Group items tagged

Local commerce giant Groupon is dealing with a lot of issues right now, with its stock price in free fall, slow growth and many of its investors heading for the exit doors.

Venture capital (VC) has delivered poor returns for more than a decade. VC returns  haven't significantly outperformed the public market since the late 1990s, and, since  1997, less cash has been returned to investors than has been invested in VC.  Speculation among industry insiders is that the VC model is broken, despite occasional  high-profile successes like Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Facebook in recent years.  The Kauffman Foundation investment team analyzed our twenty-year history of venture  investing experience in nearly 100 VC funds with some of the most notable and  exclusive partnership "brands" and concluded that the Limited Partner (LP) investment  model is broken 1 . Limited Partners-foundations, endowments, and state pension  fund-invest too much capital in underperforming venture capital funds on frequently  mis-aligned terms. Our research suggests that investors like us succumb time and  again to narrative fallacies, a well-studied behavioral finance bias. We found in our own  portfolio that: * Only twenty of 100 venture funds generated returns that beat a public-market  equivalent by more than 3 percent annually, and half of those began investing  prior to 1995. * The majority of funds-sixty-two out of 100-failed to exceed returns  available from the public markets, after fees and carry were paid. * There is not consistent evidence of a J-curve in venture investing since 1997;  the typical Kauffman Foundation venture fund reported peak internal rates of  return (IRRs) and investment multiples early in a fund's life (while still in the  typical sixty-month investment period), followed by serial fundraising in month  twenty-seven. * Only four of thirty venture capital funds with committed capital of more than  $400 million delivered returns better than those available from a publicly  traded small cap common stock index. * Of eighty-eight venture funds in our sample, sixty-six failed to deliver expect

Facebook, Zynga, Groupon ou encore Renren ont connu des chutes vertigineuses depuis leur introduction ces derniers mois. Bon nombre de sociétés du secteur ont été sanctionnées lors de la présentation de leurs résultats trimestriels. Le souvenir de la bulle revient dans les esprits.

"On l'avait presque oublié, on l'avait cru perdu, dépassé par l'étoile filante Apple, ringardisé par les nouveaux arrivants Facebook, LinkedIn ou même Groupon. Pourtant, à l'ouverture, le 31 août prochain, de l'IFA, grand-messe annuelle de l'électronique grand public à Berlin, Google risque de gentiment se rappeler à notre souvenir et montrer aux observateurs de quel bois il se chauffe."