Posts filed under 'VCs and M&A'
By Kyle
While technology start-ups still point to the general weakness of financial markets as the reasoning behind not going public; new findings by the National Venture Capital Association may indicate a larger trend in where VC’s are allocating their investors’ dollars.
As Matt Richtel of the New York Times reported on Saturday:
“In the second quarter of this year not a single company backed by venture capitalists has gone public. It is the first time that has happened since 1978, according to a venture capital industry group.”
According to Nancy Pfund, a VC at DBL Investors in San Francisco, the economic slump is playing the biggest role in drying up public offerings:
“Wall Street is being very selective in taking companies public, and blessing only those with particularly high revenue and growth projections. And venture capitalists are wary because they worry that their returns will be limited in a depressed market.”
Today’s Wall Street Journal story by Lynn Cowan echoes the decline in IPO’s and illustrates that industry experts don’t expect the rest of the summer to be any different:
“The Outlook for the rest of the summer is similarly grim. Major stock indexes around the world fell this month, and bankers believe worries about rising energy prices and inflation, as well as banks needing capital, will continue to spook investors, who tend to avoid new stocks during times of uncertainty.”
While the broad overlook for the IPO market may be grim there are signs that investments in “green” start-ups are growing. In fact the money now being allocated towards “GreenTech” or “CleanTech” companies may be one of the key contributing factors in drying up the current IPO market - as Richtel notes in his piece and Katie Fehrenbacher expands upon for her piece on earth2tech:
“The pipeline for public offerings has dried up in part because of the considerable shift in the industry’s interest in the last three years into “green” technologies, which was taking time to bear fruit.”
In the Cambridge and Boston area “GreenTech” start-ups including Mascoma, GreatPoint Energy and GreenFuel have seen investments from (patient) investors including General Catalyst Partners, Polaris Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
June 30th, 2008
By Kyle
While some of us were enjoying a nice little Saturday (A trip to Home Depot to get some wall paper, maybe a stop at Bed Bath & Beyond), Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang were working OT to get the Microsoft and Yahoo! deal done. However, a funny thing occurred sometime in-between them sitting down early Saturday in Seattle and Yang landing back in Silicon Valley on Saturday afternoon – The deal completely collapsed.
The story (in-short) played out because Ballmer led off the meeting (turns out they had been talking in somewhat secret all week) by offering Yang $33 a share. Yang countered that by saying $37 a share was the lowest offer they would accept and by all accounts the room went silent after that. Yang who was accompanied by co-founder David Filo at the meeting returned to The Valley shortly after and once again got on the phone with Ballmer. At that time Ballmer officially withdrew Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo!. According to the New York Times, this news was met with high-fives between Jerry and the rest of Yahoo!’s board. Goes to show you the disdain the Yahoo! board room still held for Ballmer and company regardless of what the deal would have met for stock holders.
Both sides have officially stated their thoughts on the end of the acquisition talks with releases here and here. Ballmer sent this backhanded thank you to Yang for his consideration and sent this note to his employees.
Yang brought forth his additional thoughts on the last three months with this post on Yahoo!’s weblog Yodel Anecdotal. In which he clearly stated his displeasure with the spin Microsoft put on the acquisition process and its collapse.
“By the way, I’m sure you’ve all read or watched the news about this. Frankly, there’s a lot of nonsense and misinformation in what’s being reported. Just so we are all clear, here’s what happened. The board took its mission very seriously. We clearly indicated to Microsoft that we were open to a transaction but only if it were on terms that fully recognized the value of Yahoo! and was in the best interests of our stockholders.
No one is celebrating about the outcome of these past three months… and no one should. We live and work in a competitive world and the Web is only going to get more competitive. Executing on our strategic plan is what matters most.”
Yang also states “With Microsoft’s withdrawal, we’ll be better able to focus our energy on growing our industry leadership and maximizing value for stockholders.” Clearly an attempt to reassure investors set to nosedive the stock this morning.
Which has happened, although the fall has not been as great as some predicted. Yahoo! opened at $23.02 a share this morning as pre market traders dumped the stock after closing at $28.67 a share Friday evening. However, it has rebounded to around $24 a share at 11:30 a.m. ET, which is still far above the $19 a share it was trading at before Microsoft made its offer public three months ago.
