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Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Weisel Partners’

Institutional Venture Partners Raises $1 Billion Fund

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Entrepreneurship, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, IPO news, Market research, Silicon Valley, Social Networks, Startups, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , on June 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

 

Institutional Venture Partners has another billion to play with.

The venture capital firm, an investor in Twitter, Zynga and LivingSocial, has raised $1 billion for I.V.P. XIV, its 14th and largest fund to date.

According to a partner, Sandy Miller, the firm initially set a $750 million target but increased it on robust demand. The fund, which was raised over four months, relied mainly on capital from previous investors.

Unlike some of its peers, Institutional Venture Partners does not write a lot of checks, usually not more than a dozen a year. As a later-stage investment firm, it invests $10 million to $100 million in seasoned start-ups in three main buckets: Internet, enterprise technology and mobile.

“I hate to sound dull but we’re doing the same strategy,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Miller, a longtime technology investor and co-founder of Thomas Weisel Partners, is optimistic despite recent setbacks in the technology sector.

Skepticism in the public markets, most recently highlighted by Facebook‘s underwhelming initial public offering, has damped enthusiasm for some late-stage start-ups. Zynga, for instance, an Institutional Venture Partners portfolio company, has tumbled more than 44 percent since its debut last year. And plenty of experts question whether another start-up it has backed, LivingSocial, is worth such a high valuation after Groupon, its far bigger rival, has fallen about 50 percent since its I.P.O.

Mr. Miller acknowledges that some valuations may pull back, but he says he invests for the long term.

“I’ve watched the technology market over a 30-year period,” he said. “There’s more interesting, high quality companies today than there has ever been and by a very wide margin.”

He added, “In every market, most deals don’t make sense, and that’s true now, but that’s always been true.”

Read more here.

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More IPO gossip, new prospects include: Greenplum, LinkedIn, Pacific Biosciences and Zynga

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Market research, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a recent article from CNN.

“If you have been an investor in technology IPOs in recent months you’ve done well.

Starting in April, and really gathering momentum this summer, there has been a slew of tech companies that leapt through the public market window including Changyou (CYOU), Rosetta Stone (RST), OpenTable (OPEN), and most recently Emdeon (EM).”

The article continues,

“Right now in Silicon Valley, investment bankers are busy making the rounds of promising portfolio companies trying to convince them of the wisdom of an IPO. There is always the question of what kind of company can – or should – go public. During the last wave of tech IPOs, after the dotcom bust, the rule of thumb was that firms with $100 million in revenue and profitability were IPO candidates.

Investment bankers on the prowl in Silicon Valley

Now, according to one prominent venture capitalist who asked to remain anonymous, investment bankers are telling him, “If a company can show revenue of $15 million per quarter, a good business model – and if not profitability, a path to profits – they can deliver an oversubscribed offering.” (One wonders wonder whether these simply are investment bankers who have had nothing to do for the last 12 months, trying to make their bonus figures.)

Venture capitalists have not had much to be happy about, either. It wasn’t just IPOs, but acquisitions that came to a screeching halt during the recession. Both of these groups desperately want the IPO window to stay open, and so far it is.”

And concludes,

“In Google’s day it was bulge-bracket investment banks – Morgan Stanley (MS), CSFB (CS), Goldman (GS), Lehman Bros or no one. The economics of the banks (characterized as going “down-market” to even do $500 million IPOs) required bigger deals. Today’s deals, with their much more modest size, are better tailored for the boutique banks – Thomas Weisel Partners, Jeffries, JMP Securities, Piper Jaffray, and the like. These are the banks pounding the streets in Silicon Valley the hardest.

Could it all end badly? Of course, and usually it does when the rush toward IPOs at some point sends half-baked companies into the public markets and they tank. But between now and then we are likely to see a group of very high quality tech companies look to go public – think Greenplum, LinkedIn, Pacific Biosciences and Zynga among many others.

For those investors with the stomach, it might not get much better.”

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