Alexander Haislip
The Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois (TRS) has announced plans to issue an RFP for a private equity consultant after Pacific Corporate Group (PCG) parted ways with TRS’s lead consultant. The move comes less than two quarters after TRS hired the consultancy firm. “TRS is clearly disappointed in the recent events at […]
PEHub.com sister publication PE Week is out today with several interesting stories: The Brain Trust Accelerator Fund, a venture capital fund launched by former AOL executive Steve Case to finance startups working to solve brain-related health problems, has had an initial close. PE Week subscribers will find more details on the fund’s focus and management. […]
The NVCA predicts venture capitalists will be investing more overseas in the coming year. But the group certainly didn’t need to commission a survey to come up with that conclusion. VCs have collected boatloads of cash to send overseas this year and firms that had once decried places such as China as investment black holes […]
Venture firms pulled back on gaming investments in 2006 despite lucrative exits early in the year. Investment dollars dropped nearly 38% in 2006 to $137 million, down from the $219 million invested during 2005, according to data from Thomson Financial (publisher of PEHub.com). It seems odd there would be a dip in 2006. Especially after […]
Black-Scholes is dead and the libertarians at Google killed it with a new type of stock option. Black-Scholes, you may remember, is the formula derived by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes and published in 1973 based on research done by Edward Thorp, Paul Samuelson and Robert Merton. Merton and Scholes won the Nobel Prize for […]
I got a tip earlier this year that Yahoo’s rumored buy of Facebook was a done deal but couldn’t substantiate it. I wrote a story saying that VCs were watching Yahoo’s Q3 earnings for a potential announcement. Nothing ever came of it, and I gave up browbeating my contacts at the social networking site and […]
A Russian hacker has taken control of Blueprint Ventures’ website, Partner Bart Schachter says. The hacker turned the firm’s website, www.blueprintventures.com into a link page for pornographic material. The Blueprint partners have been unable to receive email since they lost their site over the weekend. “It’s a pain in the ass,” Schachter says. “It’s happening in […]
I’ve wanted a lightning gun ever since I played Quake for the first time back in 1996. Now, 10 years later, science has caught up with science fiction. I ran into Ionatron (Nasdaq: IOTN) while researching a story for Monday on one of its investors. The company builds directed-energy weapons using a laser-induced plasma channel. […]
ONSET Ventures consistently takes the cake for best holiday card. This year’s version is a comic book called “Santa vs. The Liquidator” which reads a lot like “The Grinch who Stole Christmas.” In ONSET’s version, The Liquidator steals business plans, laptops, and purchase orders, oh my! I won’t ruin the ending for you, you can […]
Everybody wants more Internet metrics, especially VCs trying to evaluate startups. So I offer you Quantcast, a service that will break down your site and analyze its viewers, the demographics of your audience and what else your visitors are looking at. Quantcast launched in September and is run by Konrad Feldman, former CEO of Searchspace, […]