Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
As we know Google has a history of acquiring companies which then seem to disappear into the abyss - Dodgeball, Measuremap and Jaiku fall into that category and other services like Blogger, GrandCentral and Feedburner don’t seem to have progressed since they moved to new ownership.
There are a couple of exceptions - Youtube being the [...]
The first web bubble was much bigger - at the peak in 1999-2000 VCs were investing c$30bn per quarter, but in 2006 it was only $5bn. Exit comparisons are similar - in 1999 270 venture backed businesses went public for $21bn, in 2006 just 57 companies went public raising $5.1bn. In 2000 318 [...]
Congratulations to the company, the Birch family that founded it and also to Balderton as an investor.
It is great to see another European success story like this.
Full details on Techcrunch UK, and for the financially curious some stuff on the Balderton site.
The following is a full reproduction of part of today’s lex column in the FT (you will need a subscription to read the whole thing online). It is a great article.
In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch snapped up MySpace, for what seemed an aggressive $580m. In September of the same year, eBay’s Meg Whitman had a [...]
YouTube is starting to get serious about monetisation. As reported by Fred Wilson and the BBC they will be doing things like adding 3s pre-roll ads to videos and and using audo fingerprinting to prevent copyright theft. Getting clean(er) from a copyright point of view is an essential pre-cursor to making money - if there is cash [...]
Dead2.0 has just written an excellent piece on Facebook. It is long and well worth the read but there are two key points I want to focus on here:
- Facebook apparently turned down a $750m offer from Viacom
- They are opening their network up to everybody (previously they were exclusively for people with college email [...]
The 14 August BusinessWeek tells me the general view in the Valley is that these two are worth $500m.
I’m going to have to post sometime soon on hype curves and value curves if you get my message.
Digg (cover story) is also touted as being worth a lot - $200m in this case. Now Digg is cool [...]
