Bessemer Pulls a Hat Trick! [Who Has Time For This?]

Congratulations and thanks to the teams at Sirtris, PA Semi and Gracenote, three Bessemer portfolio companies who all signed and announced their acquisitions in the last 12 hours.

Sirtris, the startup that cheats death, fetched $720 million from GlaxoSmithKline. This company, whose sirtuin activators have been touted as the fountain of youth (at least for overweight laboratory mice), was the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Christoph Westphal, a Harvard trained doctor and geneticist. Chris Gabrieli (pictured right) and Steve Kraus led the investment for Bessemer (huge hat tip to Jonathan for the intro--we owe you one!).


Meanwhile, Gracenote--that music database in the sky that tells us all what song, artist and album we're listening to on our PCs, in our iPods, in our CD players, and increasingly in our cars--has fetched a $260 million price from Sony. Special congrats to founder Ty Roberts (pictured right), CEO Craig Palmer, my partner Jeremy Levine and our co-investor Sequoia Capital.


And finally, Forbes reported just minutes ago that Apple has disclosed its acquisition of PA Semi, the innovator in power efficient microprocessors. PA Semi was the brainchild of DEC's rock star chip designer and Sibyte founder Dan Dobberpuhl (pictured right). Thanks to my partner Rob Chandra, who led the A round with help along the way from Devesh Garg, Umesh Padval and Derrick Lee. Congrats as well to our co-investors Venrock, Highland and Focus.

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Links for 2008-04-22 [del.icio.us] [localglo.be]

• Web Startups: The London Scene
• Noah Kagan > something about noah goes here.
• Netflix Q1: Tanking On Guidance (NFLX)
• NovaRising - Digital Marketing | Creative | Development

• Web Startups: The London Scene
• Noah Kagan > something about noah goes here.
• Netflix Q1: Tanking On Guidance (NFLX)
• NovaRising - Digital Marketing | Creative | Development

Social Media is a global phenomenon [Venture Explorer]

Universal McCann just released Wave 3 of an ongoing project to study the impact of social media globally.

The full study is available here.

This is a pretty comprehensive study that interviewed 17,000 users in 29 countries, and their conclusions, although not entirely surprising, are still eye-opening. Here's a summary:

• Social Media is global, and has caught fire in Asia; China alone has more bloggers (42M) the US and Western Europe combined
• Video is the fastest growing element of social media.  Hardly surprising, given that video is the richest and yet the easiest to create form of content.
• Widgets are becoming very popular (23% of social network users, and 18% of bloggers, have installed an app or a widget)
• Blogs rival traditional media in reach - 73% of Internet users have read a blog
• Corporations have to get serious about the blogosphere.  34% of bloggers post opinions about products on their blog.

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Universal McCann just released Wave 3 of an ongoing project to study the impact of social media globally. The full study is available here. This is a pretty comprehensive study that interviewed 17,000 users in 29 countries, and their conclusions,...

Bessemer Tops the Midas List [Who Has Time For This?]

Since 2000, Forbes has taken an admirable crack each year at recognizing the most successful dealmakers in high-tech venture capital. Its Midas List attracts some controversy (and whines from VCs) since Forbes must craft its list based on incomplete and somewhat self-reported information. Clearly some folks get too much credit (e.g. I've been ranked as high as number 6, although this year I lost ground) and some star performers are neglected, such as Chris Gabrieli (Sirtris IPO), Gus Tai (sold Photobucket to FIM), and Kevin Harvey (sold MySQL, TellMe, Ingenio), who should have fared better than number 86.




With that disclosure, I wish now to point out that five Bessemer investors (including Bob Goodman, Rob Stavis, Rob Chandra and Felda Hardymon) made this year's list, once again making Bessemer the #1 represented firm.

OK, I'm done gloating. Back to work now--must move back up the list in '09...

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IVentures10 Partners with Mozilla [Go Big or Go Home]

IllinoisVentures announced today a partnership with Mozilla to take its IVentures10 program to the next level. iVentures10, sponsored by IllinoisVENTURES, is a new kind of summer intern program for computer science students with a great idea for a software or...

