vcs

Quoted: Microsoft trades at a healthy 4.55 times sales. So every $1 in the acquired company is theoretically worth $4.55. Pretty profitable business, these acquisitions, no? Unfortunately for the Redmond Boys, the GOOG can turn that $1 into $10.17. To over simplify things, they can afford to pay twice as much as Microsoft and still come out ahead.

Paul Graham says there are not enough investors chasing the following type of deal:

Quoted: There are companies that will give $20k to a startup that has nothing more than the founders, and there are companies that will give $2 million to a startup that's already taking off, but there aren't enough investors who will give $200k to a startup that seems very promising but still has some things to figure out. This territory is occupied mostly by individual angel investors—people like Andy Bechtolsheim, who gave Google $100k when they seemed promising but still had some things to figure out. I like angels, but there just aren't enough of them, and investing is for most of them a part time job.

Ning raised $60M on $500M pre-money valuation. They don't really have a great use for these funds - they just want to "keep their powder dry" to let Ning grow even through an impeding recession.

Quoted: All TechCrunch Web 2.0 Articles for

Andy Sack and Chris Devore (both of Judy's Book) have created a $2M fund and co-working space for new internet founders. Very nice idea. I like the investment tie they are making between founders in the fund to get a pool of equity in each other's companies (I talked about doing this last year - but these guys are actually putting $ behind it).

Disney's VC fund.

Quoted: Steamboat Ventures is to help young companies successfully face the challenges of becoming leaders in their markets. We invest in early- to mid-stage, technology-focused companies that are pursuing opportunities in emerging digital media and consumer technology markets. Although the fund is primarily focused on technology investments, we also consider venture investments in other areas of broad strategic importance to The Walt Disney Company.

Wishpot gets an additional $1M in funding and Rob Monster takes a board seat.

Curious Office has been an early investor since Sept 2007 - looks like they converted into this A round.

Yelp is a great site - I've recently been using it to find great spots to grab a weekend breakfast. They have raised a total of $31M. Wow - that's a BIG NUMBER. And one wonders - WHY? Certainly the technology development and data center costs can build the equivalent site for far less.

An even bigger number - their purported $200M valuation. That's $25 per monthly unique. That's BUBBLE territory, in my book.

Revenues are claimed at "sub $10M". My (generous) guess - they're getting 20M monthly page views at $4 CPM -> that's less than $1M per year. It doesn't make sense to me they can be making anywhere near $10M.

Quoted: Yelp, the popular local review site, will soon announce a new $15 million dollar round of financing led by DAG Ventures. The valuation ...

Quoted: もしかしたら常識なのかもしれませんが、Emacs の vc-annotate がとても良いです。vc-annotate は vc (version control, バージョン管理システムのフロントエンド。Emacs から直接 svn {diff, commit, revert} することができる) に含まれる機能の一部です。vc-annotate を使うと、バージョン管理システム、例えば Subversion に保存された過去の履歴を気になったときにとても容易に調べることができます。

Quoted: Here's the problem. The company/web service creation process needs some kind of end game. The entrepreneurs who spend years and risking a ton need a way to get paid for that effort. And those of us who finance their efforts need to get some return on our investment. We can argue about the magnitude of the return we need and a host of other things, but the fact remains that without a path to liquidity, all the innovation that is being created by the entrepreneur/VC equation will stop happening.
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It turns out that there is another private liquidity market under development called Opus-5.