If you’re in the mood for a really enjoyable film, I recommend Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. In it he uses the latest movie-making technologies to animate 19th century London in all its dark immensity and brooding menace- from the elegant halls of parliament to the ornate rooms of masonic temples to the labyrinthine sewers beneath the city. The sets and staging in and of themselves are a masterpiece and are simply breathtaking. I think the production designer should be nominated for yet another Academy Award.

I also came to this film with a sensibility that I did not have when I first encountered Holmes as a young boy reading Conan Doyle. I was of course neither an entrepreneur nor an early-stage investor. Not surprisingly, this time, soon after leaving the theater something I had never considered before really hit me. I was struck by the realization that Sherlock would have made an amazing venture capitalist!

"What a perfectly silly notion my dear Watson!", he would no doubt have replied. But I would have to insist and say that VC's and Angel Investors young and old would do well to emulate some of Sherlock’s best qualities. Here they are as I see them:

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In his storied baseball career, Curt Schilling has rarely found himself at a loss for words. So it was great fun to watch him sit speechless for an hour as Harvard Business School students dissected his entrepreneurial venture and some of the choices he was making as a manager, leader and strategist.

The setting was akin to sitting around the living room analyzing last night's World Series pitching performance. Judging from the rigor of their analysis, the students would have put a bevy of ESPN and newspaper sportscasters to shame.

The two classes I taught this week at HBS, based on a case that I co-authored with Professor Noam Wasserman called "Curt Schilling's Next Pitch" (which you can order here from HBS Press), were energized to have Schilling in the classroom alongside his CEO Jen Maclean. Although none of the students can relate to his triumphs and tribulations as a professional athlete (save one student who was a professional soccer player before turning to a business career!), they could all relate to his struggles to launch his gaming start-up, 38 Studios, and his efforts to chart a course for success for the growing company, which now has over 130 employees.

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The following Wharton PE Conference notes are from Carmen Feliciano, a first-year MBA student at the Wharton School. Prior to Wharton, she worked as a Brand Manager in Technology & Consumer Goods.

Panel: VC in Emerging Markets
Panelists: David Lam (WI Harper Group), Patrick Eggen (Qualcomm Ventures), Vijjay Khanna (GIV Venture Partners), Jeff Richards (GGV Capital Partners) and Ravi Viswanathan (New Enterprise Associates). The moderator was Andras Forgacs of Richmond Management.

Investments from US to emerging markets
- Innovation will still be in the US (Ravi)
- Emerging markets success must be scalable in the US (Vijay)
- Bullish about China (Jeff)
- Bullish about India (Patrick)

Advantage/disadvantage of international...

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The following was compiled by Rohan Deuskar, a first-year MBA student at the Wharton School. Prior to Wharton, Rohan was a serial entrepreneur and most recently ran the Innovation Department at mobile marketing firm Vibes Media.

I asked the Wharton conference organizers for their key takeaways from keynotes by John Megrue Jr., CEO of Apax Partners U.S., and Dalip Pathak, head of Warburg Pincus Europe and India. Here we go:

“What Dalip Pathak said about the past two recession periods lasting 10-13 years is really revealing. Conversations about where we are in the cycle are probably not as appropriate as accepting that the business climate is what it is now and figuring out how to make smart investments. There is not an upheaval around the corner. PE is not going away, VC...

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The following Wharton PE Conference coverage is from Daniela Stefovska, a first-year MBA student at the Wharton School. She sat in a panel about the future of private equity. Prior to Wharton, Daniela worked in the Global Treasury group of Merrill Lynch, where she helped create the Liquidity Risk Management platform.

Alternative Investments: Strategies for the Future

The panel kicked off by tackling the issue of whether PE was the problem or the solution to the current economic crisis. One of the participants drew the following analogy to explain attacks on PE for causing the crisis: “When a fight starts in a bar you don’t punch the guy who started it, you punch the guy you don’t like.”

The Blackstone Group’s Garrett Moran emphasized the important ro...

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There’s a lot of talk about tech IPO candidates lately. Conspicuously missing from those lists is longtime media darling Digg. Reportedly courted by Google in 2008, the five-year-old news aggregator has been elbowed out of the spotlight -- and traffic rankings -- by six-year-old Facebook and three-year-old Twitter.

In other words, Digg has a MySpace problem.

Unlike MySpace, however, Digg has no plans to passively watch its audience go elsewhere. It may have lost some of its first-mover mojo, but the San Francisco-based company -- which has 40 million registered users -- is actively working to get it back.

For starters, Digg is planning to launch a spate of new Digg sites centered around niche content. To continue broadening away from its original base of men ages 18 to 34, Digg is “extending beyond our one-size-fits-all home page and atomizing content,” says Digg's chief stategy officer, Mike Maser. If you’re interested in rock climbing or knitting, Digg aims to have in-depth news for you to vote up or down on a separate home page.

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We have a new contender for most scandalous private equity exec of the year. And, for bonus points, this one also happens to be a peHUB Wire reader.

The NY Daily News reports that Giri Sekhar, a managing partner with FA Technology Ventures, has been indicted for trying to blackmail the chief counsel of NY State Comtroller Thomas DiNapoli, in order to secure a $25 million fund commitment from NY Common Retirement Fund.

Specifically, Sekhar is alleged to have sent messages threatening to expose the chief counsel’s extramarital affair (which, for the record, DiNapoli’s office denies having occurred).

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More than 400 peHUB readers took over Connolly's on 45th Street in Manhattan last night, for our first peHUB Shindig of 2010. No content, just cocktails and conversation. Plus, more than $4,500 raised for Doctors Without Borders.

Great to see so many of you there, and sorry we'd been gone for so long (our last NYC event was in Nov. '08). Next time we promise to find a larger room, so that we can fit the other 300 or so of you who got stranded on the wait-list.

Get photos from the event, after the jump...

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In 2001, the New York Times characterized Ron Conway as “just another dot-com also-ran,” owing to the then-poor performance of two Internet index funds that Conway ran for rich contacts who wanted a piece of his early-stage action.

The uber angel was restored to his place at the center of the digital revolution when Google — which he’d backed in 2000 — went public in 2004. The search giant’s IPO made Conway and his investors far richer than when they’d started together. By then, however, Conway had taken enough slings and arrows; he resolved to invest his own money exclusively.
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In his storied baseball career, Curt Schilling has rarely found himself at a loss for words. So it was great fun to watch him sit speechless for an hour as Harvard Business School students dissected his entrepreneurial venture and some of the choices he was making as a manager, leader and strategist.

The setting was akin to sitting around the living room analyzing last night's World Series pitching performance. Judging from the rigor of their analysis, the students would have put a bevy of ESPN and newspaper sportscasters to shame.

The two classes I taught this week at HBS, based on a case that I co-authored with Professor Noam Wasserman called "Curt Schilling's Next Pitch" (which you can order here from HBS Press), were energized to have Schilling in the classroom alongside his CEO Jen Maclean. Although none of the students can relate to his triumphs and tribulations as a professional athlete (save one student who was a professional soccer player before turning to a business career!), they could all relate to his struggles to launch his gaming start-up, 38 Studios, and his efforts to chart a course for success for the growing company, which now has over 130 employees.

Read more »