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Posts Tagged ‘Investors’

Made.com Secures $3.75m To Assault Designer Furniture Industry
Made.com, a web-based furniture company, has raised £2.5million from investors to launch its service which connects buyers directly with manufacturers thus cutting out middle men.

The backing comes from Lastminute.com cofounder Brent Hoberman now of mydeco.com, PROfounders Capital (whose investors include Michael Birch ex of Bebo), investor John Hunt and Marc Simoncini through his investment vehicle, Jaïna Capital.

Made.com was created by 28 year-old serial entrepreneur Ning Li, who was a cofounder of Paris based MyFab.com which has proved the feasibility of connecting furniture buyers with makers.

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Novell Rejects Hedge Fund’s Offer To Take The Company Private For $2 Billion

New York-based hedge fund Elliott Associates L.P. in a letter to Novell’s board of directors dated March 2 offered to purchase the infrastructure software company for a cash price of $5.75 per share, or $1 billion net of the cash on the company’s books.

Elliott Associates at the time said it already owned 8.5 percent of Novell and wanted to take the company private for $2 billion.

This morning, Novell’s board publicly responded to the letter, deeming the “unsolicited, conditional proposal” from the hedge fund “inadequate”. It’s not hard to see why Novell feels that way: immediately after the initial purchase offer was made, its shares surged as investors hoped for a better bid, and stock value hasn’t decreased much since.

Shares were valued at 5.64 at market’s close on Friday – it was priced 4.20 at the beginning of this year and 4.75 when Elliott made its purchase offer public on March 2.

Unsurprisingly, Novell’s board of directors said it would start looking for alternatives for the company to “enhance stockholder value”, including a sale to another entity, joint ventures, partnerships or a return of capital to stockholders through a stock repurchase or cash dividend program.

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Palm: this is your survival guide

Oh Palm. Just a little over a year ago your future seemed so bright, so renewed. You walked away from CES 2009 reborn, held aloft by a completely innovative new mobile operating system, a striking piece of hardware, and a feeling amongst the press and investors that you were back in the game and playing to win. Now, less than a year and a half later, you’ve nearly returned to the dark and desperate place you’d found yourself in at the end of 2008; a rapidly declining mindshare, the bottom falling out of your stock, and bad dips in phone sales. All of it is leaving you backed into a corner where the common perception now is that you’ve got to sell to survive at all. So what went wrong? How did such a promising launch lead to such a disappointing reality? And how can you wrestle your way back from the brink yet again? Is that even an option?

In 2007 the editors of Engadget penned an impassioned open letter to the company, pleading for many of the changes we eventually saw at Palm. This isn’t a follow-up, but it’s very much in the spirit. We’re going to take a look at the missteps that put the company in its current spot, and talk about what we think can pull it back out. Palm, it’s time for a little tough love… again.

Continue reading Palm: this is your survival guide

Palm: this is your survival guide originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CODE Advisors Absolutely, Definitely Not Working With MySpace On A Spinoff

Lots of scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley that new investment bank CODE Advisors is out pitching a MySpace spinoff to potential buyers and investors. Sources include people who’ve actually been pitched.

CODE Advisor partner Quincy Smith says “We have not been engaged by News Corp. or MySpace on a sale of the company.” MySpace also contacted us to deny the rumor – “The story is false.” – although we hadn’t actually gotten around to asking them yet. Word travels fast, it seems.

MySpace does confirm that they have an ongoing relationship with CODE Advisors to look for companies that they may want to buy, particularly in the music space (they’ve bought two music startups, iMeem and iLike, in the last year). CODE Advisors partner Fred Davis is leading that effort.

But any effort to spin off MySpace from News Corp. – something we’ve argued must be done for the company to have any chance to thrive – is being done unofficially. And perhaps without the knowledge of News Corp. execs.

Are MySpace execs testing the waters to see if there’s a way to spin themselves off of the politics-driven News Corp.? That’s being flatly denied. But it sure would makes a lot of sense. And, like we said, the pitches are happening, whether everyone denies it or not.

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2010 VC market outlook: No cash for clunkers

(Editor’s note: Don Rainey is a general partner at Grotech Ventures and author of the  “VC in DC” blog. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)

Throughout the financial crisis of 2008-09, most venture capitalists wisely advised startups to hunker down. The best bet, they said, was to lower expenses and, above all else, avoid fundraising in 2009, since all eyes were on 2010 as the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. 

The advice, as it turns out, was somewhat short-sighted.

We are now 18 months past the height of the financial crisis. Back then, it didn’t require a doomsday-oriented PowerPoint presentation to know that difficult times lay ahead. The same, frustratingly, can be said today. This is a different capital environment, but it’s not necessarily any better. It’s just different – and it may be worse.

