Super Angels and Angelic VCs April 12, 2007
Posted by jefft in Trends, Venture capital.add a comment
From Business Week:
Jaxtr’s tale illustrates the new calculus governing high-tech venture capital. For years, angel investors and traditional venture firms existed in a sort of symbiosis. Wealthy tech-industry veterans willing to open their checkbooks for $100,000 or so—the angels, as they’re known—could bootstrap promising young companies before serious money, to the tune of six or more figures, from venture firms arrived. Angling for a slice of Jaxtr, however, were both groups: Mayfield Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards, and the Founders Fund on one hand; angel investors Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and Rajeev Motwani on the other. “The company was a bit in the driver’s seat,” one investor says.
Angels with Deeper Pockets
What put Jaxtr in the driver’s seat is a turnabout in traditional roles for angel investors and venture capitalists. Venture capitalists are responding to the emergence in recent years of what have come to be known as super-angel investors, who sink multimillion-dollar investments into Web startups and other tech companies, often carrying them further into their life span before they knock on VCs’ doors. Professional angels and boutique angel funds have been a driving force behind emerging Web companies including Kevin Rose’s Digg and Revision3, Marc Andreessen’s Ning, search engine Powerset, and online music site Last.fm, to name a few (see BusinessWeek.com, Slide Show: “Tech’s Next Gen: The Best and Brightest”).
“We have the flexibility to invest like an angel or a later-stage venture capital firm,” says David Weiden, a general partner at Khosla Ventures, an angel-investment fund headed by Sun Microsystems (SUNW) co-founder Vinod Khosla. “Because we’re investing our own money, we can scale down to whatever we want.” Khosla investments range from $100,000 to $25 million, in areas including Internet technology and clean energy.
Catch the wave April 5, 2007
Posted by jefft in Case studies, Stock, Trends.add a comment
Another private equity firm is looking to go public. And here’s more on the Blackstone IPO mentioned last week.
Gen Y rewrites family business March 19, 2007
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Here’s an informative set of articles in BusinessWeek on how entrepreneurial youth (that’s you, folks) might end up hiring their own parents for family start-ups.
Private and public March 17, 2007
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In our next class we’ll start looking at stock & start-ups. We already talked briefly about the prospect of a liquidity event, such as acquistion or an IPO.
As we’ll discuss in more detail, IPOs have some advantages but they also have distinct disadvantages, particularly in regard to the legal rules that govern public companies. Still, even the most vocal critics of going public have been known to alter their opinion. For example, check out the latest news regarding the Blackstone Group: Blackstone IPO would represent a flip-flop.
Bands as startups February 22, 2007
Posted by jefft in Case studies, Marketing, Trends, Web biz.add a comment
Last week my sneak preview for tonight’s class included a video by Maldroid. Here’s more on the band and their marketing strategy.
The most entrepreneurial generation ever? February 16, 2007
Posted by jefft in Case studies, Marketing, News, Trends.add a comment
A new study sponsored by the publishers of Quicken financial software has published a study claiming that Gen Y looks to be the most entreprneurial generation ever. And to help you follow this trend, why, the company will gladly sell you QuickBooks.
Is this research correct? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it is a good example of how a company can use bought-and-paid-for research to promote its products.
