Entrepreneurship

11.20.07

Founder Buyout and Venture Fund Expectations Entrepreneurship, VC | (1)
Understandably, my entrepreneur friends have been abuzz over the rumored founders buyout at Automattic, the company which runs the popular open source blogging platform Wordpress.com. After supposedly turning down a $200 million acquisition, the company is rumored to have accepted a large new follow-on investment led by existing investor Polaris Ventures, largely as buyout of founders' positions. Regardless of the authenticity of specific rumors here, it's worth delving into a few industry points in order to frame an appropriate discussion of dealmaking. I'll offer notes that hopefully lend clarity to the above. First, understand the stakeholders' objectives. There's no ...
11.15.07

Forge Louisville Launches! Entrepreneurship | (4)
I'm happy to announce a startup-focused group that launched last night under the name Forge Louisville. It's my hope that this effort becomes a unifying body that brings the best entrepreneurs, investors, and service providers from the area under one roof on a regular basis. But Iâ€™ll be disappointed if thatâ€™s all it is, and confident given the turnout last night and incredible feedback that it will be something more. It might facilitate smaller working groups focused on new media, healthcare, general tech, etc. It might facilitate working space for entrepreneurs. It might generate educational, focused discussion, ...
11.09.07

Creative Destruction in the Automotive Industry, Part II Entrepreneurship, Science and Tech | (5)
Quick follow up to an earlier post on the electric car movement: it turns out that the battery lease model has a second (intended) entrant. As reminder of the first: "Interestingly, ...upstart Think, out of Norway, aims to manufacture electric cars with a sales model geared to sell the car itself, but lease the battery, and sell services (such as WiFi) that utilize the car as platform. A definitively new model." On October 29, the Wall Street Journal covered former SAP executive Shai Agassi's unnamed startup for which he's raised $200 million to tackle electric car manufacturing. Like ...
11.08.07

Liquidity Via Fundraising Entrepreneurship, VC | (0)
Today's VentureWire includes an important piece by Russell Garland summarizing insights from the Dow Jones Venture Capital Deal Terms Report, a survey of startup financing terms from the July 2006 through June 2007 year. Interestingly, I noted in a September post that a certain number of bootstrapping entrepreneurs receive liquidity via fundraising. The Dow Jones report indicates that this happened in 16% of first round deals during the survey period: "The report also found that founders and prior investors usually did not sell shares to investors in the latest round, despite a longer wait for liquidity. But with ...
11.07.07

Private Equity Personalities and Algorithm Generated Judgement Entrepreneurship, VC | (0)
New media investor Alan Patricof on the late-stage component of private equity: It's a different kind of business now...These are spreadsheet people. [source] I'm drawn to the notion that late stage private equity personality types and modes of operation have shifted significantly in recent years. Are there implications for the early-stage side of the business? A primary change agent for late stage has been tremendous growth in the sector. Consider that a single prominent private equity firm, Blackstone, recently raised a $21.7 billion fund, fully 85% of last year's entire venture capital industry investment ($25.5 billion). The following charts non-venture private equity ...
10.31.07

What’s Your Facebook Profile Value? Entrepreneurship, Media | (4)
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft recently invested $240 million into social networking all-star Facebook at a $15 billion valuation. Just to put things in perspective, that places Facebook as the fifth most valuable internet company, sitting squarely between Amazon at #4 and Interactive Corp (which runs Ask.com, Hotels.com, and a slew of other sites) at #6. Heady stuff for a company that's estimated to be at a $100-150 million revenue run rate. By point of comparison, Interactive Corp did $6.3 billion in revenue last year. On a much different business model with a much different growth profile. So we'll ...
10.30.07

The Marquis de Lau Phenomenon in Venture Capital Books, Entrepreneurship, Life, VC | (2)
There's a curiously engaging book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, written by Alain de Botton, that looks at Marcel Proust's life and works (novels) in the context of universal life lessons. Chapter 2, entitled "How to Read for Yourself," conveys the notion that Proust believed in novels as "a kind of optical instrument" (Proust's words) with which to examine one's own life. De Botton relates the story of Lucien Daudet who had occasion to visit an art gallery with Proust: Daudet tells us that they went into a gallery hung with a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It ...
10.29.07

Career Discovery and LinkedIn Make Sense Entrepreneurship, Life, Media | (3)
There's a lot I like about career discovery startup Path 101's intended trajectory. As I wrote last week, the company is "tackling 3 million+ publicly posted resumes on the web (and any others the company can get its hands on) and working on organizing that information." Such work could hold exceptional value. As a stats junkie, I'll be personally interested in playing with the data, some albeit bizarre hint of which is offered to me every year by my alma mater. It's pretty intriguing stuff. Consider that the most lucrative major at Princeton last year turned out to be philosophy. ...
10.25.07

Boycotting "Entrepreneurialism" Entrepreneurship | (3)
Earlier this week I heaped praise on a La Quinta Inns & Suites ad campaign, and a kind reader pointed me to their ad agency, Mullen. So I fished around on the Mullen site to get a better sense of their excellent work and ran across the following: "You can measure Mullen by its numbers. But we believe you should also measure us by our culture. It begins with two words: collective entrepreneurialism." I sighed. There's something so antithetical to the startup mentality in the word "entrepreneurialism." It's lengthy, and ends in an awkward mess of vowels and ...
10.23.07

Everything You Wanted to Know About Careers But Were Afraid to Ask Entrepreneurship, Life, Science and Tech | (5)
How cool! Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called "Letter to a Young(er) Professional" which covered core recommendations for folks early on the career path. I hit off with the following: First, know your options. If there's one tool I wish I was given in college it would be a database of 100,000 graduates with historical career information. And ended, "I doubt that career database is far away..." Well, it's officially in the works! Charlie O'Donnell, whom I've gotten to know over the past couple years as an industry peer, has started his own business, ...

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Welcome to Punctuative! Here you'll find occasionally insightful comments on entrepreneurship, venture capital, technology, and the future, as well as a nifty tool (coming soon) meant to help open doors in the financing world. Go ahead and explore.