Category Archives: Venture Industry
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 […]
The Facebook IPO is No Netscape Moment, and Shows the Need for a Small IPO Market
The digerati are obsessively focused on the imminent filing of the Facebook IPO. The hope is that it becomes the next Netscape Moment. They also thought LinkedIn might be, but in our view, that IPO reflected a pent up demand for tech IPOs, not a seminal spark to a new boom. This chart shows that […]
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 […]
TechCrunch Tokyo: Venture Revolution Keynote
Bullpen was asked to TechCrunch Tokyo 2011 both to keynote and to join a panel. This event was crowded – over 600 attendees, a combination of eager found entrepreneurs and senior management at leading Japanese companies like NTT, Sony, etc. Booths out front touted new ventures, and the sushi at the networking event was great! […]
The Promise of Secondary Markets
At our upcoming Venture Shift conference in NY, we will discuss the impact of secondary markets on venture finance. We ran a similar panel this summer at our SF event to a lot of interest. There is a tremendous promise to SharePost and SecondMarket and other secondary sales exchanges. They already are providing liquidity to investors […]
Re-Imagining Steve Jobs
The accolades still roll in. Most folk compare him to great inventors, like Edison. My partner Rich makes the case that he is a one-off, an original, not easily compared to an Edison or other vigorous inventors. I rather think that he is a rare breed, perhaps best compared to Walt Disney, a person who re-imagined […]
Condaptive: First Exit of the Bullpen Era!
We are very excited to see that today Condaptive announced its acquisition by Millennial Media. Hemang and his team did an outstanding job and had a tremendous result for such a young company. As Bullpen is but a few months old, it is exciting to be part of an exit so quickly! The full story […]
The Barbell Strategy Shakes Things Up
I mentioned in a recent post the “barbell” strategy of Andreeson Horowitz, which has been followed by some other venture firms, notably including Kleiner Perkins. The barbell strategy is to invest early like a super-angel, and to jump in late like an accelerator fund in pre-IPO deals like Facebook. This week the WSJ celebrated the […]
VCs Heart SuperAngels
The SuperAngel phenom continues to mature. When the SuperAngels first took share away from the Series A VCs (who felt they owned the first institutional funding stage), the VC reaction was all over the map, and the punditry had a field day with VC vs. SuperAngel smackdowns, fueling the fire. We saw out-of-box VC behavior: big firms […]
Venture 101: Participating Preferred
Our bullpen of advisors continued with their Venture School lesson, asking about what we are seeing in valuations: are they rising? Is it a bubble? etc. Sure, we have seen some froth, but mostly coming out of the untamed world of uncapped converts and unchained angels. Most of the deals being referred to us by […]
