Do the words “sustainable” and “sustainability” make you feel as uncomfortable as they first made me? Getting comfortable with Conscious Capitalism also requires getting comfortable with the concept of sustainability in the business context. Understanding sustainability is relevant to the venture capital industry because the path to a sustainable society may provide the biggest opportunity in the history of capitalism.

Professor Nada Nasr of Bentley University suggests that at a basic level sustainability is the capacity to endure. It’s obvious that a business must be profitable over the long-term in order to endure. Reviewing the balance sheet and income statement is the standard approach to measuring a business’ capacity to endure. Unfortunately, the current method ...

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Alignment.

You hear this word thrown out frequently in business conversations. It is a wonderful thing to aspire to, but very hard to achieve. Perhaps even harder to achieve in entrepreneurial settings between the venture capitalist and the entrepreneur, where the stakes are so high and the ever-present risk of dysfunctional behavior leading to a Start-Up Soap Opera.

Ever since I began the research for my book, I have been spending time thinking about why VC-entrepreneur alignment is so elusive. And so when the Kauffman Foundation asked me to give a presentation to their recent class of young VCs, I decided to take the opportunity to develop a few thoughts that teed up the key issues.

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We recently surveyed over 1000 venture capitalists to get their opinion on the state of the industry. Ninety-eight percent of the respondents were either Partners or Managing General Partners at VC firms throughout the country. The mood was considerably better than what we observed in the same time frame last year. This is not a surprise as we had hit rock bottom on the confidence scale in March 2009.

That being said there is plenty of conflicting data and lots of opinions on what is going on. Brian Hughes with KPMG LLP recently published a summary report on their survey associated with Venture Summit East 2010 titled Optimism in the Northeast. The Wall Street Journal on the other hand posted an article on July 19, 2010 titled Venture Capital Could Shrivel Away.

The truth ...

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As one of the original seed investors in Carbonite, I often worry about data backup. As we move toward a nearly 100% digital life it becomes extremely important that we backup our digital data, because the digital data has become our lives.

As we move toward cloud computing, backup becomes more nebulous. Certainly the online providers are backing up our data in mass to protect themselves from major data center disasters, but in a multitenant environment, what happens to the individual when they lose their cloud data?

As a huge Gmail fan, I used ...

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An important theme that we’ve heard in talking to investors recently has been the challenge of making commitments over the next two years. On the one hand, some investors feel that 2010 and 2011 are likely to be years with good opportunities to invest – prices are down from their pre-crash highs, and many good managers are bringing funds to market. On the other hand, some investors fear prices have already rebounded and that there is plenty of dry powder sitting idle on the sidelines, eagerly looking for transactions to invest in before commitment periods expire.

Either way, private equity investors are more allocation-constrained and cautious than in any time in recent memory. Many investors already have large uncalled commitments to private equity, and some have limited li...

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We're well into the second half of 2010, so I figured it was time to see which VC firms had been the most active so far this year.

No big surprises, except perhaps that Intel Capital nearly fell out of the Top 10. Or maybe that Redpoint Ventures, which ranked fourth when we did a similar post back in March, has dropped to #28.

What follows is from our VentureXpert database, based on global investment pace (MoneyTree numbers, on the other hand, are only for investments in U.S. companies). It only includes "institutional" VCs, as opposed to super-angels (some of whom would make the list). Per usual, just a reminder that money in doesn't always correlate to money out...

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The University of Texas Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO) was the first public institutions to regularly provide fund-level performance data for its private equity portfolio, and remains the most up-to-date. While CalPERS, for example, is still listing numbers as of December 31, UTIMCO just sent over a marks through the end of May (yes, this May).

Included are IRRs and other figures for nearly 200 venture capital and buyout funds (plus some funds-of-funds and credit vehicles). Among the more notable names on the VC side are Austin Ventures, Foundry Group, Foundation Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. The buyout group includes virtually all the big names: Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, Hellman & Friedman, TPG Capital, Warburg Pincus and more.

Get the data after the jump...

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It was nearly five years ago that Founders Fund -- led by four entrepreneurs with deep ties to PayPal and Facebook -- burst onto the venture scene, promising founders more autonomy than traditional VC firms and promising investors that it would transform its connections, including to former PayPal executives, into rich returns.

So far so good, apparently. Despite a sluggish fundraising environment, Founders Fund, which has already seen a handful of its portfolio companies acquired -- CoTweet, Mint, Powerset, IronPort, and CyberTrust -- announced last week that it had closed a $250 million “oversubscribed” third fund, its biggest to date.

In a wide-ranging discussion earlier today, managing directors Ken Howery and Luke Nosek talked about that new fund, along with some of the firm’s highest-profile investments; notable companies they haven’t backed; and the nerdy -- and potentially lucrative -- areas that interest the firm today.

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There were a dozen venture capital deals announced yesterday, representing more than $100 million in raised capital. But this morning I’d like to focus on less than 1% of that tally: The $975,000 round for LearnBoost, which is developing a Web-based gradebook for teachers.

Not interested in online education innovation? That’s ok, because this column is more about the financing than the company itself.

Specifically, LearnBoost raised its $975k from four “big” venture capital firms: Atlas Venture, Bessemer Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures and RRE Ventures. It also had a bunch of angel participation – including from James Hong and Naval Ravikant – which means the average VC firm invested around $230k (assuming an even split and $10k per angel – all of which may be wrong).

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Walt Disney Co. today announced that it will buy social gaming company Playdom for up to $763 million. It's the largest exit of a VC-backed gaming company since Playfish was acquired last fall by EA, and is significantly larger.

So we've got five questions for David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners, which became a Playdom investor just last month:

1. Playdom reports fewer monthly numbers than did Playfish at the time of its acquisition, but is being acquired at a price that's around 90% higher. Why?

Cowan: I think there are three answers here. First, you always have to look at the specific acquiror and the strategic fit and value of the company being acquired. I don't know the specifics of the valuation that went into Playfish, but do know that Disney expects a lot of synergies as it brings the Playdom team into other Disney properties.

Second, number of users is only one metric. I think that Playdom's revenues were significantly more at the time of acquisition. Third, Wild Ones is totally, totally awesome.

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