The latest from TechCrunch
- Tesla's $100M IPO: Losses Expected Until At Least 2012. Musk Taking $1 A Year.
- First Round Capital Gives Entrepreneurs A Way To Get In On The Portfolio Action
- Google Twists Knife In IE6, Pulls Support From Docs And Sites
- VC Leaderboard: Top 25 Most Active Dealmakers Of 2009
- Developers, Not Apple, Will Make Or Break The iPad
| Tesla's $100M IPO: Losses Expected Until At Least 2012. Musk Taking $1 A Year. | Top |
| Electric car company Tesla Motors has filed for a $100 million IPO. There were rumors floating late last year around that the company, which is led by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, would go public “soon.” One interesting tidbit from the filing: Musk only takes $1 in yearly salary. Another interesting factoid. In the filing, Tesla states that it will has seen net losses in each quarter since inception. The company expects to continue on the same path until it starts to deliver larger quantities of its Model S sedan, which is not expected until 2010 or later. Tesla took a loss in the first three quarters of 2009 of $31.5 million which is less than its loss for the same period in 2008, which was $57.3 million. Gross profit for the first three quarters of 2009 was $7.8 million compared to $561K for the same period in 2008. | |
| First Round Capital Gives Entrepreneurs A Way To Get In On The Portfolio Action | Top |
| In case it wasn’t obvious, being an entrepreneur is risky business. Even those that get investments have a relatively small likelihood of a successful exit. So early-stage investment firm First Round Capital has a plan to alleviate some of the risk: an entrepreneur’s exchange fund. For those not aware, an exchange fund in this regard is exactly what it sounds like: company founders are given the option to give up a small piece of the stock they own in their venture in exchange for a piece of the action of the larger pool of all the First Round portfolio companies that choose to participate. Basically, this allows these entrepreneurs to diversify their own holdings without having to sell any stock. More importantly, it lowers their risk of walking away with nothing while adding an incentive to see other companies in the portfolio succeed. As First Round marketing director Josh Kopelman writes , “ One of the benefits of having a fairly large portfolio is that our portfolio companies can offer a lot of value to each other. Whether it is sharing interview techniques, technical management strategies, sales leads, perspectives on the advertising market, or doing deals – it is always great to see portfolio companies helping each other succeed. ” And with this exchange fund, all of these companies have more reason than ever to help each other out. Kopelman notes that First Round itself doesn’t receive any financial benefit from the establishment of this fund. First Round’s portfolio includes companies like Get Satisfaction, Gnip, Mashery, RockYou, StumbleUpon, Wikia, Xmarks, Xobni, and many others. Notably, their portfolio also contains two hot location properties right now: SimpleGeo and Hot Potato. And they participated in mobile payment company Square’s big first round . [photo: flickr/ michael spencer ] CrunchBase Information First Round Capital Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Twists Knife In IE6, Pulls Support From Docs And Sites | Top |
| This has not been the greatest start to the year for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Days after news of the latest security flaw in Internet Explorer, Google is adding fuel to the fire by phasing out support for IE6 for two of its Google Apps products, Docs and Sites (which recently got an aesthetic upgrade ). For both the consumer and enterprise versions of Google Docs and Sites, the only browsers that will be fully compatible are Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0+, Google Chrome 4.0+ and Safari 3.0+. The phase out will take place beginning March 1. While you’ll still be able to access Docs and Sites from IE6, you will have restricted functionality and many features won’t work, making the applications for the most part useless. We hear that Google will be phasing out IE6 support for the remainder of Google’s major products, including Gmail and Calendar, over the coming year. This isn’t Google’s first move to phases out IE6 functionality for its products. Last July, the search giant began phasing out YouTube support for the Microsoft browser. For users of IE6, the online video site began pointing to 'modern' browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives. A similar prompt will now take place on Docs and Sites for users who are browsing from IE6. For the most part, the tech community, including web developers and designers, tend to have a profound dislike of Internet Explorer 6. Obviously, the browse has many issues, including low performance and major security flaws. Even Microsoft itself, is recommending that all its customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of the browser which has better security in place. The main reason why IE6 is still being used at all is because of corporate IT departments across the globe needing to make upgrade decisions. Unfortunately, a number of these companies still have to use the browser because they have systems in place built specifically to run with it. To add insult to injury, IE6 continues to lose market share in the browser world. And Google isn’t the only technology company that is looking to close off support for IE6. Digg has hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. I have a feeling that as Google joins the web in gathering pitchforks around IE6, more companies will flock to join the movement. | |
| VC Leaderboard: Top 25 Most Active Dealmakers Of 2009 | Top |
| Which venture capitalists funded the most companies last year? We went through our funding data in CrunchBase to come up with the Dealmaker Rankings below. The most active VC was Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested in 57 deals throughout the year by our count, followed by Kleiner Perkins (49), New Enterprise Associates (47) Intel Capital (46), Sequoia Capital (42), First Round Capital (34), and Accel (33). You can see all top 25 in the interactive table below, which is followed by another table for just the fourth quarter of 2009. Mohr Davidow and DAG Ventures broke into the top ten for the quarter. You can compare those to the tables we published for the third quarter . The rankings are based on the number of deals each firm participated in during each time period. But you can also you can also re-rank the table by clicking on the different column headings to find the VC firms which participated rounds with the largest total or average values. By doing that you can see that the bigger VC firms with the most capital to deploy, such as New Enterprise, Kleiner, Accel, Venrock, and Sequoia, were the most active in the bigger rounds. The fbFund, True VEntures, First Round, and Charles River Ventures dominated the smaller, earlier stage rounds. And then interestingly, firms like Benchmark, Greylock, and Highland Capital were active at both ends of the spectrum. | |
| Developers, Not Apple, Will Make Or Break The iPad | Top |
| The iPad's fate isn't in the hands of Apple. Jobs & Co. has done their part and made the device. The iPad's success lies solely in the hands of developers. Because unlike the iPhone or iPod touch, the iPad doesn't really have a core function. The iPhone is nothing more than a glorified telephone and the iPod touch is just another PMP. But what's the iPad? A big iPod touch? None of the iPad's functions seem to define it. Ebook reading? That may turn out to be just a novelty feature for many buyers. Web browsing? Maybe, but the Internet is formatted for a mouse and keyboard, a tablet simply doesn't offer much, if any, advantage over a netbook or computer running a full OS. Early reports are even suggesting that the iPad isn't even a solid media player because of its 4:3 aspect ratio. Then there are the millions upon millions of apps Apple has accumulated over the last two years. They, and new iPad-specific ones, are the key to success for the iPad. Without them, the iPad would just be another concept-of-function device, targeted at a small crowd with its limited capabilities of web browsing, task management, ebook reading, and media playback. The apps will likely prove to be the justification many people will need to purchase the iPad. | |
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