Fortunately for Yang it appears his move to test an advertising deal with Google has some investors pricing-in what a full time ad partnership with Google would mean to the business. A deal that Yang must make sooner then later. Still, many investors and Yahoo! employees are voicing their displeasure with Yang and the board after passing up the $33 a share and watching the stock plunge for the 16 percent:
o “There is going to be a lot of pressure on Yahoo’s management to deliver in the next year or two.” ~ Bill Miller, a portfolio manager for Legg Mason (Yahoo!’s second largest shareholder), in the New York Times
Anonymous quotes from Yahoo! executives in conversations with Kara Swisher of BoomTown:
o “I am in shock.”
o “I don’t know if we won or we lost. I think we lost.”
o “I don’t love that it was Microsoft, but I think everyone thought $33 was a pretty good offer from a pretty good tech company.”
o “Having to face my staff tomorrow will not be so much fun and I need some Prozac, since I don’t know what I can say to them about how our leadership is going to get our company going again.”
o “Where’s the Jelly memo when you need it?”
o “I can’t really talk to Jerry, since it is difficult to tell a founder tough things he probably needs to hear.”
It certainly will be an interesting couple of weeks and months at Yahoo! as they try to doge loosing crucial members of their team and investor lawsuits. Rest assured (or uneasy) Jerry, you’ll still be in the spotlight.
In closing, It has been a wacky three months and I don’t think too many people foresaw it ending this way.
On a side note: The weekend collapse of the deal was a “victory” for bloggers and the digital media who were able to break the news and post follow-ups ahead of much of the mainstream media. Swisher and Michael Arrington were neck-and-neck in breaking the news as they both posted off of information gathered from anonymous Microsoft/Yahoo! sources before official comment came in the form of the press release from Microsoft. Just another illustration of the great contacts Swisher and Arrington have at Yahoo! and Microsoft along with the clout they carry in the industry.
May 5th, 2008
By Kyle
The economy and the “idea” of being in a recession are on everyone’s mind. You don’t have to flip past page one in any major daily or the cover of any business publication to be reminded by it.
Although I recognize that the current economic situation is sub-par I do somewhat believe that we are talking and writing ourselves into a recession. I’m obviously not the only person that believes this. In a quick Google search I found three articles from the last two months titled or closely titled “Talking Ourselves into a Recession.” – Newsweek, BusinessWeek and Huffington Post.
At least these journalists are raising the question. Everyone else seems happy to hop on the bandwagon by finding a new negative economic story to write about every day. Yes, I realize journalists aren’t the only ones to blame. We’re all to blame. Especially us PR folk who are hoping on any angle we can spin into a recession story – sorry that’s just our jobs.
Suddenly we’ve become so glass-half-empty that I feel like I’m living a Ken Burns film on the great depression. Honestly, I’m nauseated with hearing what dire conditions we’re in. I’m tired of being told on a daily basis that I can’t afford to blow some disposable income on a weekend in Vegas or even a Sunday afternoon matinee.
I own a miniscule amount of stock (none of the company’s listed in this story) and yet I’m constantly thinking more about the stock market’s collapse then the Celtic’s first round playoff match-up. So much so that I had yesterday – April 17th circled on my calendar. No it wasn’t my Mom’s birthday or even another Red Sox vs. Yankees series. It was Google’s Q1 earnings call.
Why was it so important? Well for one there was a lot of stock in that call and I’m not just talking about Google’s stock. If there is one company that has become a measuring stick for where the economy is right now - it is Google. When comScore made numbers public in early Q1 that advised that Google’s paid clicks, which measures how often Internet users click on its text ads, were essentially flat – Wall Street nearly threw in the towel. If Google can’t continue to stay strong in the current economic conditions, then nobody can they said. (Translation = We are all in a damn recession).
