That got your attention, right? Actually I am in a place called “The Palace” – a hotel on New Montgomery Street that I always think of as “the Sheraton Commander” (but am not sure that’s right either.) I won’t be here for long so good luck trying to find the physical instantiation of me today.
Two of my favorite bloggers (and people I adore – both working with and just simply as people) have excellent posts up today that are worth reading. I’ll start with Dick Costolo’s post titled Have a Company Voice. Dick is so completely right – I was at a board meeting yesterday and while talking about launch and roll out strategy, I wish I could have simply passed around a copy of this post (jh – hint.)
Fred Wilson has the other great post up this morning (actually – it’s a threesome of posts.) He’s blogging about historical venture capital performance and his latest is The Rise and Fall Of The Venture Business. Actually, read them in order if you are interested.
Now, before you respond and say “why is a venture guy spending all this time pulling this data together”, remember that we have investors also. Fred’s annual meeting is next week and I expect to see some of this information synthesized there. It’s awesome that he’s sharing this broadly and “thinking out loud” as he works through the data.
My friends Paul Kedrosky and Fred Wilson both showed up on WallStrip interviews this week. Lindsey interviewed Paul and got to ask about why people punch him in the face and Fred talked with Howard about the “Fuck You Phone.”
While Bijan didn’t make WallStrip this week, he did notice that 50 students at Boulder High walked out during the pledge of allegiance this week. It was that whole “one nation, under God” thing that doesn’t really work that well in a public school, especially in the people’s republic of Boulder. Praise to the kids for being independent and critical thinkers.
To finish off our Saturday morning “ok – I just caught up on reading my blog posts from the week” I point you to the Union Square Sessions 3: Hacking Philanthropy. I wasn’t there, but Fred and Brad got about 45 people together to discuss how web technology can be used to hack philanthropy. I’m anxiously awaiting the transcript.
Oh – and the Red Sox won their pennant race. Even John Kerry seemed focused on this when I met with him in Denver with a handful of other folks yesterday to discuss the carried interest tax debate.
Fred Wilson has an awesome post up today titled Venture Fund Distributions – Cash versus Stock. It explains, in great detail, how a VC thinks about distributing stock (either from IPOs or from sales of companies to publicly traded ones) back to their investors (or LPs.) It’s extremely detailed, gets into the mechanics of it, and also – as usual for Fred’s posts – has Fred’s own personal viewpoints woven through it. This is by far the best discussion I’ve ever seen of VC stock distributions either in the blogosphere or in interviews. A must read.
From a mug found in Fred Wilson’s office.
It’s important to have a sense of humor in this business (and in every business, and in life.) The coffee was great.
Today’s announcement that Microsoft is paying about $6 billion to buy aQuantive is the latest ownership change of an advertising-related Internet company.
Yesterday WPP Group announced that it was buying 24/7 Real Media for $649 million. And earlier this week Silver Lake Partners and ValueAct Capital announced they were buying Acxiom for $2.25 billion and taking it private.
Three deals, $9 billion dollars of consideration, and another big shift in ownership and alignment of Internet advertising alliances. All sparked by Google’s $3 billion purchase of DoubleClick.
While old media continues to slow dance (think News Corp / Dow Jones and Thompson / Reuters), new media is turning into a mosh pit at an AC/DC concert.
Jason and I have written extensively about 409A – a new tax regulation for pricing stock options in private companies that both of us think is fundamentally absurd. For the past 24 months we’ve been dealing with draft regulations which have made the problem of figuring out how to deal with pricing stock options in private companies both ambiguous, time consuming, and unnecessarily expensive (at least if you want to conform to the draft rules.)
The final regs have been released and Jason has sacrificed his brain by reading through him. His comments are over at AsktheVC.
I saw Paul Kedrosky deliver his Top Ten VC Lies. Priceless (and accurate.) I also met him face to face for the first time – we both commented on how weird that was since we’ve become good blog / email friends over the past two years.
Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion indicates that we aren’t in Kansas anymore. Fred has a good riff titled The Banner Is Back and the WSJ does a good job decomposing the return for private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. Finally, Paul Kedrosky weighs in with some interesting “Microsoft vs. Google” speculation and a suggestion that we are looking at a 12x FTM revenue multiple for ClickClick.
For those of you too lazy to clickclick once through to the WSJ analysis, H&F bought DoubleClick for $1.1b in 2005, although it appears they only used $330m in equity for the purchase. They sold off several pieces of DoubleClick (Abacus for $430m and the email business for about $100m) resulting in a return of over $3.6b for an investment of $330m less than two years ago.
No one has mentioned any cash dividends that H&F might have taken out of the business so the number could be even higher (and – depending on how things are structured – the investment basis might be even lower.)
There’s only one word for this. “Score!”
I’ve had my share of experiences with DoubleClick over the years (competition, acquirer of one of the companies I was an investor in, and investor of another company that I’m an investor in.) Now that they are destined to be part of Google, it’ll be interesting to see if they finally live up to their potential or if this is merely yet another chapter in the long and convoluted story that is DoubleClick.