Dan Primack

Last week, I posed the following quiz question: Can you name the venture capital firms that just pumped more than $40 million into Cash4Gold, the company whose name – and ubiquitous television commercials – basically say it all. Your hint was to think East Coast, although not so far south as Cash4Gold’s Florida headquarters. I’ve received over 80 replies so far, including a small handful that answered correctly. So it’s time to spill the beans: The investors are General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital Partners. If you’re like me, your initial reaction is to spit out your mouthful of Dunkin Donuts iced coffee and then wipe off your Kevin Garnett bobble-head. Ok, maybe that’s a bit too specific. Let’s just assume you’ve having a good chuckle. Still going? Think of something sad, so that we can collectively continue… For those who don’t watch too much television (here’s a test: do you know what a ShamWow is?), Cash4Gold is not some sort of national pawnshop chain. Instead, it’s better described as a C2B precious metals refiner. It pays consumers to send it jewelry

Limited partners keep telling me how “unrealistic” it is for VCs to launch new firms this year, but that sure isn’t stopping the dreamers. Last month we broke news on the formation of ArrowPoint Ventures, and now there appears to be yet another Boston-area firm getting off the ground. This one is called Genovation Capital, a seed- and early-stage shop that is expected to begin formal fundraising later this quarter. It came together last summer, and includes three partners who previously worked together at television on-demand company Broadbus Inc. (bought by Motorola in 2006 for $189m in cash). They are: Jeff Binder, a Broadbus co-founder who later served as senior director of strategy and M&A for Motorola’s on-demand solutions group; Vin Bisceglia, chairman and CEO of Broadbus from 2004 to 2006; and Dave Fellows, a former Broadbus board member via his role at CTO of Comcast, and a onetime principal with Pilot House Ventures. I spoke with Binder and Bisceglia for nearly an hour this afternoon, and touched on just about every topic other than fundraising (apparently they’ve already retained counsel). My main questions, of course, were about how Genovation would

Can you name the venture capital firms that just pumped more than $40 million into Cash4Gold, the company whose name -- and ubiquitous television commercials -- basically say it all? Think East Coast, although not so far south as Cash4Gold's Florida headquarters. You can post your guesses below, or email them to me.

Paul Graham recently suggested that venture capitalists could actually be a victim of the recession, because they will be decoupled from entrepreneurs who learn to live without. He wrote, in part: "The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore's law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups—probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator—the biggest expense is simply the founders' living expenses. We've had startups that were profitable on revenues of $3000 a month." My initial reaction is that Graham bought some Web 2.0 blinders, in that the above argument does not apply to large swathes of the startup community (particularly most life sciences and cleantech efforts). I’m also not sure I agree with a concurrent Graham argument that VCs will slow down their investment pace as drastically as they did in 2002. After all, that drop was dramatically lengthened because VCs had been so gregariously reckless in the preceding years. Say what you want about VCs in the 2003-2008 era, but no one can say they've been investing as much cash as they did between 1998 and 2001. But then I’m a bit conflicted, because the types of deals Graham is talking about are the very types of deals VCs may need

Zonare Medical Systems Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of ultrasound systems for diagnostic imaging, has withdrawn registration for an $86.25 million IPO. It had planned to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol ZONE, with Citi and Piper Jaffray serving as co-lead underwriters. The company has raised around $171 million in total VC funding since 1999, from firms like Frazier Healthcare Ventures (25.2%), 3i Group (18.4%), Earlybird Venture Capital (13.9%), Draper Fisher Jurvetson (13.2%), Mosaix Ventures (9.9%) and CB Healthcare Ventures (7.1%). Zonare is the fourth VC-backed company to withdraw an IPO filing this week, following Aegerion Pharmaceuticals, Epocrates and TransMedics. That leaves just 26 such companies in registration for IPOs. Go here for the full list of remaining VC-backed IPO candidates here. Buyout-backed IPO candidates also are listed.

HRJ Capital, the fund-of-funds manager formed in 1999 by a pair of ex-NFL stars, has hit its two-minute warning. The San Francisco-based firm is unable to pay back a $68.9 million warehouse loan it received from Silicon Valley Bank, and is now negotiating a settlement that could include SVB taking over management of HRJ's funds (with some HRJ pros likely joining SVB). If that were to happen, SVB would use the management fees to slowly pay off the debt. Also worth noting that "negotiating" is a very soft word for what's going on, given that SVB basically holds all the cards here.

TransMedics pulled its IPO registration yesterday, making it the third VC-backed candidate to bail so far this week (following Epocrates and Aegerion Pharmaceuticals). Overall, 39 VC-backed companies have pulled IPO registrations in 2008, including 11 this quarter. That leaves just 27 such companies in active registration, with none expected to price by year-end. The buyout-backed pipeline isn’t much stronger, with just 39 companies in registration to price on U.S. exchanges. That includes Talecris Biotherapeutics, which has agreed to be acquired. Here’s a downloadable spreadsheet of the VC-backed and buyout-backed companies still in registration.

Earlier this week, I suggested that public pension systems could become embroiled in bonus battles that would play out on the front pages. At issue would be managers who get cut checks for beating market benchmarks, even if both the benchmarks and their individual performance are underwater. Well, it seems that such a situation has already occurred. A helpful reader points us to this story from South Carolina, where the state retirement system owed chief investment officer Bob Borden a $176,000 bonus for performance relating to the fiscal year ending June 30. South Carolina Treasurer Converse Chellis moved to block the payment, arguing that it was inappropriate given state budget cuts and state worker furloughs. Chellis took his fight to the system's investment commission

Like all institutional investors, CalPERS has been hard hit by the denominator effect. According to new documents released ahead of its Dec. 15 investment board meeting, the pension system’s actual allocation to alternative investments is now 40% higher than is its target allocation, despite making few new alternative asset commitments. The blame instead goes to […]

JiWire, a San Francisco-based WiFi advertising network, has quietly raised around $11.1 million in new venture capital funding. It also sold another $1.53 million of Series B warrants, which could be converted into around $3.88 million of preferred stock. Comcast Interactive Capital came aboard as a new investor, with CIC principal David Horowitz joining the […]