Alexander Haislip

First Reserve Corp. managing director Will Honeybourne knows a few things about the energy industry. He’s worked in Texas for more than a quarter of a century and has been with the energy-focused private equity shop for eleven of those years. At First Reserve, Honeybourne focuses on upstream oil and natural gas opportunities and services companies. He says that he has seen his fair share of ups and downs in the industry. Last month, Honeybourne was a panelist at Buyouts Texas, a conference affiliated with peHUB. We've got 5 questions for Will after the jump...

Apple CEO Steve Jobs lives at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a swank part of downtown Memphis in a yellow house with white trim and a pool in the backyard. Or maybe he doesn’t. One thing is now for certain, he was in Tennessee for a liver transplant. The Wall Street Journal has the story. We first reported that the Apple CEO was there on April 15. Like everything associated with the world’s most-secretive CEO, his whereabouts in the week Apple reports earnings have the air of mystery you’d expect to see in an episode of The X-Files. His location is so secret, in fact, Apple’s public relations team doesn’t even know where he is. “I don’t have that information,” Steve Dowling told me two months ago. “Steve is on a medical leave of absence and there’s nothing further to say.”

Terralliance, a natural resource discovery company, says it raised more money from its existing investors and added new investors. Company spokesperson Gordon Burk declined to comment on the size of the investment or disclose the investors. Terralliance had previously raised $295 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Goldman Sachs, DAG Ventures, Dubai-based Ithmar and […]

Reporting by Martha Sanchez Apple is buying eye-tracking technology from Tobii Technology, a Stockholm-based startup that just closed a $21.5 million Series B financing from venture capitalists, according to company founder John Elvesjö. Tobii Technology’s eye tracker can be imbedded into a device or used to measure the efficacy of advertisements, applications and websites. Tobii’s […]

Stock options used to be a great way to compensate the employees of startups. Everybody either got a huge payday when the company sold to a strategic buyer or could dribble out their holdings to the public market. But, as you’ve probably noticed, the IPO window is shut and strategic buyers aren’t as busy as […]

I spoke with a well-connected business person in Memphis this morning who says that there is a house in a swank neighborhood there that has been bought for a princely sum and is undergoing minor renovations in preparation for its new resident. He says he has reason to believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs is moving […]

Mid-market private equity firm Thoma Bravo recently closed its ninth fund with $822.5 million in capital commitments. The fund, which the firm said was oversubscribed, focuses on buyouts in the software, business and financial services and education industries. “We are pleased to have exceeded our fund-raising goal despite a challenging environment,” Carl Thoma, one of the firm’s four managing directors, said in a statement. We've got five more questions for him: Q: How is the downturn affecting your firm? A: We’re seeing more opportunities now than we saw six months ago. From the buy side the opportunities are better than what we’ve seen. Public valuations have gotten so low there are going to be a lot of opportunities to take private. Stocks that were $15 are now $5 but their earnings are still going up. Consumer space is the one that everyone is trying to decide if you jump into that space yet or not, since earnings there are really coming down.

Warren Buffet’s executive air-travel company NetJets has hired Goldman Sachs to raise up to $1.4 billion in debt, according to a government filing. NetJets has $1.2 billion of short-term debt notes outstanding as of early February, documents show. The company became a subsidiary of Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company in 1998.

Jerry Yang is out as CEO of Yahoo, though will remain at the company to ensure a smooth transition to his successor, according to reports.

The big surprise from my evening with a group of middle market buyout pros assembled by Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management was that two out of the three had discussed launching debt funds. Something like a quarter of all middle market buyout deals done are financed by GE Capital, the panelists told nearly […]