Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘netscape’

A Circle of Tech: Collect Payout, Do a Start-Up

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, internet, Investments, IPO news, Market research, Social Networks, Startups, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Matt Cohler was employee No. 7 at Facebook. Adam D’Angelo joined his high school friend Mark Zuckerberg’s quirky little start-up in 2004 — and became its chief technology officer. Ruchi Sanghvi was the first woman on its engineering team.

All have left Facebook. None are retiring. With lucrative shares and a web of valuable industry contacts, they have left to either create their own companies, or bankroll their friends.

With Facebook’s public offering in mid-May, more will probably join their ranks in what could be one of Facebook’s lasting legacies — a new generation of tech tycoons looking to create or invest in, well, the next Facebook.

“The history of Silicon Valley has always been one generation of companies gives birth to great companies that follow,” said Mr. Cohler, who, at 35, is now a partner at Benchmark Capital, and an investor in several start-ups created by his old friends from Facebook. “People who learned at one set of companies often go on to start new companies on their own.”

“The very best companies, like Facebook,” he continued, “end up being places where people who come there really learn to build things.”

This is the story line of Silicon Valley, from Apple to Netscape to PayPal and now, to Facebook. Every public offering creates a new circle of tech magnates with money to invest. This one, though, with a jaw-dropping $100 billion valuation, will create a far richer fraternity.

Its members will be, by and large, young men, mostly white and Asian who, if nothing else, understand the value of social networks. And they have the money. Some early executives at Facebook have already sold their shares on the private market and have millions of dollars at their disposal.

Mr. Cohler, for example, is at the center of a complex web of business and social connections stemming from Facebook.

In 2002, barely two years out of Yale, he was at a party where he met Reid Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who was part of a slightly older social circle. The two men “hit it off,” as Mr. Cohler recalled on the online question-and-answer platform, Quora (which was co-founded by Mr. D’Angelo). He became Mr. Hoffman’s protégé, assisting him with his entrepreneurial investments, and following him to his new start-up, LinkedIn.

Then, Mr. Cohler joined a company that Mr. Hoffman and several other ex-PayPal executives were backing: Facebook.

Mr. Cohler stayed at Facebook from 2005 to 2008, as it went from being a college site to a mainstream social network. One of his responsibilities was to recruit the best talent he could find, including from other companies.

Mr. Cohler left the company to retool himself into a venture capitalist. He has since been valuable to his old friends from Facebook.

Through his venture firm, Mr. Cohler has raised money for several companies founded by Facebook alumni, including Quora, created in 2010 by Mr. D’Angelo and another early Facebook engineer, Charlie Cheever. Other companies include Asana, which provides software for work management and was created in 2009 by Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder; and Peixe Urbano, a Brazilian commerce Web site conceived by Julio Vasconcellos, who managed Facebook’s Brazil office in São Paulo.

Mr. Cohler has put his own money into Path, a photo-sharing application formed in 2010 by yet another former Facebook colleague, Dave Morin. Path is also bankrolled by one of Facebook’s venture backers: Greylock Partners, where Mr. Hoffman is a partner.

And he has invested in Instagram, which was scooped up by Facebook itself for a spectacular $1 billion. “Thrilled to see two companies near and dear to my heart joining forces!” Mr. Cohler posted on Twitter after the acquisition.

Instagram clearly was a good bet; it is impossible to say whether any of the other investments Mr. Cohler or other Facebookers are making will catch fire or whether the start-ups they found will last. Certainly, there is so much money in the Valley today that start-ups have room to grow without even a notion of turning a profit.

Ms. Sanghvi, one of the company’s first 20 employees, married a fellow Facebook engineer, Aditya Agarwal. Mr. Zuckerberg attended their wedding in Goa, India.

Read the rest of this article here.

Read Full Post »

‘Netscape Moment’ Won’t Come From Solyndra, At Least Not Yet

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , on June 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is a article from the VC blog at WSJ.

“At The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference in March, famed venture capitalist John Doerr declared the clean-technology industry needs a “Netscape moment” – an IPO listing that will capture the public’s imagination and usher in a slew of other companies through an open gate to the public markets.

Several clean-tech investors were looking to solar company Solyndra Inc. as perhaps such a breakthrough. But the fact that Solyndra – which exceeded $100 million last year and has been selling panels briskly – couldn’t pull of an IPO, raises the question of what comes next.

