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LinkedIn Valuation Modest Compared to Renren, VCs Holding Onto Shares
NEW YORK/BANGALORE, May 9 (Reuters) – LinkedIn Corp has priced its closely watched initial public offering at a bargain compared to rivals such as Renren Inc, underscoring growing caution over social media valuations. The debut of the social network for professionals founded by ex-PayPal executive Reid Hoffman values the nine-year-old firm at $3 billion. At about 12 times 2010 sales, its IPO is cheap compared to 78 times for Renren, the Chinese site often likened to Facebook. Companies including Twitter, Groupon and Zynga have stoked heavy interest from investors betting on social media only getting hotter.Wozniak-backed startup challenges storage giants | Reuters
BRIGHTON, England (Reuters) - U.S. startup Fusion-io, backed by computing pioneers Steve Wozniak and Michael Dell, says it can outwit computer-storage incumbents like EMC which have too much invested in old technology. Fusion-io, which has filed for a U.S. initial public offering, believes its fresh approach to speeding up data retrieval coupled with a first-mover advantage mean it can win deals over rivals concerned with bigger things. "Established companies go after known markets. We created a new market, and that market is for storage that runs at the speed of memory," David Flynn, Fusion-io's chief executive, told Reuters in an interview. Fusion-io says its technology speeds up data processing by a factor of 10 by putting a solid-state flash memory drive directly into the computer server rather than in the traditional storage area, which is further away and takes longer to reach.
Solar startups turn to big companies for capital | Reuters
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Fledgling solar power companies looking to grow beyond their venture capital roots are increasingly catching the eye of deep-pocketed corporate investors. For many startups, rounds of venture or private equity funding are thought of as stepping stones on the way to an initial public offering -- the ultimate corporate symbol of having arrived. But a tepid investor appetite for publicly traded clean energy companies has dampened enthusiasm for splashy IPOs, leaving solar companies looking elsewhere for the large sums of money they need to build factories, construct power plants or invest in improvements to their technology.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Venture capitalists are shifting their attention to social networking companies and away from biotech companies, bankers told the Reuters Global Mergers and Acquisitions Summit on Monday. Venture capitalists, who make high-risk investments in start-ups, are tired of waiting years for biotech companies to generate real products and be marketable as initial public offerings, bankers said. They'd rather invest in companies that could go public in just a year or two. "Think of an IPO for an early stage biotech company.
VCs trade biotech for social networking | Reuters
DETROIT (Reuters) - The recession and high gasoline prices offer the U.S. automotive industry a chance to reinvent itself as consumers inch toward acceptance of alternatives to the internal combustion engine, a top venture capitalist said on Tuesday. "This recession is a great reminder that the industry is changing," Ray Lane, a managing partner at storied U.S. venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said at an engineering conference here. "Business as usual is just not acceptable," added Lane, whose firm is an investor in California-based electric carmaker Fisker Automotive. He said 2011 will be seen as the inflection point for the adoption of new propulsion systems as oil prices continue to rise and more people around the world move to cities. Kleiner -- best known for investments in Google, Netscape, and Amazon.com -- has made investments in other start-ups in the auto sector, including Finland-based Think and V-Vehicle.
U.S. auto sector needs to rethink itself: top VC exec | Reuters