On an annual basis, Probitas Partners conducts a Survey of institutional investors in order to gauge their opinion on key trends in the private equity market. We recently contacted approximately 4,000 institutional investors and received 359 individual responses from a mix of Pension Plans, Funds of Funds, Endowments & Foundations, Family Offices and Financial Institutions. […]
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 fourth chapter. A decade ago, every ambitious and analytical business-school student dreamed of […]
Being an entrepreneur means figuring out how to survive and thrive when you often find yourself in way over your head. An ambitious entrepreneur is always pushing and stretching beyond their comfort zone — creating a company from scratch, evangelizing a new category, taking risks way out of any rational person’s comfort zone. They rarely […]
I attended the “Exploring Regional Venture Capital Business Models” yesterday at Boston University, the inaugural event created by Vinit Nijhawan, an entrepreneur-in-residence at BU and chairman of TiE-Boston. As first time events go, this was a winner. Next year will be even bigger I predict. The premise was to showcase/discuss the differences between venture capital […]
Despite how U.S. students continue to lag far behind those in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan in math and science and score comparable to European students (NYT, 11/14/07), I was never concerned about the welfare of our nation. Even though, for more than a decade, U.S. students typically placed outside the top […]
As the attention to emerging markets and the need for geographic diversification increases, moves like the one noted below by AIG, and several other new funds being established by General Atlantic, Advent and others, Latin America looks increasingly important for PE funds and investors. The GDP per capita is increasing in many of these countries […]
With oil prices at an all-time high, a struggling dollar, volatile equity markets, fallout from the credit crunch in fixed income values, there are some LPs that are now facing private equity allocations that are slightly out of whack, preventing them from being able to make commitments to otherwise good quality funds. From the boom […]
Last weekend I was reading a newspaper article about the tough decisions high school seniors and their parents are facing. Do the parents scrape up the dough to send their kids to a top school (even if it means mortgaging their homes or drawing from their retirement accounts) or do they encourage their kids to […]
Fred Wilson wrote a blog last week on VC exits, bemoaning the lack of liquidity paths. I admire Fred tremendously (both as an investor and blogger!) and think It’s a great blog, but it only covers a part of the story. First, a bit of background. VCs need their start-ups to exit in order to pay back […]
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 third chapter. I wonder what Alfred Winslow Jones would think if he were […]