Being smart people, we are all aware of the sea change/blip in the financial reporting regulations that is bearing down on corporations. I am referring to the end of the world/no big deal of fair value estimating that has been foisted upon/given to us by the FASB in the forms of FAS 157, FAS 141R […]
The role of a company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is an incredibly critical, but poorly understood, one. Many startups even neglect the position, unless a member of the founding team is a strong technology visionary. Instead, they assume the CIO or VP of Engineering can be responsible for setting technology strategy as well as delivering on it […]
Will the iPhone platform help anyone make money? The underlying questions are 1) What is a platform? 2) Is the iPhone a platform or just a fun piece of hardware? Last year Facebook evolved from an application to a platform enabling a gold rush of investment in application vendors and new venture funds focused on monetizing the new platform. Presumably being a platform is better than being an application, as anybody old enough to remember the Flying Toaster screensaver can attest. After near-ubiquity in the PC era, Wes Boyd and better half Joan Blades (who would later go on to found MoveOn.org) in 1997 sold Berkeley Systems -- including its Flying Toaster application -- for a reported $13.7 million. In 2008 dollars, this would be a Series A. Applications were not a way to make money in the 1990s.
While the popular press continues to exult in the death of old media (newspapers come to mind in particular), the answer is never quite that simple. The truth is that old media and new media are in an evolving symbiotic relationship, and their interplay is increasingly crucial to long-term success. A Primary Issue presents itself […]
Focusing on the supply side of the petroleum markets isn’t the right way to come at this, at least from my perspective. There are more than 300 million acres of public land now available for oil leasing in the United States. Oil companies are currently sitting idle on nearly 70 million of those acres, so there’s plenty of room for new drilling and exploration – we don’t need to add more acreage to the mix.
The following is the text of a speech given Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention by Nancy Floyd, founder and managing director of energy-focused VC firm Nth Power: Good evening! Ever since I graduated college, I’ve worked in one way or another on renewable energy, trying to find cleaner, cheaper ways to power everything […]
Michael Butler is chairman and CEO of investment bank Cascadia Capital. He is writing a book titled Financing the Future and the Next Wave of 21st Century Innovation, and is serializing it here at peHUB. What follows is an excerpt from the eighth chapter. It’s been nearly 30 years since Ronald Reagan tore down the […]
It’s been a bit since I’ve posted a Law Firm 2.0 post. Most of the reason has been that I’m still getting a ton of inbound calls and emails from lawyers telling me that I’m onto something here and they want to add their two cents to further refine my thinking. I’ll have several more […]
The lead NY Times editorial last Sunday, had a stern warning against relaxing ownership rules for private equity investing in commercial banks. Let me suggest why this is a misplaced warning. The current state of play is that ownership of 25% or more of a federally regulated bank subjects the owner to being deemed a […]
Given all the free publicity in this publication for The Dutch Goose during the past week, The Oasis Beer Garden in Menlo Park must be feeling a bit like John McCain. Much in the way Kansas Citians categorize themselves by asking the simple question “Gates or Bryants?”, resident of (and travelers to) the Silicon Valley […]