Alexander Haislip

Much of the focus on secondaries has been on how VC firms are selling stakes on the to help achieve liquidity. Since the public markets are all but closed for exit opportunities, a VC firm nearing the end of its fund might sell its illiquid stake in a startup to a secondary firm for pennies on the dollar. The investors at Millennium Technology Value Partners take a different approach to the secondaries business, one that has netted the firm a stake in several high-growth companies, such as eHarmony and Facebook. Millennium focuses on helping companies structure secondary sales to provide liquidity to long-serving employees, contractors and recently laid-off staff. I recently caught up with Millennium managing partner Samuel Schwerin to discuss the firm’s approach. 1. What’s changed in the relationship between VCs and secondary investors? Schwerin: Because of the current economic crisis, VCs are looking to use secondaries as a tool instead of something that has a stigma about it. If you go back to 2002, you wouldn’t hear a single investor endorse a secondary sale.

Willard MacDonald is the kind of guy who likes to fix things. MacDonald, an electrical engineer, naturally started investigating one day why the solar panels on his roof weren’t putting out the energy the installer had promised. He found the problem was surprisingly simple. The company that had installed his panels hadn’t taken into account […]

The swine flu outbreak is likely to benefit one of the most prolific and successful venture capital firms in the United States: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Shares of the two public companies in the firm’s portfolio of eight Pandemic and Bio Defense companies — BioCryst Pharmaceuticals and Novavax — jumped Friday on news that […]

Venture capitalists used to love networking. I’m not talking about schmoozing over wine and swapping business cards. I’m talking switches, routers, traffic monitoring, wireless, fiber and anything else that facilitated data transfer. Networking devices and management tools were hot in 2000 when venture capitalists invested $2.55 billion in U.S.-based startups offering networking appliances, according to […]

TransLink Capital, a Palo Alto-based VC firm that helps startups tap into Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, has raised $43.4 million toward a $75 million first fund, according to a regulatory filing. That’s lower than the $100 million target that Partner Toshio Otani told PE Week about last year. Otani did not return a request […]

Limited partners rated Russia as the least attractive region in which to deploy capital, according to a recent survey by U.K.-based secondary firm Coller Capital. Nearly three out of four investors surveyed said they would not invest in Russia or other ex-Soviet countries in the coming year. “Confidence in Russia as an investment destination has declined markedly,” says Coller Capital Partner Erwin Roex. That may not be particularly surprising, given that the RTS Index, Russia’s equivalent to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, has lost nearly 70% of its value since hitting a high point in May.

Qnuru, a company run by a high-school dropout turned blacksmith turned MacArthur Fellowship winner, last week launched its line of solar-powered outdoor lighting products, with help from a cleantech accelerator. Santa Fe-based Qnuru’s outdoor, solar-powered lighting products have the futuristic look of something that landed from another planet. Its lights use a fraction of the […]

DFJ Gotham has raised $35 million toward a $125 million second fund, according to a regulatory filing. That’s more than twice what the firm raised during its previous close in September 2007. So far, the New York-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson affiliate has raised the money from 36 investors, including CS Strategic Partners IV VC Holdings and Lehman Brothers Custom Fund A. The proposed target is slightly more than the $107 million DFJ Gotham raised for its debut fund in 2000.

Earth Class Mail Corp., a Seattle-based company that aims to re-invent the business of delivering snail-mail, is out to raise between $11 million and $20 million for its Series B financing within the next several weeks, CEO Ron Wiener tells peHUB. The startup last year raised $13.4 million in a Series A round from Ignition Partners and the Keiretsu Forum, a group of angel investors. In addition, the company secured a $3 million senior secured debt financing from Comerica and a $5.1 million convertible note financing last year, for a total of $21.4M of capital raised to date. Earth Class Mail works with postal services to scan mail and deliver it electronically to its clients. The service is said to be green since it helps to reduce carrier miles and promotes recycling.

Thin-film solar company OptiSolar Inc. raised another $30 million from investors, despite cutting its staff and selling projects earlier in the year. The Hayward, Calif.-based company sold senior secured promissory notes to 44 investors, according to a regulatory filing, a sizeable debt financing that adds to the $229 million the company had raised to date. The regulatory filing does not name any of the investors, but the firm previously raised funding from Richardson Capital and an undisclosed venture firm.