Because so many companies avoided fundraising last year, there is currently a glut of companies that likely need cash. Accordingly, the competition is fierce, and it includes many companies that didn’t grow much (if at all) in 2009. Many companies seeking funding in 2010 are (or soon will be) out of money, and as a result they’re in poor negotiating positions. Even good companies are fighting for one of history’s toughest investment pools.

For all the back and forth, thrust and parry, and plain old bitching by, between and about entrepreneurs and their investors, we all are sailing in the same boat. Most investors were once entrepreneurs and many entrepreneurs will become investors.  And, together, we are facing a great shakeout at a time when the country needs the innovation and the job growth that startups provide to the economy. It demands that we, as VCs, exercise great caution in identifying companies to back or continue backing in 2010.

In this environment, there is no cash for clunkers unless, of course, we’re talking about the government. The downward pressures of a year like 2009 push good companies (meaning ones that would have done well or reasonably well in a typical year) and the bad ones (meaning ones that wouldn’t have done well even without the downward environmental variable) into the same pool.

You could argue they’re always in the same pool and that only the great companies stand out. That’s true. It’s just truer right now. And distinguishing the two is the difficult task faced by VCs.

If your startup needs cash in 2010, present the facts to potential investors without apology and don’t gloss over the need. You may not get the deal you had hoped for, but you will keep your dream alive.

Look for investors that have complementary portfolio companies, which heighten the chances of an exit via merger or acquisition. And if you’ve previously secured initial funding, you’ll always do better staying with your current investors, since they have already supported the vision.

VCs, in the meantime, need to look forward, not back. Companies need to be judged, above all else, on their potential to succeed in the future. The past is important, but as all good investors know, past performance does not guarantee future results.  The companies that are most likely to succeed are the ones that did the most with the least in 2009. They typically have a nimble business model, a clear vision for success and an obvious market need – and those qualities should be at the fore of any 2010 investment discussion.

Photo by shawn.miller via Flickr

Tags: Venture Capital

Companies: Grotech Ventures

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Possibly as many as 50,000 iPads pre-ordered in first two hours

Filed under: Retail, Apple Financial, iPad

The early adopters are out in force today. Based on analysis from Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog & the investors of the AAPL board on Investor Village, it seems that as many as 50,000 iPads were pre-ordered in its first two hours of availability this morning. That’s pretty staggering demand, especially considering that on a typical day Apple only receives an average of 15,000 online orders for all products combined.

Naturally, we have no way of knowing if these numbers are exact as of yet. The numbers reflect over 50,000 orders placed in two hours, and the percentage of those that are iPad orders isn’t clear. Considering that the iPad was just made available for pre-order today, however, and the 15K daily average noted above, it’s likely the majority of orders placed this morning were indeed for the iPad. Additionally, the numbers only reflect the number of orders placed, not the number of units ordered; taken with the 2-pad maximum for today’s pre-orders, the data does suggest that somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 iPad pre-orders were placed within two hours of its availability.

This suggests a huge demand for the device, at least among early adopters. It will be very interesting to see if this trend is repeated once the iPad is actually available in stores.

One interesting note: even if all 50,000 of those iPads were the $499 version (which is very unlikely), based on iSuppli’s analysis of that unit’s build cost, it means Apple gained nearly $13.5 million in revenue profit from the iPad alone in a mere two hours — and that’s the bare minimum. Once you factor in all the other models and their higher prices, the numbers climb by several million dollars. Even for a company with a market cap in excess of $205 billion, that’s still pretty amazing performance.

[h/t MacRumors]

TUAWPossibly as many as 50,000 iPads pre-ordered in first two hours originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AOL, Intel, And The New York Times Help betaworks Raise A $20 Million Series B

Betaworks, the New York City-based holding company investing in the realtime Web, just raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by RRE Ventures and Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY, Lerer Investments and Founders Collective, also participated, along with investors from the last round, which was $7.5 million

The company both invests and incubates realtime media startups, including Summize (acquired by Twitter for realtime search), bit.ly, TweetDeck, StockTwits, SuperFeedr, Outside.in, OMGPOP, and gdgt.

CEO John Borthwick says that the funds will be used to do more of the same, invest in and create realtime media startups.

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Benchmark, Others Store $9 Million In Scale Computing

Benchmark Capital is placing a rather hefty bet on Indiana-based SAN startup Scale Computing – they’ve led a $9 million Series B round of financing and Partner Bill Gurley joins the company’s board of directors.

Existing investors Blue Chip Venture Company, CID Equity and Spring Mill Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Scale Computing sells storage hardware – actual machines with a proprietary software layer – to mostly small and medium sized businesses. The low end product is 3 Terabytes of usable storage for around $10,000, and additional storage can be purchased and added to the cluster from there. The company, which competes with HP’s Left Hand Storage, Dell’s EqualLogic and others, now has over 100 customers, says Gurley, and is growing fast.

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