January 24, 2010 – 6:21 pm
Last week’s note on Apple licensing generated a good flow of comments, all appreciated. I’ll respond, but not before we get Apple earnings and the putative Jesus Tablet out of the way.
I’ll approach today’s topic, mobile payments, using an Apple Store moment.
Some cables keep disappearing. In particular, the ones that connect MacBooks of various [...]
December 20, 2009 – 8:17 pm
by Jean-Louis Gassée
As promised last week, let’s dig into a venture fund’s key numbers.
Limited Partners, LP, institutions or individuals put money into the fund. We, the General Partners, GP, make and manage the investments and we split the profits with the LP as the sole compensation for our services.
Over time, the split has varied with [...]
December 13, 2009 – 4:11 pm
Two weeks ago, I discussed what I called The Other French Paradox, that is how French taxpayers and French companies are at a (curable) disadvantage in Silicon Valley. Last week, I “shared” (we’re in California) my own plans to deal with the twin problems: a venture fund whose profits reverse the flow of money back [...]
December 7, 2009 – 9:00 am
Last week, we looked at the two components of the “other” French Paradox.
First, the Valley aura helps a tiny Palo Alto start-up sell its technology in France. But it doesn’t work the other way around: a Lyons high-tech company will get a polite reception but no orders from the likes of HP, Google or [...]
November 29, 2009 – 12:56 pm
by Jean-Louis Gassée
Foie gras, crême fraîche, butter, red wine — and lots of it! All these excesses leading to a higher life expectancy, to say nothing of the joys of sinning. That’s the legendary now official French Paradox. Scientists strain to explain the phenomenon: ‘It’s the phenolic compounds in the red wine’, they say. Me, [...]
September 20, 2009 – 11:07 am
In an “Entrepreneurial Thought Leader” lecture given at Stanford University earlier this year, Tom Siebel argues that all of the great technological advances and development of great companies are behind us – and the growth rate for the tech sector is just on par with the rate of current economic growth.
The previous sentence introduces [...]
The acronym stands for Net Asset Values. Be forewarned: this is the more boring installment in the VC Money Pump series of columns (see part 1 and part 2 ). Worse than spreadsheets and compound interest calculations, today’s topic forces us to deal with FASB (Federal Accounting Standard Board) regulations. Expensive futility as far as [...]
Last week, with Excel’s help, we looked at the “simple” computation of a VC fund’s rate of return. This week: Reserves, a most important sets of numbers.
As a rule, for every dollar initially invested in a company, we immediately set aside an additional $2 or even $3 as a reserve for future rounds, future injections [...]
This week, I intend to take you through the pipes of a VC fund’s “money pump”. It starts with dollars coming in from our investors, our Limited Partners, LP, to be invested in entrepreneurs’ big ideas. Later, sometimes much later, money comes back to be shared between the LP and us, the General Partners, the [...]
