Lawrence Aragon
Old media is getting a fresh look from private equity investors. Today, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. made an unsolicated bid of $5 billion for Dow Jones. The family that controls DJ said it rejected the bid, but that doesn’t diminish the significance of the offer. It comes as Internet billionaire Mark Cuban appears on the […]
As tech buyouts get more and more competitive, some PE firms are bidding up deals through overly aggressive debt. That’s what Alex Slusky of Vector Capital and Robert Smith of Vista Equity Partners said during my tech buyouts panel yesterday at the Buyouts Symposium. They both half-jokingly said that they plan to raise distressed debt […]
It may be Friday the 13th, but it’s a great day Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity. Google has agreed to pay $3.1B in cash for DoubleClick. Not sure what the ROI is yet. Just wanted to post the news asap. UPDATE: Looks like they paid $1.1B back in 2005. Here’s the release: Google to […]
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has a bit of a public relations problem. The NYT did some digging and figured out that the firm invested in an oil exploration company called Terralliance. (KPCB and some unnamed individuals invested $35.3 million in the Newport Beach, Calif.-based company last October, according to Thomson Financial.) Normally such an […]
Remember Larry Bock? Back in 2002, Venture Capital Journal dubbed him “the most successful venture capitalist you’ve never heard of.” At that time, 11 of the 16 biotech companies he had seeded boasted an aggregate market cap of more than $14 billion and another two had been acquired for more than $1 billion. Not content […]
Simeon Simeonov should think about giving up his job as a VC at Polaris Venture Partners and becoming a reporter. Check out his great post about a rumored Google phone on his blog, High Contrast. The part that stands out for me is that the main guy is a founder of Danger (maker of the hip […]
Bay Partners appears to be trying to rewrite its history, judging by Matt Marshall’s post over at VentureBeat. The very strong implication is that MP Neal Dempsey pushed out the firm’s non-performers. We’ve been covering the troubles over at Bay for a while. This is less a case of Dempsey proactively “transforming” the firm than […]
The world is flat indeed. PE funds targeting “emerging markets” surged last year, according to a new report by the Emerging Markets Private Equity Association. EMPEA says 162 PE funds focused on Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa raised a little over $33B last year, up from about $26B raised by […]
It seems VCs are now competing with one another to see who can come up with the best holiday card. The hands down winner so far is Blueprint Ventures, with its Web greeting card featuring entrepreneur-of-the-year Gary Snoman. Gary’s daydream of becoming a VC will make some laugh and others cringe. His favorite piece of advice: […]
The “VC model is broken” story refuses to die. I just got an email from a Financial Times writer looking into the canard put forth by Sevin Rosen Funds in a letter to its LPs last month. And Bart Schachter from Blueprint Ventures stirred up some, uh, stuff with his “72 virgins” post on the […]