Venture Economics

I get quite a few questions sent in by readers and am going to make more of an effort to post some of the ones that I think would be of general interest (please – keep them coming). Recently Jonathan asked: Do you have any reference regarding recent pre seed, seed, and first round valuations for B2C companies? We had several back and forth e-mails about this over the past week and I thought they were worth summarizing here. First, some additional background from a subsequent e-mail from Jonathan: I am actually doing two simultaneous rounds: one for 125K and another for 1.4 million. The first one aims at testing the viral potential of the application. We will focus on…

Dad stopped by the other day on his way back from a meeting and we were kicking around some ideas. One of the things that he brought up that I’d been toying around with as well was the notion of enabling companies to sell their NOLs. I think this is an outstanding idea – both at the state and the federal level. I don’t really want to get into it here, but you should assume a priori that I believe that NOLs should also be more transferable in acquisitions as well. That’s a related topic for sure but here I’d just like to address the ability of companies to literally sell their NOLs to the highest bidder. Let my address…

I’m in the middle of writing a few posts on the economics of venture investing (actually on venture “exiting”) and was therefore pretty interested in the VentureWire 2005 venture m&a stats that came out last week (there were a bunch of articles recapping the 2005 venture exits if you want to Google for them). Here’s some of what was reported: – m&a dollar volume rose 17% to $27.4bn -ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> the number of companies bought fell to 356 (from 407 last year) -ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> IT companies accounted for $11.73bn of this amount across 221 companies So if you do the math, of the venture backed companies that were…