Dan Primack

Connie is still on maternity leave, which leaves me stuck checking in on the world of Jesse Draper, daughter of venture capitalist Tim Draper (please come back soon Connie... this can be kind of painful). For the uninitiated, Jesse is an actress who regularly produces web videos called "The Valley Girl," in which she interviews local VCs and entrepreneurs. Not exactly hard-hitting -- she recently had on HRJ Capital's Ronnie Lott, and never noted that his firm had effectively collapsed -- but she does get an impressive set of guests. One recent sit-down was wth DFJ partner Raj Atluru, who talked a bit about the cleantech niches he's currently focused on (like smart grid). You can watch the video (which is actually Part II) after the jump. Now getting back to my regularly-scheduled work...

The National Venture Capital Association and Cambridge Associates today released new VC fund performance data, for the period ending June 30, 2009 (VC returns lag a month). Most time horizons remained unchanged from the prior quarter's report, except for a significant drop in the 10-year horizon. Expect that decade figure to really hit the skids come January 1, when the 1999 results peel away. Full release after the jump...

Peter Shannon is the latest investor to leave Atlas Venture, announcing today that he will join Firelake Capital as a partner. He also will switch coasts, relocating to the Bay Area early next year. This move is of particular interest to me, because it seems that Firelake co-founder Marty Lagod originally met Shannon at the exact same moment I did: When Shannon was part of the University of Chicago team at the Venture Capital Investment Competition finals in Chapel HIll. Each year, there are a handful of participants that are a cut above the rest, and Shannon was in that crew (even though U Chicago came in 3rd). He soon signed on with Atlas as a principal focused on cleantech, and began returning to Chapel Hill each year as

[Updated] Earlier this year, VC-backed video processor startup Novafora Inc. acquired publicly-listed Transmeta Corp. for $255 million. Several months later, the combined company shut its doors and hired a trustee to sell Transmeta's intellectual property (designed, in part, by Linus Torvalds). peHUB has now learned details of the asset auction, which is scheduled to take place on October 30 and be run by Power Auctions LLC. According to an email, "We will sell the assets by using an ascending-clock auction process, rather than by a sealed-bid auction or an eBay-style auction." The minimum asking price is just $800,000, a figure that combines four different "items" being sold. For example, the minimum bid for Transmeta's technology -- "including its servers with all code and documentation, the source code for code-morphing and various prototype hardware" -- is just $225k. The licenses have a floor of $500k, while Novafora's "spika" and "video genome" technologies are at $50k and $25k, respectively.

WSJ blogger Scott Austin is reporting that Sequoia Capital is a small part of the consortium that has agreed to buy private bank First Republic from Bank of America, for more than $1 billion. Don’t quite know what to say, except that it’s a bit unexpected. Not only because Sequoia doesn’t typically involve itself with buyout deals (save for the Aricent deal with KKR), but because it also isn’t known as much of a financial sector investor. I’m sure Sequoia is aware that the VC world’s track record with big buyout clubs is mixed (to be kind). The most egregious examples are Battery Ventures with Freescale Semiconductor and Highland Capital Partners with Harrah’s. More recently we had

You can stop pitching your buyout or venture capital fund to OMERS, because the giant Canadian pension fund is officially not interested. Instead, the C$43 billion system's 40% allocation to "private markets" will be used for direct investments in private equity, venture capital, infrastructure and real estate transactions. This strategy shift has been a popular whisper for months, given that OMERS hasn't actually made a new fund commitment since 2007. But it was not explicitly stated until this past Tuesday and Wednesday at the Quebec City Conference, by both OMERS CEO Michael Nobrega and OMERS Strategic Investments CEO Jacques Demers.

We all know that Stanford University is trying to sell a bunch of PE/VC positions on the secondary market, but one of its offerings is particularly surprising. Not only is this fund a 2009 commitment (i.e., after liquidity troubles were evident), but it was a tough allocation to get. Can you name it?

What follows are six VC deals culled from recent Regulation D filings with the SEC. None of them has been otherwise disclosed: * Audience Science Inc., a New York-based provider of behaviorally-targeted audience analytics for Web advertising, has secured $15 million of a $20 million round (including $10m of converted promissory notes from 2008). Backers include Mayfield Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners and Integral Capital Partners. Audience Science previously raised over $80 million. www.audiencescience.com * Damballa Inc., an Atlanta-based developer of Internet security software focused on "bot armies," has secured over $8 million of a $9 million funding round. Palomar Ventures was joined by return backers like InterWest Partners and Sigma Partners. The company previously raised $8.5 million. www.damballa.com

peHUB is hosting a cleantech event in Boston later this month, with a focus on helping investors and executives navigate Washington D.C.’s regulatory and financial landscape. We’ve got a great panel but, truth be told, one of the first cleantech VCs I reached out to turned me down flat. His brief email reply was as follows: "Thanks, but no, not my thing, getting money from governments. Others are more expert and better at holding their noses." I didn’t think too much of his response at the time, except that it further confirmed libertarian sentiments that he’s expressed elsewhere. But then I (finally) got around to finishing Josh Lerner’s new book Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which focuses on the historical relationship between government, entrepreneurship and venture capital. One takeaway was that the VC – and others who think like him – are ignorant of the role that government has played in the VC industry’s formation and sustenance.

Nearly three years ago, tech journalist Scott Kirsner wrote a blistering indictment of the Boston startup scene, titled "Can the Bay State Still Make the Big Time?" Suffice to say, he wasn't optimistic. Kirsner expressed particular concern with Boston's inability to produce "pillar companies" that “influence entire industries, attract talented people to Massachusetts and help retain recent college grads." He basically was yearning for the next Boston Scientific or Staples, but an IT version that could compete with the Cisco's and Google's of Silicon Valley. I agreed with Kirsner's diagnosis, but had a slightly different take on some of its underlying causes. For example, I wasn't sure that Boston's robust universities couldn't serve as adequate pillars. Moreover, Kirsner worried that Boston-area VCs were investing more in "products" than "companies" -- a malady that was hardly a local phenomenon (and is even less so today). Instead, I fretted about the lack of a local startup culture. Not just the timidity of many Route 128 investors, but the literal lack of forums/events where area entrepreneurs and investors could congregate (other than obligatory Christmas parties). Each new day was greeted with photos from some party in Silicon Valley the night before, while Boston entrepreneurs were lucky to run into someone at a bus stop on their way home.