PEI Staff

More than $5 trillion has disappeared from the value of public companies in the first three weeks of January. Many markets are 20% or more below their highs — the informal definition of a bear market.  It’s a frightening moment, particularly for the banks, but it’s also inlaid with investing opportunities for savvy distressed buyers. Here are […]

This originally appeared at Rob’s Greentech Media blog International markets are melting down, the Fed is stepping in with a big emergency rate cut, and everyone is talking about the R-word. So what would a recession mean to cleantech venture investors and startups? There are four potential scenarios being discussed by investors: 1. There are […]

My first year in venture was 2002. The great bull run of the 1990s was over, the dot com movement had come to a crashing halt, and Silicon Valley settled into a year of retrenchment and reckoning. I remember long and painful board meetings where companies decided on reductions in force, recapitalizations and investor wash […]

FirstLight Financial, an arranger of senior debt for mid-sized leveraged buyouts, has fired roughly one-third of its 65-person staff, peHUB has learned. The less-than-one-year-old firm got caught flatfooted after building a business model that presumed a thriving market for loan syndication—a market that dried up after last summer’s the credit crunch. The layoffs span the entire spectrum […]

With yesterday’s 0.75% rate cut by the Federal Reserve, the press has been rightly focused on the ripple effects that the soft economy will have on the US and the world.  Amidst the high-level analytical fervor, the mainstream press has not probed on the implications to the venture capital/start-up economy, which fuels so much innovation, […]

The New Year for life sciences investors does not begin on January 1. Instead, it commences on Monday of the following week in San Francisco, with the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference – or as old guys like me stubbornly continue to call it, the H&Q Conference. It’s a four-day marathon of early-morning breakfasts, back-to-back meetings […]

Another year, another blizzard of VCs descending on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to check out the latest venture deals. Well, not exactly.  “What’s the latest in the plasma vs. LCD debate?” I asked a VC friend as we crossed paths in the turbulent canals of the Venetian Hotel. “I didn’t focus on it […]

As I did in 2007 as well as 2006, I thought I’d throw out a few predictions for 2008.  So here we go, in no particular order… 1) No Recession. As Agent Maxwell Smart would say:  “missed it by that much”.  I am short-term bearish about the US economy and, like many of you, have […]

In the past several years, an intriguing trend has pervaded the venture mindset. The VC mantra has gone from changing the world to saving it. A decade ago, most venture firms aligned their investments with a corporate CIO’s holiday shopping list. Today, glance at websites for some of the most prominent VC franchises, and you’d […]

The first week of the year always offers such promise – New Year’s resolutions to eat less, exercise more and focus on the important things. For many of you, that probably means focusing on your career. I personally find it easier to keep my own resolutions if I have a tangible reminder of what the […]