Mark Boslet

Solar experts have long anticipated a shakeout in the thin film solar industry. Thin film cells, a component of solar panels, offer the potential of low costs. But higher energy conversion efficiencies give competing crystalline silicon cells a market advantage, especially as Chinese firms pump out great volumes supported by inexpensive loans from state banks, lowering […]

The land down under is on top. Venture capital performance continues at an impressive pace in Australia, according to Cambridge Associates and the Australian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. Annualized one-year returns as of the end of March were 7.7% and five-year return were 4.8%. While three-year performance lagged at 1.5%, no surprise given […]

The University of California’s venture portfolio reads like a who’s who of the VC industry. Included are funds from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Accel Partners, Canaan Partners and DCM, to point to a few of the endowment’s 84 holdings. So what is the university’s board of regents buying into today? The answer […]

Gordon Murray’s startup in the United Kingdom won’t build cars, but it hopes to revolutionize the auto industry. Auto manufacturing, to be precise. The former designer of Formula One racers turned entrepreneur is pioneering the use of composite materials to replace steel in the design of 21st Century cars. The result will be smaller, lighter […]

The most genuine measure of the success of a venture fund is its ability to return cash to its limited partners. By this measure, early stage funds have a slight edge over later stage ones in CalPERS’ venture capital portfolio. Four of the top 10 cash generators from 2001 to 2005 are early stage investment […]

A maker of printed batteries, a service for searching cloud documents, a mobile distributor of news. The 10 startups presenting at Plug and Play’s Startup Camp Expo were a diverse lot. There were similarities too. All were the brainchildren of university students and the beneficiaries of a 10-week summer program of coaching at the Silicon […]

Earlier this week, Cooley offered a sanguine portrait of the venture landscape. More than 72% of second quarter financings were up rounds, the largest percent since the fourth quarter of 2009, the law firm said. This enthusiasm for deals was so strong that the average Series A valuation rose to $8 million, the highest in […]

Startup incubators and accelerators are all the rage. Y Combinator in Silicon Valley, TechStars in New York and elsewhere. The Cambridge Innovation Center in Boston. They are fostering a new generation of young companies sometimes on a shoestring and shifting the axis of company creation away from VCs. Just this week, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups […]

Two interesting charts I found today highlight the dramatic gap between top and bottom quartile fund returns. They also detail what might best be called the “V Curve” in recent fund performance (no longer the J Curve). Both are published by Pregin in the firm’s Private Equity Spotlight for August. The first (above) shows median […]

When the financial markets were hemorrhaging in late 2008, Sequoia Capital circulated its now infamous slideshow: “R.I.P Good Times.” Cut headcount, preserve cash or risk extinction, the sky-is-falling tirade advised startups. “We’re not there,” says Dixon Doll, co-founder and general partner of DCM, an early stage firm managing more than $2 billion in capital. Doll’s […]