Alexander Haislip

Larry Aragon, the Editor-in-Chief of the Venture Capital Journal, caught Kleiner Perkins Partner Ted Schlein on the telephone this morning and asked him what he thought of Adam Lashinsky’s critical article that recently ran in Fortune Magazine: Larry: Any reaction to the Fortune story on KP? Seems to suggest that the firm has made a […]

Joanna Glasner and I came to an interesting conclusion while reporting a story for the Venture Capital Journal about late stage investing in downward spiraling market conditions. We’ve been hearing that late stage private companies are getting higher valuations from venture capitalists than comparable companies are getting from the public markets. There are two schools […]

SponsorHouse, the operator of a social network for action sports athletes and enthusiasts called Loop’d Network, has raised $575,000 in funding from five individual investors, according to a regulatory filing. The San Diego-based company had previously raised $1.9 million from undisclosed angel investors. Its board of directors includes Tom Horgan, the CEO of Acorn Technologies, […]

You may have heard that the market isn’t looking to good for IPO-oriented startups. What may surprise you is the extent to which the late stage venture market doesn’t seem to care. Late stage valuations are still high, despite the prolonged slide of public comps. It’s driving some investors who can walk in both worlds […]

With the IPO market cooler than a penguin’s toes, VCs are forking more money into their late stage startups to keep them rolling. Some 57 companies raised $20 million or more from VCs for a fifth, sixth, or seventh round of financing so far this year, according to data from Thomson Reuters (publisher of PeHub.com). […]

Convict Jonathan Lee Riches is a lawsuitaholic, or so it would seem from the more than 1,000 of suits he filed from his South Carolina prison cell since being busted for identity theft and confined for 125 months. After attempting to sue Vinod Khosla earlier this year for $43 million, he turned his attention to […]

A source once told me that venture capitalists were the most risk-adverse averse people on the planet. It wasn’t until I understood the fee-plus-carry compensation structure that I believed it. A venture capitalist, before he or she is anything else, is someone who has taken money from an endowment, institution, university or retirement fund. Venture […]

The NVCA released a census report created with help from Dow Jones (a Thomson Reuters competitor in some verticals) that shows that the venture capital industry is predominantly made up of white men. The heterogeneity of the industry in itself is not surprising to anyone who has spent time in offices on Sand Hill Road. […]

I am gleefully devouring Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea” and recommend it to anyone involved in private equity. The book provides a non-fiction account of the voyage of the whaler Essex, which as any English major can tell you, was the inspiration for Moby Dick. The economic situation of 1819 is not […]

The NVCA survey issued in response to the poor IPO market for venture-backed startups reports that 57% of VCs it interviewed believe that Sarbanes-Oxley legislation is killing new issues. I don’t buy it. When I reported about the effects of Sarbox in 2005, Mark Zanoli, head of tech banking at JPMorgan, gave me the best […]