Jul
23
The big news yesterday was Amazon‘s purchase of Zappos for $ 920M. This is a great win for Zappos’ team and investors and also proves that Amazon has the appetite to make big acquisitions (they are quickly becoming a very active acquirer). As I thought more about this deal though one thing struck out – [...]
Jul
02
Investment valuations and exit markets go hand in hand. When exits are happening you can get a nice valuation. When they’re not, you can’t. It has nothing to do with the merit of you or your business – its all about the likelihood of getting out at a sufficient level of return in the future. [...]
Jun
16
Techcrunch published an interesting table yesterday showing startup count and acquisition rate by State (reproduced here). This is by no means conclusive since it covers a two year period and thus cannot cover the full lifecycle for all the companies, still there are some interesting takeaways for me. 1. Density matters: I hate to reinforce [...]
Jun
04
Startup Accelerators seem to be all the rage these days. Highly visible programs like YCombinator, Techstars and Launchbox Digital have really shone a spotlight on this space. I recently came across a series of interesting posts on accelerators (see bottom of this post for links). In some respects, these accelerator programs are just incubators under [...]
Jun
02
Back in January, I wrote about the oncoming era of the “small exit“. I felt then (and still do) that the combination of capital efficiency, the bad fit between traditional VC and today’s young startups, the sheer number of startups vs. amount of available capital (especially here in Canada) all pointed towards small exits. Vancouver-based [...]
Recently, I shared some thoughts on the state of the M & A market courtesy of Corum Group. It wasn’t particularly optimistic. Deal volume and deal prices were down across all sectors. John Elton , a Partner at Inovia Capital followed up yesterday sharing a market update that included this chart. Still, there are some [...]
So, Oracle is at it again, buying Sun for $7.4B. The story has been widely covered so I won’t repeat it, but I wanted to share some thoughts on a very interesting graphic I saw in today’s Wall Street Journal about this transaction: When you calculate a few key ratios from this graphic, you really [...]
For the second time in a week, eBay is proving itself to be a bad dealmaker: EBay’s biggest acquisition by far was its purchase of Skype for a total price of $ 3.1B. While Skype is a huge success as a stand alone business, there were and are essentially zero synergies between it and EBay. [...]
Feb
26
I recently attended a seminar put on by Corum, one of the leading software M & A advisers. Here’s what they had to say about the state of the software / Internet M & A market: Trends & data points: Valuations of Internet companies: 1.1x sales down from 2.5x last year. Private equity is on [...]
Feb
24
In a key scene from my favourite movie of all time, Wall Street, Gekko launches into one of his many great speeches. It begins: “The most important commodity I know of is information…” and goes to show what an unfair advantage he generates for himself (and hence how much wealth or value he creates) through [...]
It’s not every day that we get to see a tech IPO. In fact, in all of 2008 we only had six of them. So, I thought I’d check out the SEC fling for Opentable‘s planned public offering to see what we could learn from a company that has grown enough to brave the public [...]
Last week we learned that Defensio was sold to Websense. Given that the Defensio team got to an exit without the aid of outside investment, I thought there would be some hard-fought lessons there for other entrepreneurs. I was right. Here’s my interview with Carl Mercier, founder and CEO of Defensio. Enjoy! Can you tell [...]
Jan
28
Montreal-based Defensio announced its sale to Websense yesterday. This comes a few days after another Montreal startup Reasonably Smart was bought by Joyent. These transactions are just a couple of data points confirming what I see as the era of the small exit. “Small” is a relative term. And it’s not necessarily bad. Still, it [...]
Jan
23
Don Dodge recently posted on the state of the VC & IPO market. His post contained some numbers that nearly made me fall of my chair. In the table below, Don shows VC$ invested (money in) vs. returns through M & A or going public (money out). Over the past eight years, $213.5B has been [...]
