finance

Squawk Box September 30 – Credit Crunch continues, and Cloud Computing

by alec on September 30, 2008

We continued our discussion of economics today, the day after the single largest drop on North American in history. The markets are up today, after president bush called on US lawmakers to pass the bailout package, but there is still a lot of speculation about what this will mean for companies and investors.

We started with Eric Schonfeld’s piece on how this will impact Venture funds. Schonfeld points out that limited partners in a venture fund commit capital and then deliver the money to the venture fund as the VC commits to make investments. He postulates that as investors suffer losses elsewhere they won’t be able to make their commitments to the venture fund. As a result, Silicon Valley investor confidence is at it’s lowest level in 7 years.

We then moved on to Rafe Needleman’s advice to startups for surviving the downturn. He says, in essence, don’t count on advertising, rotate your business into enterprise, don’t go direct, raise money from angels not VC’s, conserve resources and (paradoxically, spend to plan). We had a few survivors of the last downturn on the call who added some color and additional viewpoint to Rafe’s advice.

Switching topics, we then discussed the emergence of a series of anti-cloud computing rants. There was Larry Ellison complaining that he didn’t understand what Cloud Computing was, beyond a marketing term for technology that already existed, and Richard Stallman’s rant against Cloud Computing that appeared yesterday. We debated the definition of cloud computing, the privacy implications, and more.

On today’s conference call: Dan York, Jim Courtney, Hudson Barton, Brad Dixon, Bill Volk, Sheryl Breuker, Marcus Elford and Sergio Meinardi.

Squawk Box September 30 - Credit Crunch and Cloud Computing [ 35:12 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Squawk Box September 29 – The Credit Crunch

by alec on September 29, 2008

Today we talked economics. The credit crunch in the US has lead to talk of depression. As the banks have failed, we’ve seen folks like Jason Calacanis and Om Malik publishing viewpoints as well. So, how will that hit technology markets? That was our topic.

To add a little structure to this discussion we split the discussion into a couple of phases. First we discussed the impact on larger players — the giants like Microsoft, the carriers, the cable companies and so on. And then we discussed the impact on the startup environment — does it make it harder to raise funds, what about exits, etc.

You will note that I’ve bleeped out the name of a company that was referenced early in the call. This was at the request of one of the participants.

On today’s Calliflower Conference Call: Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Bill Volk, James Body, Phil Wolff, Randall Howard, Dan Rockwell, Tom Orr, Sergio Meinardi

Squawk Box September 29 - Credit Crunch [ 29:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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“Smart Money” vs Dumb Money

February 22, 2006

Over the last couple of days I’ve had a number of conversations with investors about the whole concept of "smart money". Smart money is the idea that an investor brings more to the table than just a chequebook. They might bring business acumen, mentoring, customer contacts, or strategic expertise as well. The smart money argument [...]

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