Venture Capital —
Just under a year ago, I wrote about IPTV company, Joost, closing a susbtantial $45M round of VC funding led by Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures (I also wrote about them a month later) At that time, I was dubious that the timing of the venture was right, and because of that I was unclear [...]
You’ve no doubt seen the news that AOL is buying social network Bebo for $850 in cash. By any standards, that’s a great exit for all involved. Bebo was founded in 2005 and raised a single round of venture capital ($15M for 16% of the company, apparently) in 2006. They’ve been pretty successful in growing [...]
Well, Apple’s iPhone software roadmap meeting is over. Did they deliver? In a word - YES! All the commercial and techincal details look great. By using the iPhone SDK, it will be possible to develop truly amazing, magical software applications for iPhone, and it will be easy to distribute these apps too. Importantly, along [...]
You’ve probably seen the news already. Sun Microsystems is to acquire MySQL AB (the company behind the MySQL database) for $1B. I’d been expecting MySQL to IPO this year, so it came out of the blue to me. This looks like a potentially great outcome for everyone involved.
It certainly looks like a great outcome for [...]
So… I keep hearing how all the top talent in Silicon Valley wants to join Facebook… but why? I can’t think of a single reason why they would; and I can think of a whole bunch of reasons why they wouldn’t. For example…
Coding social networking software is pretty tedious - it’s essentially nothing [...]
Wow! If the rumours are true, not only has Microsoft bought a small stake in Facebook at $15B valuation, but so have at least a couple of non-corporate investors. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of a return this latest group of investors get from Facebook, because the only way to [...]
I’ve written before about the issue of Facebook valuation, suggesting that a rational valuation for Facebook today might be around $2B (see Facebook - True Value Less Than $2B?). Now, in response to the values of $100B being touted, Jason Calacanis has valued Facebook at around $1B-$2B; or $2B-$5B, depending on how you [...]
Until you’ve been round the block a few times, if you own (or work at) a hot company, you believe that there’s only one direction for the valuation to go; and that’s up. People have been saying that Facebook shouldn’t sell out for $6B, because it’s soon going to be worth much more. [...]
A few days ago, I wrote about Facebook in the context of an IPO, and I said then that the big question is what is Facebook really worth. Now, thanks to Valleywag, we have some credible numbers from which we can estimate the company’s value. I’m finding it hard to get the [...]
There continues to be lots of talk about the valuation of Facebook. One of Facebook’s founders has apparently suggested that they wouldn’t sell the company for less than $10B; and, as I wrote recently, people have been advising the owners of Facebook that it would be a big mistake to sell for $6B. [...]