So yesterday was a big day, not only for Google to fire back at comScore (A Red Sox vs. Yankees type rivalry is brewing there) but also for those of us who would like to avoid the negative talk for once and point to some positive numbers. Google wasted no time addressing “their” updated numbers on paid clicks to open up the call. Google’s paid clicks were up 20% from a year ago. That was a far cry from the 1.8% growth rate for the first quarter that research firm comScore had reported. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt took even less time to summarize those numbers:
“It’s clear to us that we’re well-positioned in 2008 regardless of the business environment,” Schmidt said. “Paid click growth has been higher than speculated by third parties.”
Yi-Wyn Yen at Fortune runs through the rest of the numbers here:
“Google regained investors’ confidence after it reported profits that rose 30% to $1.31 billion, or $4.12 per share. Its total revenues of $5.2 billion, which includes ad sales it shares with partners, grew 42% from the same period a year ago. The stock shot up 17% in after-hours trading Thursday and rose above $500 mark for the first time since Feb. 22.”
Kevin Delaney of the Wall Street Journal, who set the stage for the importance of yesterday’s call with a preview on the front page of the Marketplace section, followed up today on the front of the Marketplace section once again with this lead-in sentence:
“Google Inc.’s go-go era apparently isn’t over.”
I for one will take the positive news in stride. In addition to Google: eBay, Intel and IBM all posted positive earnings this week. Yes, I understand a lot of this is being accredited to each of their strong presences in international markets (Skype unit in eBay’s case), but I’ll take it as a glass-half-full nonetheless.
So this weekend spend less time counting your pennies and a bit more time enjoying the nice weather (nice for once on the East Coast, which I assume means it’s nice everywhere else).
Google is “Google” once again and all is well in the world.
April 18th, 2008
By Kyle
There was some great debate in the blogosphere last week on how a lack of exit strategies for start-ups, that need to return on venture money, is killing innovation. The debate was spawned by a post from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. In his post Wilson opinions that the IPO market is currently closed, leaving only mergers and acquisitions as viable ways out. While this option is making Fred, a lot of other VC’s and entrepreneurs rich; it’s also a killer of innovation.
As Fred notes:
“We’ve sold three in the past couple years out of our Union Square Ventures portfolio, delicious, FeedBurner, and TACODA, to Yahoo!, Google, and AOL, respectively. Were we happy to take their money? Yes. Were we happy with the outcome? Yes. Were they good buys for their new owners? On the face of it, yes.
But if you look deeper, I wonder. Delicious grew nicely for a while under Yahoo!’s ownership but recently the user base has fallen off pretty dramatically. I double checked this chart in compete and alexa and they all show the dropoff. Well, what about FeedBurner? Clearly Google has done a good job with that acquisition. Well I am not sure. I don’t see any integration between Adwords and FeedBurner yet. I can’t buy FeedBurner inventory through Google’s text ad interface. I honestly don’t see any additional money flowing to me, the publisher of the feed, since the Google acquisition. There’s no way to know what the rate of signup by publishers has been since the acquisition, but I wonder if it’s increased much.
And TACODA? I know that TACODA had an incredible fourth quarter post the acquisition by AOL, blowing way past the numbers we were projecting in our annual budget. But in the first quarter, AOL fired Curt Viebranz, TACODA’s CEO, and many of the top members of the TACODA team are now gone from AOL. Another acquisition messed up.”
His basic point being that start-up services never reach their true potential once they are acquired. Umair Haque at Harvard Business Online added to these thoughts with his post later last week:
“Let’s revisit the spectre haunting venture capital. Why aren’t there more Googles? The answer’s very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically.
Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them. Let’s replay the Google story. Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo - what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time - didn’t sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo’s or MSN’s search box.
Why isn’t it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better. Because it did, it held on and revolutionized the advertising value chain – and, in turn, capital markets gave Google an exuberant welcome.See the point? If all Larry, Sergey, and Google’s investors had wanted to do was to sell out fast to the highest bidder, they could have done so at any time. But they didn’t: they chose to revolutionize something that sucked - and so a tsunami of new value was unlocked. That’s how Google was made.”
So what current start-up(s) have the resolve to pass on a billion dollar short term exit strategy and the conviction to keep a close hold to the company mission statement(s) that they want to implore? I could probably count them with one hand. Entrepreneurs may fault impatient investors (But Wilson and other’s I’ve heard chat about the topic say that’s just a myth). The truth may be a more somber tale.
