What a lousy year this has proven to be for the venture capital industry. According to data released today by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters, venture funds raised just $1.6 billion in the third quarter. That’s down 82 percent from a year ago and 21 percent from last quarter.
The passing of a year hasn’t much changed Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s opinion of cloud computing. Remarking on the industry’s sudden fascination with the concept at Oracle OpenWorld last September, Ellison reduced it to a thin sheen of windshield condensation. In conversation with former Sun CEO Ed Zander at a Churchill Club event a little over a year later, Ellison expanded on those remarks, suggesting that if the cloud is anything, it’s a cloud of BS.
EBay’s plan to sell a 65 percent stake in Skype to a group of private investors is going to be a bit more difficult to pull off than expected. This afternoon, Joltid, a company owned by Skype’s founders, filed a copyright suit against eBay and the consortium of investors that just paid $1.9 billion for a majority interest in it.
They say “flat is the new up” and that certainly seems to be the case with the venture capital industry. Though we’ve had two consecutive quarters without an IPO and the venture market is all but frozen, VC optimism is beginning to return. The latest Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index shows a small but noteworthy uptick in the VC community’s views of the entrepreneurial environment in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation. And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game, and Google and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.
To hear tell from the National Venture Capital Association, the VC landscape is as burned out and desolate as the ashen vistas of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” According to its latest data, not a single venture-backed company went public in the first quarter of 2009 or the one that preceded it. That’s the first time the association has ever recorded two consecutive quarters with no issues.
Google announces Google Ventures, a $100 million venture capital fund. Plus, Bill O’Reilly on Twitter, layoffs at Sun and Microsoft kills Encarta. (Mar. 31)
Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often says that the best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks. Google appears to have taken that message to heart because it’s launching a new venture fund at a time when the VC industry is busy practicing its duck-for-cover exercises.
Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz once argued that “the best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks.” A pithy little adage, and one that was understood to be emblematic of the healthy optimism and patient money of the venture capital industry and its indefatigable all-trees-grow-to-heaven worldview. It loses a bit of its luster, though, when that healthy optimism and patient money are themselves cowering under the desk.
Sad Guys on Trading Floors may soon have some new photographs of dismay to catalog, if the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index is any guide. Released this morning, the index puts VC confidence at its lowest point in the five-year history of the survey.
With Adam Smith’s oft-lauded “invisible hand” giving investors the invisible finger and the world economy reeling from what the International Monetary Fund just labeled the most dangerous shock to the financial markets since the 1930s, the healthy optimism and patient money for which the venture capital world has long been known are fast turning into a querulous hopelessness. To wit, the emergency gathering held at Sequoia Capital this week.
A Google VC arm?
Sounds like another one of those poorly conceived “20-percent time” projects, doesn’t it? Historically, corporate venture capital portfolios have a very mixed record.
So why bother? Well, if you’re a company driven by long-term results, as Google claims to be, you’re likely more concerned with long-term strategic goals than short-term financial ones.
Now that venture capitalists are so taken with green tech, perhaps they can push some VC dollars toward the development of a greener data center. Because according to consultancy McKinsey, data centers are fast becoming the Superfund sites of the tech industry. McKinsey found that data centers are responsible for 0.3% of the world’s carbon-dioxide [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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