debbiegage

Today was the deadline that Calacanis had set for various angel groups -- the Keiretsu Forum, Maverick Angels, AlwaysOn and several others -- to stop charging fees for entrepreneurs to present their startups. These groups have pretty much ignored him, so Calacanis -- who's sold two companies and is now CEO of the venture-backed startup Mahalo, as well as an angel investor himself -- says he will make good on his promise to start his own angel network, the Open Angel Forum. It will be a for-profit group with chapters planned in 20 cities, starting in the first quarter with Los Angeles (where Calacanis lives and says he plays poker with "two dozen *real* angel investors"). Details so far are scarce. Calacanis declines to say how he's going to make money.

Here's a copy of the complaint filed last month in Kern County, California, alleging problems with the new -- and mandatory -- smart meters being installed in that part of the state. The plaintiff, Pete Flores, claims that his utility bill has tripled -- from $200 to as much as $600 a month -- since he got one of these devices, which he says were supposed to save him money. He's suing both his utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the installer of the meters, PG&E contractor Wellington Energy, for negligence, fraud, unjust enrichment etc. His attorney, Michael Louis Kelly, says that PG&E's suppliers might also be sued. These include General Electric and two private-equity backed companies -- Landis+Gyr, which makes the meters, and Silver Spring Networks, whose communications technology connects them. Silver Spring is advised by Al Gore

The National Venture Capital Association and Startuphire.com have partnered to publish a list of job openings at startups and are looking for 140-character "testimonials" about what it's like to work at one. These are supposed to be positive stories, and to make sure you get that message, startup.com has posted some sample Tweets, which sound a bit like they may have been written by someone who's had too many cups of coffee -- or perhaps knows English as a second language. "You must have agility to be able to change hats mid-thought and analyze a problem in the opposite direction from someone else's shoes."

Here's Harry Rein from Foundation Medical Partners telling Maria Bartiromo on CNBC today how innovation in the new healthcare reform bills has "hit the cutting room floor." "They're focused on access and reductions in cost...(but) you don't get to lower costs without innovation. It IS the solution," Rein said. Al Waxman of the Psilos Group has a very different view. Healthcare innovation does not always lower costs, he found -- sometimes it makes costs go up. Waxman discovered this first-hand in the 1970s, when he invented an ultrasound device that he thought would lower healthcare costs by eliminating unnecessary surgeries. But it didn't. It raised costs because doctors used the device to do unnecessary procedures to lower their chances of getting sued.

Mayfield's David Ladd, who was on Voxeo's board when the company was struggling to survive in the wake of the dot-com bust (see my previous post), said founder and CEO Jonathan Taylor "has proven to be a true entrepreneur" and deserves all the success he gets. But Ladd also has no regrets about cutting Mayfield's losses and exiting the company when he did, five years ago. Mayfield turned over its interest to Taylor for $1, Ladd said, after investing, along with Crosspoint, around $38 million. "We could have been mean VCs -- we could have kept our ownership and said 'Too bad, good luck,'" he said.

Voxeo issued a press release today announcing a $9 million investment by North Atlantic Capital and the Florida Growth Fund, but did not mention the $38 million it raised several years ago from Crosspoint and Mayfield. Crosspoint's Rich Shapero and Mayfield's David Ladd were on Voxeo's board -- in November of 2001 they replaced other board members from those firms and expressed their confidence in and commitment to the company. Thomson Reuters has Voxeo raising $78 million in funding between 2000 and 2002 and adds Silver Lake and Broadview Capital as investors, although Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor says some of that money was venture debt from Lighthouse. In any case, things did not go as planned for Voxeo,

Even though Barris stressed that only three of the 12 investments NEA did in October were new, as opposed to follow-on rounds, he's not arguing with Larry's ranking of NEA as the most active venture capitalist in the U.S. -- at least for October. Mergers, acquisitions and IPOs are all picking up, he said, and he's predicting good times for venture capital next year. Just yesterday, NEA led a $43 million Series A round into Playdom, a social gaming company [UPDATE: that is also making acquisitions]. We asked Barris to tell us more. 1. You cite new investments, more of an equilibrium in pricing, and less hesitation to make commitments in the last few weeks. Why are these changes happening? It depends on the nature of the investment. If it’s an early stage startup, I think there were a lot of entrepreneurs sitting on the sidelines waiting to get financed at a valuation they wanted. For more mature companies in need of working capital -- to the extent they could manage a delay in that -- they followed the same path as the entrepreneurs, waiting until things were better and we reached equilibrium in pricing. And I think some were out there squeezing expenses and finally got to the point where they have to have the capital.

Activity on the auction site has spiked in the last 18 months because so many people -- venture capitalists, limited partners, employees of startups and others -- have their money tied up in illiquid assets and want out, said founder Barry Silbert, who spoke yesterday on Grant Thornton's conference call introducing their latest report on the long-term decline of U.S. IPOs. Second Market now has $25 billion worth of assets for sale and 5,000 participants, and Silbert expects the site to complete 2 billion transactions by the end of the year. Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley -- private companies that are unwilling or unable to go public -- are selling assets, including Facebook, eHarmony, Second Life, LinkedIn and Tesla Motors. There's more interest in Second Market from investors too, Silbert said, partly because secondary sales are the only way some of them can get in on these deals. So Benchmark, Accel, NEA, IVP and several other VCs and investment banks are shopping at Second Market.

Seattle-based biotech company Omeros went public in October, after raising nearly $110 million in venture capital and delaying its IPO for nearly two years. Since then, it's watched the price of its shares tank. Today they're trading at around $6.44, down over 35% from the IPO price of $10, making Omeros one of the worst performing IPOs of 2009, according to Renaissance Capital. David Weild, the former vice chairman of NASDAQ who co-authored Grant Thornton's reports proclaiming an IPO crisis, told peHUB that Omeros' performance shows how structural flaws in the stock market can undermine the performance of small-cap companies, since Omeros -- whose product speeds recovery from surgery -- is trading "at a discount to total money invested plus new money raised. There's nothing in this business to represent the years of work and human equity that's gone into it." But Omeros has other problems too. Less than a month before its IPO, the company and its directors were sued by its former Chief Financial Officer, Richard Klein, who claims, among other things, defamation and wrongful termination. Klein was fired in January after he acted as a whistleblower and reported that Omeros had falsified claims to the National Institutes of Health on work done for its NIH grant.

Venture capitalists are sitting on more boards than they were three years ago, according to data released this morning by Dow Jones and the National Venture Capital Association, and more boards than CEOs think they should. VCs think they can handle 4.6 boards for early stage companies and 5.4 boards for later stage companies -- but CEOs think those numbers should be 3.8 and 4.2. CEOs also think VCs should have less control on boards than they do, and the two groups have a different perspective on board conflicts. For VCs the top issue is "executive management searches and changes"; for CEOs it's valuation. (No surprises there). NVCA president Mark Heesen says all these conflicts are going to get worse before they get better, as the venture industry continues to contract. Get the press release here, or see full survey after the jump...