Venture Capital —
Following yesterday’s Oracle / Sun announcement, the integration planning process will be starting almost immediately. Teams at both Oracle and Sun will be tasked with figuring out how to combine the two companies. What, though, is the new vision for the combined operation? The vision should inform the integration planning process; and help people figure [...]
Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL before the company was acquired by Sun Microsystems, is to leave Sun. People seem surprised by this. I don’t know why. I’d been expecting it for a while.
Marten Mickos is an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are rarely comfortable being part of large organizations because these almost never have an entrepreneurial [...]
Techcrunch has a copy of a 56-slide PowerPoint presentation that Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s most highly-regarded venture capital groups, just gave to their portfolio companies. Fifty six slides! Given how many presentations these guys sit though, it’s kind of shocking they would inflict that number of slides on anyone Take a [...]
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 [...]