Big news early in 2011 with Goldman Sachs raising and investing up to $1.5 billion in Facebook. To do so, Goldman is setting up a “Special Purpose Vehicle” (SPV). Because Facebook is a privately-held company, it can have no more than 499 individual investors due to SEC regulations. This SPV enables Goldman to make highly… [Read more…]
July 21, 2010
Interesting article on Wired today – 5 Things That Could Topple Facebook’s Empire. It’s fun and easy to create this lists – 5 things that…, 10 things that… – but thought-provoking nonetheless. Terms on a patent are 20 years, but businesses of the Facebook sort are difficult to make patentable, let alone enforce any legal… [Read more…]
August 10, 2009
Just saw that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. Found this interesting since the Google tree is expanding. Paul Buchheit is one of FriendFeed’s founders and the brains behind Gmail. After watching him speak on a panel last Spring, I wrote about Google, employee retention, and entrepreneurship. FriendFeed is a small shop with only 12 employees according… [Read more…]
July 31, 2009
Yep, there’s lots and lots of places for an online profile, but I just set up my “Google Profile” and found it really easy and kind of fun. One aspect that I like is that Google Profiles aren’t explicitly related to other applications such as the case with LinkedIn or Twitter. It’s basically a simple… [Read more…]
February 18, 2009
Logged into my Facebook account this morning to see: Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For… [Read more…]
December 11, 2008
Back in the Spring, I met the guys at Project Einstein at the University of San Francisco Business Plan Competition. They are on the move! They are now His Catalog. Check ‘em out for the holidays! Great to see new companies with solid concepts continue to grow. I like their blog as well – lots… [Read more…]
December 10, 2008
Last week, I wrote did some quick math comparing the value of Twitterers relative to the value of Googlers. My initial thoughts were that Googlers were far more valuable – that the relative value of Twitterers based on the $500 mln offer from Facebook was an extreme valuation. Now I’m not completely sure. After posting… [Read more…]
November 26, 2008
Maybe the message was something like: Twitter: @Facebook “No can do. Thx 4 the offer.” It’s common knowledge now that Twitter declined Facebook’s “$500 million” offer. Running some numbers yields some interesting results on the offer and valuations of both companies. (We’ll come back to the quotes around the $500 million shortly…) Back in April,… [Read more…]
August 12, 2008
After writing my weekend post about LinkedIn’s $1 bln valuation (“Locked in on Linked In“), I did a bit of reading about how some others viewed the matter. (I wanted to come to my own conclusion without being influenced too much by others who already wrote about the topic…) Michael Arrington wrote a nice article… [Read more…]
August 9, 2008
I read about the recent $53 mln Bain Capital investment to LinkedIn and I was prepared to write an article again questioning the valuation of another social/business networking site. Like many, I’m not particularly enamoured with the current $15 billion valuation of Facebook, so my initial reaction to the $1.035 billion valuation of LinkedIn was… [Read more…]
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January 4, 2011
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