Whether it’s lack of faith in turning out consistent and predictable growth and earnings quarter over quarter (for years), that rightly shies then away from public markets, or a lack of a sense of business purpose to change the world that creates the itch to sell – today’s entrepreneur seems happy to “settle” for a quick payday, even if that means signing off on the slow death of the enterprise that they have shed blood, sweat and tears on.
That may make a lot of “us” rich but it doesn’t create game changing businesses. Further more when we turn to put on our consumer shoes we’re left with seeing our favorite applications and platforms slowly evolving into unrecognizable and disinteresting shells of their former selves under their new leadership. Or worse, we’re greeted with a combination of our favorite applications becoming a corporate mega-merger-smorgasbord.
NewsMicroHoo!OogleBook anyone? May the force be with you Mr. Zuckerberg.
April 17th, 2008
By Kyle
Los Angeles is newly becoming a technology hot spot. Led by the digital entertainment revolution, it has become one of the next big markets lauded by venture capitalists eyeing the next JibJab or Flux. I’m starting to wonder when they are going to launch the Silicon Hills Insider?
Laura Holson has the latest chapter in the digital entertainment industry’s attempt to bridge the gap between The Valley and The Hills in today’s New York Times.
According the Laura:
“On Monday, the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, will announce that it is teaming up with the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Accel Partners and Venrock to invest in digital media start-up companies based in Southern California.”
Dan Primack at the peHUB actually had some general musings about a potential William Sonoma and Accel Partners seed-stage digital media/entertainment fund last week.
The interesting part of Laura’s story is that she highlights AT&T’s role in the fund, that hadn’t been previously noted.
AT&T will be a limited partner and according to Laura and is specifically interested in investing in mobile technologies that will assist their overall mobile strategy:
“AT&T is not looking exclusively for content; the likes of CBS, ESPN and NBC already provide much of that for cellphones. Instead, it is hoping to invest in technologies that will make it easier to run ads on cellphones, as well as to nurture social networks like Facebook and MySpace, online hits that have migrated to hand-held devices. AT&T has spread money around Hollywood before — it invested in the film producer Media Rights Capital — but those investments were largely passive.”
Laura reports that the fund will be in the tens of millions of dollars, but Dan at peHUB believes it to be as high as $50 million dollars. This would price it as a good deal smaller then rival Creative Artists Agency (CAA) venture fund with Draper Fisher Jurvetson that is believed to be around $150 million-$200 million.
AT&T’s investment into the Los Angeles technology scene makes perfect sense as it aims to take advantage of the entertainment advantage the iPhone has given it over the rest of the mobile market. It also has a strong hold on the IPTV market in the US, which it could address through this investment as well. It has already invested in technologies on that front including Akimbo, a white label video service provider and ChoiceStream, a personalization provider.
Disclosure: ChoiceStream is a client of the Racepoint Group
March 3rd, 2008
By Carla
In case you all missed it, New England Web 2.0 companies are raising big bucks and overshadowing our West Coast friends. Comparatively, New England raised $11.5 million more than San Francisco in the first half of 2007, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t going to turn Boston into the technology hub overnight.
Silicon Valley has earned its reputation for a reason. Surviving the dot-com bubble, the area hosts thousands of tech companies including household names Google, Apple, eBay, Yahoo! and AMD. What is promising for the New England area is the amount of growth it has experienced year over year. In 2006, the region brought in $62 million, while it had already amassed more than $102 million by mid-2007.
Not that Bostonians should become overly giddy—we’ve missed a chance or two to make Boston the home of some of the biggest technology companies. When Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin first looked to Battery Ventures in Waltham for financing for their social networking site with 1,000 or so users, they were turned down. And now the Palo Alto-based company is worth as much as $6 billion.
But not to worry, Boston has plenty of start-ups developing technologies to keep those Googlers on its toes. With the energy and nanotechnology sectors heating up, Boston definitely has a fair shot at rising above the Valley and it’s clear that the venture capital exists to fund innovative new companies.
October 2nd, 2007
