is not like the WE’LL-ALL-BE-WORKING-FOR-JAPAN-oh-nevermind scare of the 1980s. Why? Because China has more than 1 billion people. It already represents the largest online audience in the world and is less than 30% penetrated and has Internet spending per capita that’s less than one-third of the United States.
That means two… → Read More
What does it take to build a $2 billion consumer Internet company in the UK? For starters, center it around a market that’s illegal in the US. Betfair, a marketplace that matches and executes some five million wagers everyday, went public earlier this year and is valued at more than $2 billion.
It has a few things in common with the other $2 billion-plus Internet win out of Europe, Skype. While… → Read More
After a decade in Silicon Valley, I’ve learned there’s a difference between what some VCs say and what they do. For instance, there’s the well-worn phrase that nearly every venture firm utters: “We believe downturns are the best time to invest.” And yet, somehow, the investment numbers always go down in recessions.
But University of San Francisco associate professor of entrepreneurship… → Read More
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