Dan Primack

CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension system, has updated its website to include private equity performance data through the end of Q1. Finally! The refresh should have occured following an August 17 investment committee meeting, but neither official schedules nor my constant pestering -- just ask the CalPERS press office -- could make the system's webmaster go faster than glacial. Overall, the private equity portfolio had $42.4 billion in private equity exposure as of March 31 (down 31.4% year-to-year). This includes 629 active fund interests, including leveraged buyout funds, venture capital funds, growth equity funds, mezzanine funds, funds-of-funds and distressed funds. You can download the whole lot of them (with IRRs) by clicking here. If that's too many numbers, what follows is some data on CalPERS' five largest holdings (by

I am pleased to announce that the next peHUB Shindig will be in Dallas on October 14. That’s the night before Buyouts Texas, and also smack dab in the middle of Red River Rivalry week. You can get tickets and more info here. Per usual, no content – just cocktails & conversation with other members of Big D’s private equity and venture capital communities. Tickets cost just $10 each, with proceeds being donated to a local charity that will be selected by event attendees (you can nominate a charity when you register). I urge you to get yours soon, since these shindigs tend to sell out. A very special thanks to our Dallas Shindig sponsors: Landmark Partners, New Capital Partners and StaffOne.

Yesterday we spotted a regulatory filing from something called Factery.net, which had raised $1.25 million in VC funding. No investor info on the document, and the only listed executive was search marketing vet Paul Pedersen. We described it as an "online answer engine," based on the alpha product up on Factery's website. Now a source has filled us in with additional details, including how Factery's current website isn't really representative of its product plans.

What follows are six VC deals culled from recent Regulation D filings with the SEC. None of them has been otherwise disclosed: * DisplayLink Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based fabless semiconductor manufacturer that focuses on network displays, has raised $8 million in fourth-round funding. The company previously raised around $51 million, from Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, DAG Ventures and

The Institutional Limited Partner Association (ILPA) today released "a set of best practices to address important issues relating to the alignment of interest between general partners and limited partners, fund governance and providing greater transparency to investors." I'm still working through it, but have posted it after the jump so that you can read along...

Earlier today I chatted with Brian Rich, managing partner and co-founder of growth equity firm Catalyst Investors. We talked media deals, SaaS and PIPEs:

Kai-Fu Lee, who last week resigned as president of Google China, has launched Innovation Works, an incubator for Chinese IT startups. It has been funded with $115 million, including from lead investor WI Harper Group and individual backers like Steve Chen (co-founder of YouTube), Terry Gou (chairman of Foxconn), Liu Chuanzhi (chairman of Legend Group) and Yu Minhong (chairman of New Oriental). I spoke to Lee on Friday, and what follows is a transcript (we had agreed to embargo the news until this evening): peHUB: Innovation Works sounds much like a Chinese version of Idealab or Y Combinator. Are those fair comprisons, and are there other such programs already in China? Lee: There are similar programs in China, and at least one public company based on similar ideas. But I think our model is different, for several reasons: First, I think we are specifically targeting the spaces in which this idea works. These are the spaces were you can move quickly: Cloud computing, ecommerce and mobile Internet. Second, I think that I bring a unique ability to draw talent. I’ve hired thousands of people at [Google and Microsoft], and many joined because of me. When I joined Google, for example, it was basically an unknown brand in China. The first people joined because of my brand, not because of the company’s brand.

Prism VentureWorks has closed its West Coast office, several months after the Needham, Mass.-based firm suspended efforts to raise its sixth fund. Prism originally opened the Venice, Calif.-based satellite to accomodate partner Gordie Nye, who wanted to move west. He will continue to serve as a general partner with Prism, but will be based out of a home office. Venture partner Tony Natale will relocate east, while principal Bong Koh will spend most of his time on

A bunch of changes over at Battery Ventures: Mark Sherman and Battery have “come to the mutual conclusion” that Sherman will leave the firm once the new investment period of Battery VIII is concluded. That apparently will be at the end of Q1 2010, which means that new blue books might be out before year-end (seems a bit fast to me -- considering that the firm raised $1 billion in 07/08 -- but this is straight from a firm spokeswoman). Sherman had been part of the firm’s push into India, but that now will be scaled back significantly. Battery will no longer build a team in Mumbai, instead focusing on India investments out of Silicon Valley. Guatam Patel, currently Battery’s sole employee in Mumbai, will leave to “seek other opportunities.” That move also is expected to occur at the end of Q1 2010.

Three months ago, Steve Gillmor wrote that "it's time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter." Sam Diaz piled on last week, calling RSS a Web 1.0 application whose time has passed. And things got even worse today, when news leaked that former Feedburner chief Dick Costello has agreed to join Twitter as chief operating officer. All of this made me wonder whatever happened to RSS Investors, a venture capital firm formed in 2005 to focus exclusvely on real simple syndication. What I learned was that RSS Investors is even deader than RSS.