Category Archives: Bubble
Tech Crunch gives Bullpen some credit for predicting series A crunch…
It’s nice to get credit for spotting a trend before it happens. That said, this was not really a tough one to predict. With the massive growth of the super angel (seed) funds and flat lining of the series A funds, a crunch was inevitable. I can’t say that me or my co-founders knew WHEN […]
Liquidity Cometh
Ari Levy and Lee Spears of Bloomberg Newsroom write clearly about the impact of the Facebook public offering, offering little in the way of condolences for those buying at $42 in the opening confusion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-21/facebook-ipo-spawns-new-wave-social-media-angels-tech.html Instead, they rightly focus on how liquidity, locked up for years in quiet ponds (some bigger than others), is soon […]
TechCrunch Tokyo: Series A Crunch
While at TechCrunch Tokyo I had a good chat with the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, who gave a great intro to the conference, discussing the Cambrian Explosion in startups. He asked me to expand on the theme, especially around how the lean startup had given rise to a Lean Finance Model of Venture Capital. You can click here to […]
Venture 101: Capped Convert Confusion
The venture industry got comfortable with valuation “rules of thumb” in the follow-on rounds using the typical model of Series A, Series B etc. Bullpen plays in the “rational B” follow-on round , and we see both priced seed rounds coming to us as well as unpriced convertible notes. We have been on both sides […]
Timing the New Tech Boom: Is It 1997 Already?
The recent downturn in stocks has spooked some investors. Tech IPOs like Zynga are now threatened with delays, and the excitement surrounding the recent IPO window opening has given way to skittishness. It doesn’t help that the Groupon filing has been amended to remove some sketchy accounting constructs, to a chorus of catcalls. We should […]
The Groupon Rorschach Test
Valley People poured over the Groupon IPO filing like the NYT over Palin emails, looking for clues. They saw what they wanted to see. It ranged from “Ponzi Scheme!” and “Swindle!” to the ironically witless “no, it’s like Amazon and other dot-coms.” They meant to justify Groupon because Amazon ran years of losses before become […]
Is LinkedIn the “Netscape Moment”?
A quick scan of commentary on LinkedIn shows mostly “it’s 1999 again” posts with comparisons to the pets.com of that era. It is as if they see any first-day pop as bubblicious and forget that Netscape had a similar pop well before the dot-com bubble brewed. The LinkedIn IPO looks awfully similar to Netscape, and if […]
Venture 101: Uncapped Converts
We have our bullpen at Bullpen – an outstanding group of advisors from companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google who have permission from their companies to come join our meetings every few weeks. We ask one of our companies to come in and present, facing a gauntlet of astute questions from people in the trenches […]
Paul Martino Live Interview
A good friend of mine name John Furrier is now running a fascinating company called Silicon Angel. He is re-inventing the advertising, analyst, and content creation market. The first segment that they are disrupting is technology. Many of you might remember John from when he was the founder of PodTech. You can read more about […]
In a bubble, you need a filter…
[THIS IS A REPOST FROM A FEW MONTHS AGO, BUT NOW WE ARE UP AND RUNNING] At the end of last year I was giving the full-on Bullpen pitch to a former senior executive from Yahoo. He said, I like the pitch, but isn’t there a more simple version? Intrigued to hear more, I asked […]
