Now Hiring: New York City During an industry event a few weeks back, I was pulled aside by a public pension fund manager who objected to my blanket characterization of his peers as “dumb money.” He argued that every large group has both good and bad apples, and that it’s unfair to deride the entire […]
Forum Notes Last Thursday, Thomson Financial and Goodwin Procter co-hosted an afternoon forum titled Energy Investing in a Carbon-Constrained World. The standing-room only crowd included a large number of Wire readers, who heard a wide-ranging discussion that touched on everything from carbon credit trading to box office results for the Al Gore movie (or, more […]
Random Ramblings I do not pretend to understand the wisdom of Highland Capital Partners’ deal size-agnostic investment strategy. To me, it seems instinctively improper to conduct the same amount of due diligence time and money on a $35 million investment (like FastClick) and a $500,000 million investment (like Virtual Iron Software), even if Highland is […]
Monday Mouth-Off The sun is shining, the Boston Herald could not be sold and Vinod Khosla is the Dateline NBC-anointed face of ethanol evangelism. In other words, it
Monday Mouthoff The sun is shining, Brokeback got robbed and the Buyouts Symposium East is just two days away. In other words, it’s time for some Monday Mouth-Off. Most email was in response to Friday’s column about the Silicon Valley VC being arrested for domestic abuse, and my (possibly hypocritical) reasons for not disclosing his name […]
Random Ramblings *** It’s only been 24 hours, but I’ve already developed a love/hate relationship with the new pandemic and bio defense fund formed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. What I love is its nobility. With avian flu now spreading into Western Europe and lots of real-life baddies hoping to mimic the Chechnyan thugs […]
Random Ramblings I was working on a comprehensive column on M&A, but ran out of time (I’m sure you’re shocked, just shocked). So instead here are the salient points, followed by some unrelated notes: *** The majority of M&A professional believe that M&A activity will continue to rise in 2006, according to the ACG/Thomson DealMakers’ […]
Random Ramblings *** Buyouts Magazine is asking private equity pros to participate in its second annual Survey on Sell-Side Advisors. Specifically, it monitors how private equity firms use sell-side advisors/I-banks, and their overall feelings about the working relationship. Results will be published in the next issue of Buyouts Magazine, with selected results published here. So […]
AIG vs. Cartesian: Postmortem Ten days ago, I wrote that there would be no winners in the AIG vs. Cartesian Group lawsuit, save for the lawyers (which generated lots of indignant email from lawyers). From a legal perspective, I was entirely correct. After all, the whole point of a confidential out-of-court settlement is that both […]