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The angel network is asking chapters to waive their presentation fees for "true startups" -- companies that have no revenue and less than $500,000 in capital and are trying to raise less than $500,000 from investors, said Randy Williams, Keiretsu's founder and CEO. Williams said the change is not a response to the recent attacks on the fees launched by investor Jason Calacanis -- who has promised to start his own angel network on Monday, November 16, unless Keiretsu and several other angel groups drop their fees -- but have been in the works for several months. Keiretsu also has no plans to drop fees for other entrepreneurs.
Setting aside the fact that Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters/the NVCA/PricewaterhouseCoopers don't agree on what they are, you get an interesting batch of companies when you combine the two lists. Seventy percent of them (12/17) are in California, and nearly half -- (8/17) -- are in healthcare, most of them developing drugs or medical devices. There are four clean tech companies, two social networks and three outliers -- a wireless IT company, a company in Iowa that sells software for fundraising, and an oil and gas exploration company working in Africa. Only one (Solyndra) has raised over $100 million.
At least so far. It was a little over a year ago -- the week the stock market tanked -- that Sequoia summoned Jive and its other portfolio companies to a secret meeting so they could lay out how bad the economy was and order their fledglings to cut costs. That meeting didn't remain secret long -- Sequoia's presentation, embedded below in case you've forgotten, was soon leaked all over the Internet. But it made a big impression on a lot of people, including the folks at Jive, who went back to Portland and laid people off.
They rose to $4.8 billion last quarter -- up 17% from Q2, according to the latest MoneyTree report (based on data from Thomson Reuters, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association). Deals, meanwhile, fell only slightly to 637, a drop of just 3%. PwC's Tracy Lefteroff called the new numbers "very encouraging." So how come Dow Jones said on Saturday that venture investing was down third quarter to $5.1 billion, a 6% drop, in a trend that "points to prolonged correction, shakeout"? It depends on whose numbers -- and whose prognosis -- you believe.
Accel has hired Neeraj Bharadwaj away from Apax, where he worked for a decade, to build up Accel's portfolio in India. So far, Accel has made early stage investments in India out of a $60 million seed stage fund it closed late last year. Now, however, it will also be making "growth equity" investments, meaning Bharadwaj will be authorized to write checks to mid-sized Indian companies for between $10 million and $50 million.
Considering the billions of dollars the government is investing in this sector, you'd think venture capitalists would be angling to get a slice of it. But not all are enthusiastic. One firm that's wary is DCM, which has decided not to depend on government subsidies or renewable standards to drive the economics of their clean tech companies. "It reduces our field of investment opportunities, but that's what a VC is," said DCM's Tom Blaisdell, who talked to peHUB last week. "We're looking for a needle in a haystack anyway, and in any market it's our job to find those needles." Blaisdell wasn't enthusiastic when DCM first asked him to focus on clean tech,
This is from Dow Jones VentureSource -- numbers from Thompson Reuters, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association come out Monday (and will be very different). A little over $5 billion was invested in U.S. venture backed companies last quarter -- a slight drop from second quarter and a bigger drop from last year. Six of the top nine deals were in healthcare, including Pacific Biosciences and Complete Genomics. The top three were WastePro, Facebook and Tesla Motors. Get data after the jump...
That's because venture capitalists tend to underprice IPOs to benefit their own firms, according to the University of New Hampshire's Center for Venture Research, while the interests of angel investors are more closely aligned with entrepreneurs'. The center looked at all the companies that went public from 2001 to 2007 and figured out how they were funded -- whether their investors were angels, venture capitalists, both or none. Venture capitalists were prone to under-price IPOs (meaning the difference between the offering price and the closing price of shares was higher) because they hang on to their shares and distribute them to limited partners, said the center's director, Jeffrey Sohl.
Steve Westly -- the former California gubernatorial candidate turned Silicon Valley venture capitalist -- issued a wake-up call today to U.S.entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who have hesitated to invest in clean tech -- especially in China. "No VC firm should be without a China strategy," he told an audience of several hundred people at a clean tech conference sponsored by Cooley Godward, a Silicon Valley law firm. "China will pass the U.S. in 20 years as the largest economy in the world. There are only two countries that matter -- the U.S. and China. They create 40% of the world's pollution, and the other 191 countries divvy up the rest....I go to China every 90 days -- China knows the big health issues they're facing." Despite the massive investments the U.S. has been making in alternative energy, smart grids and other clean technologies, the Chinese government is moving faster and is pushing the U.S. hard,
NASDAQ OMX's Bruce Aust told peHUB on Tuesday that NASDAQ has a new "lower-tier listing market" in the works that will be aimed at emerging companies and at financially solid companies that can't meet the NASDAQ's listing requirements. The idea is to make it easier for companies to go public, which has been tough for over a year. Aust said NASDAQ has been working closely on this project -- which would operate in Boston -- with the National Venture Capital Association. Not so, says the NVCA.
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