Sony buys a UGC pioneer [bijansabet.com]

I’ll never forget the first time I ripped a CD onto a Mac. It was in 1996. I encoded it with some shareware tool. And then I manually entered in all the meta data - artist, album, and tracks. I did it for all of the CDs I could fit on my Mac at the time.

Then one day, i put a CD in my Mac and all of the fields were prepopulated.

The data came from other users just like me. The software was called CDDB. It was  a free service and it became a project that we all helped create. Sure, there were typos and mistakes. But it was built from the community. It was UGC but something more.

Eventually it was sold and renamed to Gracenote. And the new owners took it away from the users and added a licesing model.

And today Sony bought the company. We’ll see what they do with it.

But I’ll never forget how cool that product was in those days. It was like magic. 

Yahoo Conference Call [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]

Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me.
Tanya: You haven't got any.
Quinlan: What do you mean?
Tanya: Your future is all used up.

    - from Touch of Evil (1958)

The Yahoo Q1 conference call is underway. I'll give Jerry et al., credit for at least trying to talk futures, which they're doing at some length. But when the afterhours market reacts to news from Jerry that Yahoo is guiding cash flows higher by flatlining, then you know that investors have largely checked out.

Short of announcing a major deal with AOL, GOOG, or someone else -- which could admittedly still happen in this strange and drawn-out affair -- this is rapidly becoming corporate kabuki theater. It is a costume drama that is all surfaces, one where no-one is talking about the only thing that matters, which is the Microsoft offer that has not been successfully fended off by today's results.

So, is Yahoo's future all used up? No, I'm exaggerating to make a point. After all, this is a company with great traffic and strong properties. But its future has irrevocably changed.

Yahoo Results: Good, But Not Good Enough [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]

Yahoo's first quarter results are now out. I'll have more color later, but here is the gist in tabular form:

It is, as the numbers suggest, a beat across the board. Good for Yahoo, but not unexpected either. The Street consensus was that YHOO would be slightly ahead on the main metrics as the company sold everything not bolted down to beat the quarterly numbers.

But this isn't a big beat so the stock isn't doing much in afterhours. It's kind of a "If this is the best you can do, then ..." reaction. Or, as someone put it in a message to me just now, investors are implicitly accusing them of padding sales with paperclips, snow globes, and purple foam YHOO fingers, and still not being to blow away the Street. And that's just not good enough in the circumstances.

When Meg Sued Craig: Ebay vs. Craigslist [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]

Now this is a strange story. Apparently Craigslist's founders, never ones to follow the orthodox economic path, did something back in January to dilute Ebay's 28.4% minority stake in their fast-growing company. Here is a quote from the NYT:

In a statement released Tuesday, eBay said that in January, Craigslist’s two directors, the founder Craig Newmark and the chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, took actions that unfairly diluted eBay’s economic interest in the company. eBay did not specify what those actions were.

What could Craig, et al., have done to piss off Meg and company back at Ebay HQ so much that they would take Craig & Co. to court? Did they sell a stake to someone else quietly? Did they bring about some sort of poison pill? A new class of shares? Sell Craigslist stakes on Craiglist?

Alpha's List of Highest Paid Hedge Fund Managers [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]

Names aside in this latest list from Alpha Magazine of the highest paid hedge fund managers -- okay, John Paulson led the way with a $3.7-billion 2007 take -- I'm more bemused by the related factoids. Here are some directly from the article:

• Five of the managers on this year’s list each made more in 2007 than the $1.2 billion that JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to pay for the almost failed 85-year-old Bear Stearns Cos.
• When we published our inaugural list, in 2002, Soros led the way with $700 million, a showing that this year would have put him at No. 9. Back then it took $30 million to crack the top 25; this year, $360 million.
• The grand total earned by the top 25 in our 2003 ranking, almost $2.8 billion, was less than what any of the top three managers made this year and less than one fifth of what the top ten made altogether ($16.1 billion).
• Though we doubled the size of our list from 25 to 50 this year, longtime New York–based star managers Mark Kingdon of Kingdon Capital Management and Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Group both miss the cut, despite each making about $200 million. This year’s minimum: $210 million.

More here.

SKYPE: Cheap.Com Just Isn't Interesting...Especially if Not an RFB [VCinJerusalem]