Alexander Haislip

January is the cruelest month when it comes to reading. Books from both Christmas and my birthday vie for time and attention like so many petulant, raucous children. David Owen’s Green Metropolis has been a source of some amusement and entertainment for me and I recommend it to anyone looking at the green buildings market. The gist of Owen’s book is simple, the entire world would be better off living in Manhattan. Baring that, they should at least live as those in Manhattan do, stacked on top of each other in high-rise apartments within easy walking distance of shops, offices and restaurants. Perhaps this is the conclusion any staff writer for The New Yorker might arrive at.

Game maker Electronic Arts is poised to invest in a newly-formed, $200 million Canadian venture capital fund made up of former EA employees, peHUB has learned. The firm, called VanEdge Capital, expects to hold its first close on $100 million from six limited partners, including EA, later this month. Vancouver-based VanEdge plans to focus on early stage digital media opportunities in the United States and abroad and has garnered support not just from one of the world’s largest video game publishers. Limited partners currently executing final diligence on the firm include the Export Development Bank, the Business Development Bank, the British Columbia Investment Management Corp. (one of Canada’s largest pension funds), BC Renaissance Capital Fund and Nicola Investments, says firm co-founder Paul Lee.

Oh what I wouldn’t give to live in San Francisco again. Clean air, some of the world’s greatest food and a chance to be in the midst of some of the greatest innovators in the world. (Let’s ignore for a second those pesky earthquakes.) Maybe the best part of living in the Bay Area is […]

In a year that has been tough for every sector, few entrepreneurs have had as tough a time raising funds as the founders of pharmaceutical startups. Just ask entrepreneur Nolan Sigal. Sigal says that he has been trying to raise between $12 million and $15 million in a first round of financing for allergy drug startup Tunitas Therapeutics for more than a year. He says he has pitched some 60 VCs and was hoping to use the funding to help push the company through clinical trials. However, the number of first-round pharmaceutical and biotech companies financed have fallen by nearly 70% in 2009, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). Some 49 drug companies managed to raise $513 million in venture capital during the first 11 months of 2009, compared to 159 startups that raised $1.13 billion throughout all of 2008, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Zynga’s new investors are building an online keiretsu on a global scale that the social gaming company may be well poised to exploit, records show. The firms, Moscow-based Digital Sky Technologies (DST), New York-based Tiger Global Management and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Andreessen Horowitz, recently led a $180 million investment round for an undisclosed stake in […]

Wells Fargo has committed $1.2 billion to venture capital affiliate Norwest Venture Partners, nearly doubling the amount it had invested just three years earlier. Norwest Venture Partners will invest the money in technology startups and other growth-stage private companies based in the U.S., India, Israel and China over the next three to four years, says […]

The confluence of technology and entertainment has long been the dream of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists living in Los Angeles. But Digital Hollywood, like so many other dreams born in the basin, has proved to be less substantial than appearances would suggest. The Los Angeles area is uniquely poised to grab a piece of the […]

Endowments have always been the mother’s milk of venture capital and private equity funds, typically allocating 11.8% of their portfolio to these assets, as compared with the 8.8% of all institutional investors. Yet only 33% of endowments have made new PE commitments this year according to a recent survey by Preqin and 35% won’t be making another commitment until 2011. And if you’re getting revved up about pitching one of the big boy endowments on your latest fund, you may be disappointed. The study found that 42% of endowments with over $750 million under management were over-allocated to private equity. That’s nearly three times as many over-allocated funds than the endowments with $350 million or less under management.

I wrote about Galleon Management’s $300 million move into venture capital in August 2007. The firm had hired half a dozen investment professionals and opened an office on Sand Hill Road to invest in private companies looking to go public. Today’s news that Galleon decided to wind down its funds after getting $1.3 billion in capital calls (thanks to a pesky insider trading scandal) may close the books on the firm’s operations, but its move out of venture capital happened at least a year before.

When a person becomes known for one thing, it’s easy to forget that he once did something completely different. Few people remember, for example, that before Babe Ruth was a New York Yankees slugger he was a successful Red Sox pitcher, with 94 wins, 46 losses and a 2.28 earned run average. So too, it is hard to remember that Michael Moritz was once a journalist for Time and a good writer before he became “the best long-ball hitter around” in his own right. But if you haven’t had the chance to read Moritz’s work before, you’ll have a chance to pick up a new edition of his 1984 profile of Apple Computer, which is coming out on November 10 from Overlook Press. Moritz’s “Return to the Little Kingdom” will have include “Moritz’s contemporary perspective on the state of Apple and the accomplishments of Steve Jobs in a new Introduction and Epilogue,” according to the publisher. No book signings