Lawrence Aragon

(UPDATED WITH FREE TABLE) Turns out everyone has been buzzing about social networking for a good reason: VCs have gone completely bonkers in their quest to find the next MySpace or Facebook. In this month’s Venture Capital Journal, Joanna Glasner turns up more than 30 investments in the sector this year alone! VCs have bet on […]

As we point out in this month’s cover story (click here for a free version), VCs are going to great lengths just to record an exit — any exit. Is this the new normal? If so, will we start to see an exodus from the business and fewer people trying to get in?

Google is paying $625 million for Postini, producing a monster exit for the company’s venture backers, who put about $26 million into the email security company over five rounds. It is a particularly welcome exit for Mobius, which up to now has had too few hits to get LPs excited enough to back another fund. Is […]

The July issue of VCJ is sure to give readers a jolt. Senior Editor Joanna Glasner did an amazing reporting job for this month’s cover: “Five Ways to Jump Start Your IRR.” With the IPO and trade sales markets fairly flat for the past few years, many VCs are rightly worried about whether they will be […]

Some dire predictions have been made about what will happen if Congress increases the tax rate on carried interest. We want to get a better picture of what the PE industry would look like if such a tax increase were implemented. Please click here to take our very quick survey.  

There is a problem with the carried interest debate: VCs are wrongly being lumped in with buyout pros.  It is entirely appropriate for congress to reexamine whether the profits from buyout deals should be taxed at the capital gains rate. But the profits from venture deals should NOT be part of that discussion. Venture capitalists are primarily interested […]

There is a bit of a mystery with VC/shutterbug Steve Jurvetson’s Flickr account. What happened to his photo of Tim Draper holding up Natalie Portman? My colleague Alex Haislip first brought you the photo on May 8. We sent Steve multiple emails to get his OK to run the photo in Venture Capital Journal, but […]

Marc Andreessen has posted some thoughtful comments about VCs on his blog in a three-part series titled “The Truth About Venture Capitalists.” It’s always interesting to hear what a non-VC thinks about the VC business. MBA students who want to get into VC will probably find it the most useful. Andreessen is generally favorable about VC […]

For well over a year, London’s AIM has been touting itself as a good way for tech companies to go public without the high costs of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. But few VC-backed companies from the United States have made the leap across the pond. I believe that’s going to change following yesterday’s successful IPO by Blinkx, a video search […]

My colleague Alex Haislip, who is traveling on assignment, heard from a reliable source that Michael Arrington, head of super-popular blog TechCrunch, has been talking to at least one “well known” venture fund about raising some capital. The source also says that the VC isn’t Sequoia Capital or Kleiner Perkins.  Anyone know who it is? We put in […]