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Q3 M&A–volume flat, average value falling fast

Ernst and Young’s latest quarterly Global Technology M&A Update found that the number of announced deals is pretty much flat year on year and compared with the last quarter, but the average value of those deals fell sharply to $185m. That’s 43% down on Q3 2011 and 12% down on Q2 2012. There were [...]

Return profile of VC investments shows why home runs are key

One of the world’s larger investors in venture capital recently shared data with us about the multiples they have made on over 5,000 companies they had stakes in via their LP investments in US VC funds. I’m not sure the extent to which they are happy with the information being made public so I’ve [...]

The winds of change: consumer Internet and software investing

I was on a panel at the excellent Dublin Web Summit yesterday where we discussed the balance of VC interest between consumer internet and software companies. My perspective is that for most of the last five years the balance was shifting in favour of internet, but in the last year or so software companies [...]

SaaS has been hot for a while, now blistering

HR software business Workday has just upped the proposed share price in its coming IPO to $24-26, taking its valuation over $4bn. That’s 30x this years forecast revenues of $134m. Moreover, the company says in its filing that it has “a history of cumulative losses and we do not expect to be profitable for [...]

Facebook’s acqui-hires–$24m on four companies in H1 2012

In its quarterly filing yesterday Facebook disclosed that it spent $24m on ‘talent focused acquisitions’ in the first half of 2012. Techcrunch has done some digging and identified the companies as Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox and Karma.

This raised two interesting questions for me.

Firstly – can investors make a decent return on businesses that [...]

Great to see Microsoft making a success of Skype

Many great services whither and die following acquisition and when Microsoft acquired Skype I feared the worst. It turns out I was wrong. Microsoft announced yesterday that we all made 115bn minutes of calls over Skype last quarter, a whopping 50% up on the quarter before.

They also announced an integration with Outlook [...]

On social network transience and profitability

Consider this piece of logic from Derek Powazek:

The flow, as I see it, works like this.

We want to be a social network. The more people in it, the more “value” it has, so we need everyone to join. Because we want everyone to join, we cannot put up a pay barrier, so [...]

Microsoft’s fading adtech ambitions

Yesterday Microsoft announced the write off of $6.2bn of the $6.3bn it paid for interactive ad company aQuantive in 2007. The aQuantive acquisition came hot on the heals of Google’s $3.1bn acquisition of Doubleclick and was clear evidence of Microsoft’s ambitions to be a serious player in online advertising. After the deal Ballmer said [...]

Facebook’s poor IPO doesn’t change the fact that it is a good business

There is quite rightly a lot of chat at the moment about Facebook’s poor showing post IPO, but the fact that the shares are down 30% doesn’t mean that Facebook is a bad business, it means that investors now think the $100bn IPO price was too high. 30% to high to be precise.

A [...]

Autonomy is lost to the UK

When I wrote “we lost Autonomy to HP” at the end of my post on Wednesday I was a little worried that the statement might be too strong. Since then we have heard that Mike Lynch is now leaving Autonomy/HP, that most of his senior management have already departed since the HP acquired the [...]