The maker of thin-film solar panels, the first renewable-energy recipient of federal loan guarantees, cited “adverse market conditions” for its decision to pull the IPO. The move will make expansion more difficult for Solyndra, which will require hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to reach its goals.

Rather than persuade public-market investors to buy in, Solyndra opted to once again turn to its private backers for more cash, selling $175 million in secured convertible promissory notes to undisclosed existing investors. The company has already raised $970 million in equity from these backers, the second highest total ever among venture-backed companies.

A tepid IPO market is some reason to blame for Solyndra’s withdrawal. Public investors haven’t exactly embraced unprofitable, risky plays like Solyndra this year, no matter how promising. While Solyndra is selling its product and expanding, mounting losses and an auditor’s going concern statement in its IPO filing didn’t make anything easier for the Fremont, Calif.-based company.

Public investors may also be skeptical whether Solyndra can match up with publicly traded First Solar Inc., which also sells thin-film solar panels and is considered a trail blazer for the industry by many venture capitalists.

“First Solar is preventing the tech [solar] companies from going public,” said Stephen Chin, analyst with UBS AG. “None of these start-up companies like Solyndra, Nanosolar, have scale or large capacity. I think that’s the biggest hindrance. First Solar is hard to compete against,” he added. UBS owned more than 1% of First Solar shares as of end of May, according to a disclosure statement.

Indeed, Solyndra’s manufacturing costs are high at $4 per watt for the fourth fiscal quarter ended Jan. 2, 2010. First Solar, on the other hand, plans to have costs of 78 cents per watt by the end of this year. Solyndra appears to be selling at a loss, too, as its average selling price for the full year ended Jan. 2 was $3.29 per watt, down from $3.75 per watt a year earlier.

“If the more you sell, the more money you lose,” you can’t make that work, said Kevin Landis, portfolio manager for Firsthand funds, which have a stake in another solar CIGS company SoloPower Inc.

First Solar plans to have annual production capacity of about 2 gigawatts at the end of next year, compared to 300 MW promised by Solyndra. Its panels use copper indium gallium diselenide, or CIGS, as the semiconducting material, which has higher potential efficiencies than First Solar’s cadmium telluride.”

Read the full article here.

Read Full Post »

The Next IPO Boom

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 11, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is an article from The Wallstreet Pit.

“Paul Kedrosky made a wish for the new year: “Remember IPOs? Way back when your parents were messing about with technology stocks in the late 1990s, pretty much every company that could went public, mostly via Nasdaq IPOs…. I’m wagering we’re about to enter a similar period in 2010.”

He was hoping for a Walter Sobchak moment:

Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules? Mark it zero!
– The Big Lebowski (1998)

The Next Netscape

The dot-com boom was sparked by Netscape’s IPO, just as Apple’s IPO launched the PC Bubble in the early ’80s (complete with companies with goofy names like Kentucky Fried Computers).

Will we have our Netscape Moment this year? It is now looking less likely.

Today’s Netscapes are companies like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and (maybe) Yelp – winners in social media. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld gives his top 10 IPO candidates. Yet it seems rather than rush for glory in the public markets, these companies are inclined instead to take in private equity and stay private. Facebook for example took a big slug from a Russian PE firm, and took itself out of the IPO sweepstakes for now.

Instead of the hot new companies, we are seeing a lot of ’90s retreads finally getting their chance to exit, such as the indomitable Force 10, which has more than $200M VC financing in it, and no buyers. Their only exit left is the unsuspecting public! We are also seeing cleantech names, like Tesla, line up to go out – companies which need tons of capital to grow. (Disclosure – I have an indirect VC interest in Tesla.)

Companies with hot growth prospects in a new sector can be a Netscape. Google got out, and at the time a lot of VCs thought it would be the new Netscape. No dice. Filings ratcheted up from 47 by Aug 2003 to 236 by Aug 2004, but few got out. Google was really a second generation search firm, a category hot in the prior IPO period, not the start of a new trend.

Retreads will not make an IPO craze. Cleantech may have the allure and cache to do so, but so many of them are long-term science projects which require huge capital to get going (think – solar farms in the desert). A bunch of solar firms went public in 2006, and a lithium-ion nanotech battery maker, A123, went public on late 2009 (cleantech and nanotech in one company!), but no huge wave of cleantech IPOs has emerged, yet.”

Read the full article here.

Read Full Post »