The Venture Intelligence Blog

Silicon Valley VC and Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley has been calling a bubble for a couple of years now. Gurley explains why he is so concerned with bubbles in his latest interview to Technology Review magazine: Great entrepreneurs are relatively disadvantaged in these markets where so much capital is available. In a market where capital is hard to come by, they can still raise money. In this market, they can raise a ton of money, but so can a lot of [less capable] competitors that wouldn’t be in business otherwise.  ...Imagine two companies. One is told, “I want you to get to $100 million in revenue and you have to be profitable when you get there.” The other is told, “I want you to get to $100 million in revenue and I don’t care if you lose $40 million getting there.” Which of those two exercises is harder, and by how much? I would argue it’s at least 10 times harder to do the first. Until you can prove that you can generate cash flow, you don’t have a sustainable b...

Here's an extract from the Rise Capital Blog : ... the differences between China and India matter just as much as the similarities. We believe that there will be quite a few investors who get “burned” by buying at lofty valuations this time around who subscribe fully to the convenient idea that India is the “next China”, and that Internet companies there are the “____ of India” (fill in the blank with any successful Chinese Internet startup). At Rise, we are eerily reminded of the rush of investment capital that flooded into Brazil a few years ago, with VCs believing that Brazil could also become the “next China”. At one point, the overnight flights from Kennedy (NYC) to Guarulhos (Sao Paolo) were packed with American VCs, startups were getting funded at a breathtaking clip, and early-stage valuations well north of >$100m were not uncommon. So what happened? A dip in the Brazilian economy combined with a realization by VCs that Brazil is actually quite different than China has...

By Arun Natarajan At the dawn of 2014, ad industry executive Ramesh Srivats had jokingly predicted : Flipkart will get a few hundred million dollars from VCs in March, July, and maybe November. With Flipkart raising $1000 million in July to add to the $210 million raised in May and spending (a reported) $300 million on Myntra.com in April, I wonder if Srivats was joking at all. And, if not, what numbers Flipkart will spring in November. The billion dollar deal making it to front pages of mainstream newspapers along with new Whatsapp/Airbnb/Uber triggered waves from Silicon Valley, makes an (unfortunately) old timer like me wonder if “I have seen this movie before”. Flashback The star deal of the 2000-2001 era was of course Sify’s acquisition of content portal IndiaWorld for about INR 500 crore (small change by today’s billion dollar standards but “eye popping” was the descriptor used for it in those days). That “mega” acquisition was promptly followed by companie...