Tech Investing

December 12, 2008

Sirius XM's Dual Concerns: Debt, Delisting

Sirius XM (SIRI) is racing to get its financial house in order before a meeting with restive shareholders scheduled for Dec. 18. As chief executive officer of a ...

November 21, 2008

College Endowments Deserting Venture Capital

Entrepreneurs aren't the only ones in startup land feeling pressure from the economic slump. Venture capitalists themselves are feeling heat from some of their biggest...

November 21, 2008

Facebook Gets SEC Stock Exemption

Earlier this year the social networking site Facebook grew concerned that an obscure securities regulation might force the privately held company into the spotlight. ...

November 11, 2008

HomeAway: A Find in Online Vacation Rentals

There's no place like a second home. Or so the backers of vacation-rental startup HomeAway believe. Venture capitalists are so enamored of the three-year-old Austin ...

November 6, 2008

Ultra-Wideband: On the Ropes

Five years ago, the promise of a new networking technology known as ultra-wideband was a living room without wires, where DVD players, set-top boxes, and video ...

November 4, 2008

Startups: When Cutting Costs Won't Cut It

In just about every Silicon Valley boardroom the conversation inevitably turns to cutting costs. Once the pleasantries are exchanged and election handicapping ...

October 27, 2008

Can Hot Techs Keep Growing?

Amid the roiling waters of the stock market and economy, which have tossed tech investors around for weeks, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs made a special guest ...

October 21, 2008

Yahoo: It Coulda Been Worse

Thanks to aggressive cost-cutting and surprising strength in search advertising, Yahoo! (YHOO) pleased investors on Oct. 21 with third-quarter earnings that managed to...

October 14, 2008

Prediction Markets Meet Wall Street

With all the fuss about Wall Street lately, one fact has gone unobserved: The stock market has performed brilliantly as a form of artificial intelligence. That's ...

October 10, 2008

Venture Firms Recoil from Crisis, But Not for Long

Venture firms are sounding the alarm over what this downturn might mean for their portfolio companies. While it's true that great companies are built during downturns,...

October 9, 2008

Venture Investment Likely to Fall Short in 2008

In the last few days, venture firms have begun to realize they are not immune from the credit crunch. At the end of next week, official data will arrive that will ...

October 9, 2008

What Will the Crisis Mean for Venture Capital?

In the lingo familiar to the kids toiling away at Web startups, the U.S. financial system is on the verge of an epic fail. The same may soon be said of many of the ...

September 16, 2008

Tech Stocks: No Safe Haven

Amid the rash of bad news emanating from Wall Street, investors could have yet another setback to stew over. Technology stocks, once a haven from the storms roiling ...

August 29, 2008

Multitasking Chips Point to Future Cell Phones

Many venture firms shy away from investing in semiconductor startups because of the inordinately high cost and risk involved relative to other sectors, but some firms ...

August 29, 2008

Has Dell's Comeback Hit a Roadblock?

Dell's turnaround plan veered off course during the summer. The PC maker reported on Aug. 28 that its fiscal second-quarter profits slumped 17% on aggressive price ...

August 28, 2008

Students Will Help Save Apple

Take a look around and it's hard not to get depressed by all the negative economic news. Home prices keep sliding. Credit is drying up. Inflation fears are on the ...

August 8, 2008

How Angels Are Playing a Fallen Economy

The grim economy has led not only to a drop in consumer spending and the foreclosure of more than a million homes, but to changes in the way angel capital is deployed....

August 1, 2008

VCs Eyeing Cleantech Seek Other Backing

Earlier this week, 35 venture capitalists wandered the halls of the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado. They were attending a conference focused on ...

July 22, 2008

Yahoo Saga: Microsoft Investors Weigh In

Amid Microsoft's quest to acquire all or part of Yahoo, made public a half-year ago, media attention has zeroed in on Yahoo shareholders, and how they stand to gain or...

July 17, 2008

EBay's Painful Quarter

When earlier this year John Donahoe was named eBay CEO, succeeding Meg Whitman, he indicated that planned changes would inflict some pain in the short term ...

July 15, 2008

Intel's Happy Earnings Surprise

The sky over the tech landscape isn't falling after all. Amid growing concerns that the global economic malaise is worsening, a surprisingly upbeat second-quarter ...

July 14, 2008

What Capital Crunch?

There's no capital crunch in Silicon Valley. Despite turmoil in the stock market, jitters about mortgage financiers Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), and the ...

July 1, 2008

The Worst IPO Market on Record?

When M. Benjamin Howe headed up technology investment banking for Montgomery Securities in the mid-1990s, the market for initial public offerings was a fountain of ...

June 30, 2008

What I Did at VC Camp

In the spring of 2007, Michael Sullivan was trying to figure out how to add some mojo to his startup, Affine Systems. As a graduate student in applied mathematics at ...

June 27, 2008

Yahoo Tries to Heal Itself—Again

In the latest attempt to persuade restive investors it can fix itself, Yahoo! (YHOO) is reorganizing its management ranks. The widely expected revamp, unveiled June ...