This is a totally vain story, but I’ve been asked about this a few times, so I’ll repeat it here – plus it goes to the heart of why I blog which is something I realized in looking over some of my posts that I haven’t been writing much about. (This reminds me that still haven’t finished my post on ‘is blogging about vanity?’ yet – not sure what’s keeping me from doing that . . .). Over the past couple of months I’ve been asked how I might measure my success as a blogger. I’m blogging for two primary reasons: 1) I want to make a name for myself. I’m a young VC who wants to stay in the…
Posts By / seth levine
What it takes to go public
I’ve sat through a few presentations by investment bankers recently on what it takes to go public (most recently at VC in the Rockies – see my post about the conference here). I thought I’d throw out some of my notes so you could see what I’m being told it takes to get public in the current market. The VCIR panel I sat through included some thoughts on the state of the m&a market, so I’ll include those notes as well. Company ‘Requirements’: – Revenue: ‘Bigger the better’; minimum of $60m/year annualized (so $15m/quarter at the time of the IPO; however 60% of 04’ IPO’s were < $100m in revenue (up from only 30% in the depths of the market);…
Who vs. Where
I recently wrote a blog – The Power of Location – about Quova (one of the companies I work with) and the idea of “place” on the Internet. In response, Dimitar Vesselinov (who has a great blog) dropped a couple of comments to the post. My sense is that not everyone pays attention to the comments section of blogs, so I thought I’d post the links he suggests here. I also want to be sure I’m clear on the differences between digital identity (the subject of Dimitar’s comments) and geolocation (the subject of my post) as well as how the two ideas overlap. First the comments. Below are some sites that Dimitar sent over for those interested in learning more…
Steppin’ Up
I took an important step in my life as a venture capitalist today when I attended my first board meeting as an actual board member (rather than a board observer – see my post on this distinction from last month). While the earth didn’t exactly shake off its axis, I can’t help but feel that today was a real milestone in my life as a venture capitalist. I’ve worked with a lot of companies since joining Mobius, but this is the first deal that is really my ultimate responsibility. Today’s board meeting wasn’t unlike the hundreds of other board meetings I’ve participated in over the past 3 years, but there was no question that there was something a little different…
Venture Capital in the Rockies
I spent the much of last week attending the annual venture conference sponsored by the Colorado Venture Capital Association. The purpose of the event is to attract out of state VCs to take a look at Colorado venture deals that are in the market (click here for a link to the companies that presented this year). I’ll talk about Colorado’s venture capital market in a separate post, but suffice it to say, it’s important to the local VC community to have financial support (at least on some deals) broader than the local community can provide. While each of us has relationships with firms out of state that we syndicate deals with, as a group this is our one annual chance…
The Masses Speak
A couple of days ago the following story hit my inbox from Marketwatch (story below, link here): WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — While you watch the Super Bowl, dozens of online-savvy consumers and Web loggers will be watching the Net to see how the game’s TV commercials are playing in Peoria. Intelliseek Inc. of Cincinnati and New Media Strategies of Arlington, Va., have lined up dozens of people to surf Web sites, blogs and message boards to get a fast read on the effectiveness and popularity of marketers’ commercials. With TV costing as much as $2. million for a 30-second spot, companies want to know whether their money was spent wisely. As people post comments about the ads on the Web, the…
The Power of Location
The Mobius web-site was spoofed recently. Someone – presumably looking to pass themselves off as a legitimate venture capitalist and needing a web-site to do so – copied our site and changed the name of the firm as well as some of the biographical information (contacts, team, etc). They even went so far as to pull live feeds from our site that updated our portfolio ticker. We looked up information on the domain on whois and on some of the registry sites, but the most interesting data came from one of our portfolio companies – Quova. Quova has mapped the IP space of the internet for physical location. If you give them an IP address, they can tell you where…
The 10 Minute Difference
When I graduated from college I worked on Wall Street for a couple of years as an analyst for Morgan Stanley. While a valuable experience, especially for someone such as myself who had never even considered taking a business or finance course (I was an econ and psychology major), the job pretty much sucked. While I enjoyed the finance aspect of it and, particularly in my second year, had great access to the CEOs and CFOs of the companies I worked with, a lot of my job involved staying up until all hours of the night (morning, technically) preparing analysis and putting together ‘pitch books’ for use in presentations the following day. Not particularly glamorous work. Nor was it generally…
eWork CEO Hans Bukow on OutsourcingTV
Ok. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of OutsourcingTV.com but apparently it exists and they did an “interview” with Hans Bukow, the CEO of eWork on the recent eWork/ProSavvy merger (see my last blog post). You can check out the interview at the following link: http://www.outsourcingtv.com/ot/index.jsp?movieid=13688&channel= I’m in the middle of writing a post on whether blogging means an end to traditional media and, not to steal my thunder, but I think this interview backs up the point I’m going to make – there’s lots of room in the world for niche media (or point media) to exist along side more traditional media sources. Clearly enough people care about the outsourcing market for there to be a website that…
eWork/Prosavvy Merger
One of the companies that I work with closely, ProSavvy, announced this week that it merged with eWork (the combined company will keep the eWork name). The merger creates perhaps the largest private company in the workforce management/services procurement/payroll services business. As part of the merger, Mobius led a new round of financing into the combined business. You can read the press release here. In layman terms, the combined business offers products that allow businesses to manage various aspects of procuring, managing and payrolling temporary employees (contract laborers) and what are called fixed project deliverables (consulting projects). The combined business has three main products: eWork Enterprise – a enterprise software platform for managing contract work (whether that be contract labor,…