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5 Questions for Dennis Miller Dan Primack |
| posted on: 07-17-2007 | |
Spark Capital today announced that it has closed its second fund with $360 million, which will be used to continue investing in the conflux of media, entertainment and technology. The Boston-based venture firm was founded in early 2005, and soon after raised around $260 million for its debut fund. So let's ask 5 Questions of Dennis Miller, a general partner with Spark Capital:
1. Spark is known as an early-stage firm, and your website even notes that “no idea is too green.” But this fund is larger than the last one, in part, so as to enable some later-stage investing. Why the desire to diversify downstream?
Miller: I think that we are going to stick to our core knitting, which is early-stage investing. But we’ve discovered along the way some select c...
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Is This Venture Capital? Alastair Goldfisher |
| posted on: 07-17-2007 | |
After Thomson Financial and the NVCA released fund-raising stats yesterday, most media outlets focused on the number of funds raised or the total dollar amount pulled in (68 funds raised $7.1 billion). But the big takeaway should be the growth of expansion-stage and late-stage fundraising.
Although 39 early-stage funds (led by such stalwarts as Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Emergence Capital Partners) raised about $2 billion during the quarter, 10 expansion funds raised $2.8 billion in the second quarter of 2007, shattering the previous record from the first quarter of 2000 when three funds raised $1 billion.
Among the funds active in Q2 07 were Insight Venture Partners VI (which raised more than $900 million); Institutional Venture Partners XII ($600 million); and Sequoia Capital Ch...
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SunRocket Burns Out Dan Primack |
| posted on: 07-16-2007 | |
I’m sitting in Logan Airport, awaiting a shuttle flight to Washington D.C. – where tomorrow I’ll be speaking at an event sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Venture Capital Association. The topic is general rather than regional – existing VC-backed companies by selling to private equity firms – but there is some Mid-Atlantic news of note today:
SunRocket has crashed.
SunRocket is a Vienna, Va.-based Internet telephony company (think Vonage, sans the miserable IPO). It launched in 2004 with $9.25 million in VC funding, and eventually raised a total of $79.25 million. Backers included Anthem Capital Management, BlueRun Ventures, Bru Venture Capital, DCM, The...
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Regaining My Footing Dan Primack |
| posted on: 07-16-2007 | |
Greetings from the home office, where I’m glad to be back after a two-week respite. Just a few notes as I hop back into the saddle…
*** Last Friday, The New York Times reported that Blackstone Group executives will essentially pay no taxes on their individual IPO gains, because the executives will receive good will deductions that typically are passed on to regular shareholders. Blackstone took the unusual step (for Blackstone) of firing off a press release that characterized the NYT article as being “filled with inaccuracies, myths and misrepresentations.”
I need a few more hours to analyze the matter before passing judgment, but here’s one thing that both sides acknowledge: What Blackstone did is perfectly legal, and was disclosed in its pre-IPO filings with the SEC. So n...
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Q2 Data: Venture Capital Fundraising Dan Primack |
| posted on: 07-16-2007 | |
Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association today released VC fundraising data for Q2 2007. Sixty-eight firms raised $7.2 billion, which represented a fund number decrease and dollar amount increase over Q1. Overall, 2007 is on pace to beat 2006 fundraising totals.
Here is the release and data: Q207VCFundraisingfinal.pdf.
