Alexander Haislip

Draper Fisher Jurvetson has begun fundraising for its tenth fund a mere 12 months after closing its $600 million ninth fund, according to a regulatory filing. Details are not yet available and Tim Draper could not be immediately reached for comment. The firm filed four regulatory filings associated with its previous fund, starting in December […]

Where do you go when you've proved your technology and need cash to build out your manufacturing plant or expand sales globally? Cleantech companies have had a particularly hard time connecting with expansion capital, especially after the credit crunch effectively shut down lending.

Elon Musk told Reuters he will try to raise $20 million from his existing investors to ensure that Tesla is able to deliver its Roadsters and continue work on its electric sedan. The investor-turned-CEO says the company has $9 million of cash on hand, but will need more to tide it over. Musk was working on a $100 million investment round before the stock market fell off the table. When the DOW dove, each potential investor tightened up the terms, forcing Musk out of the fundraising market. Tesla, by virtue of its high-profile product, is just one of maybe a hundred or more cleantech companies in trouble thanks to the crumbling credit market. But we’re going to do something to help. Thomson Reuters is sponsoring a breakfast panel that will feature some of the people who can and will still be financing large cleantech projects through the downturn.

Last month I suggested it was about time for a new song to replace "The Risk Master" as Tim Draper's Silicon Valley anthem. The song's origin was a long-kept secret, thanks to a hush-clause the writer demanded. But two years ago, the Venture Capital Journal was the first to report that the song's writer was Don Henley. I'll confess that I had to ask someone over 40 who that was, but my editors thought he was cool. But an inside source recently leaked video footage that suggests Draper may have hired 33-year-old will.i.am to liven up his increasingly tired sound. The front man of the Black Eyed Peas is known for his sense of style (he studied at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising here in LA) and for his increasing political involvement. Most recently, will.i.am wrote music to the words of a speech

Dan’s wire today cautioned VCs about the coming smackdown in enterprise IT spend, saying “It was that phenomenon–more so than the dotcom silliness–that caused so many VC portfolio problems earlier this decade.” It’s not that IT shops are going to cut spending so much as cut proposed increases in spending. I got the survey results […]

Why aren’t VCs freaking out as Wall Street burns? It’s a question that I’ve been asking for more than a week now. There is, of course, the usual litany of responses: we’re long term investors, we invest in fundamentals, our LPs are going to be good for their commitments because they’re so big and so […]

Harvard Business School spun itself into a tizzy after reading Philip Delves Broughton’s account of his two years at the school in the recently published “Ahead of the Curve.” Delves Broughton’s criticisms of the school itself are minor (only professors with experience running companies should teach entrepreneurship, grades should be abolished, etc…). His real beef is with the capitalistic strivings of the school’s graduates who can’t seem to hold their marriages together, call their children “strangers” and work 100 hour weeks with regularity. Harvard Business School is a “factory for unhappy people,” Broughton writes, albeit an efficient and well run factory. As an insider’s view inside an American institution, the book delivers and may be entertaining to any graduate of the school. There are several amusing vignettes in the book, ranging from an account of cross-dressing at the annual Pricilla Ball (recent grads better scrub those pics out of their Facebook profiles, ahem.), the labyrinthine hiring process at Google and the barrage of personality tests the school encouraged students to take. Venture capitalists will likely chuckle on hearing of Delves Broughton’s Harvard-sponsored trip to Silicon Valley. First there is the careful and sympathetic recounting of a meeting with KP’s Russell Seligman [sic: That’s Russ Siegelman (HBS’89), for the detail oriented]. The investor spoke to HBSers about how many people saw VC as a fast track route to riches, but how it wasn’t really.

China has certainly been the belle of the ball among venture capitalists. Investors have already put nearly $2.6 billion to work in China year-to-date. That’s 50% more than what VCs invested during the first eight months of 2007, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of PEHub.com). However, a spate of recent fund closings suggests venture firms […]

Whenever you get to feeling bad about the economy, it’s always refreshing to go listen to seed investors and their startups. They’re so full of optimism. And why wouldn’t they be? The economy will likely have righted itself by the time they’re looking for liquidity. Some professional angels even see it as a positive development. […]