industryterm:venture capital fund

  • 2019’s Security Token Market Trends
    https://hackernoon.com/8-security-token-market-trends-to-watch-out-for-in-2019-718f8b7652cd?sou

    By: Kadeem Clarke, Investment Manager at 8 Decimal CapitalAs a #blockchain-focused venture capital fund, 8 Decimal Capital is focused on assisting in the mass adoption of blockchain technology. We believe that this can be done by investing in the future, not only what’s popular. This is why we are consistently conducting thorough research, due diligence, and speaking to industry leaders. As of recent, our research has been primarily geared towards the security token space.Based on our research, here are 8 security token market trends to look out for in 2019:Note: This is merely my opinion and I expect many readers to have differing viewpoints.1. Exchanges won’t be successful in 2019As the security token market gains popularity among the blockchain community, many people are focused on the (...)

    #market-trends #security-token #finance-and-banking #blockchain-development

  • A Regional Comparison of Venture Capital Fundraising and Investor Appetite
    https://hackernoon.com/a-regional-comparison-of-venture-capital-fundraising-and-investor-appeti

    North America is home to the majority (57%) of LPs that were active in venture capital funds in 2017. Given that GPs typically have a better understanding of LPs’ requirements in their home regions, fund managers tend to attract a large proportion of investors domestically. Consequently, it is unsurprising that North America-based venture capital funds continued to dominate the fundraising market in 2017: 262 funds reached a final close, securing an aggregate $35bn in investor capital. This is greater than the total capital ($21bn) raised collectively by 185 vehicles headquartered in Asia and Europe.Despite Europe-based venture capital funds securing just 13% of aggregate capital raised globally in 2017, the region saw a favourable fundraising environment. As shown in the chart below, (...)

    #venture-capital #vc #startup #entrepreneurship #investing

  • F.D.A. Official Under Bush Is Trump’s Choice to Lead Agency - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/health/fda-scott-gottlieb.html

    President Trump said Friday that he intended to nominate Scott Gottlieb, a partner at a venture capital fund with longstanding ties to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, to lead the Food and Drug Administration.
    […]
    Mr. Trump has made no secret about his desire to overhaul the F.D.A., telling a group of pharmaceutical executives in January that he planned to slash regulations and speed up drug approvals at the agency.
    […]
    Indeed, Dr. Gottlieb was the clear choice of the pharmaceutical industry — when the Wall Street firm Mizuho Securities surveyed 53 drug companies in February, nearly three-quarters said they preferred him.

  • #Propriétarien

    1.6 L’idéologie de Facebook – ce n’est pas fait par un étudiant cool.
    https://sortirdefacebook.wordpress.com/#sec-1-6

    En ces temps où on veut toujours nous faire croire que les débuts de l’internet étaient seulement portés par une idéologie californienne libératrice, il est salutaire de lire ou relire l’article de Tom Hodgkinson sur Facebook paru dans le Guardian en janvier 2008. Prémonitoire et on ne peut plus d’actualité près de [trois] ans plus tard, soit une éternité à l’échelle temporelle du web.

    Quelques extraits :

    « #Facebook est un projet bien établi, et les personnes derrière le financement sont un groupe de spécialistes du capital-risque de la #Silicon_Valley, qui ont clairement pensé l’idéologie qu’elles souhaitent diffuser dans le monde entier. (..)

    Bien que le projet ait été au départ conçu par le très médiatisé #Mark_Zuckerberg, le vrai dirigeant derrière Facebook est le philosophe #Peter_Thiel, spécialiste du capital-risque et futurologue de la Silicon Valley, âgé de 40 ans. Il y a seulement trois membres du conseil de direction sur Facebook : Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg et #Jim_Breyer, appartenant au groupe de capital risque #Accel_Partners. (..)

    Mais Thiel est plus qu’un capitaliste intelligent et avare. C’est un philosophe du futur et un activiste des néoconservateurs. Il est diplômé de philosophie à Stanford, en 1998 il coécrit un livre appelé « Le mythe de la diversité », qui est une attaque détaillée sur l’idéologie multiculturelle qui domine Stanford. Il estime que le multiculturalisme a conduit à une diminution des libertés individuelles. Alors qu’il était étudiant à Stanford, Thiel fondait un journal de droite, encore en service actuellement, appelé « Que la lumière soit ». Thiel est un membre de #TheVanguard.Org, un groupe de pression néoconservateur sur Internet, qui a été créé pour attaquer MoveOn.org, un groupe de pression de gauche qui travaille sur le Web. (..)

    L’Internet [personnification étrange…]fait immensément appel aux néoconservateurs tels que Thiel, parce qu’il promet une certaine forme de liberté dans des relations humaines et dans les affaires : absence de droits nationaux embêtants, suppression des frontières, etc. L’ #Internet est le cheval de Troyes du libre-échange et de l’expansion du laissez faire. Peter Thiel semble également soutenir les paradis fiscaux en mer, et réclame que 40 % de la richesse du monde réside dans les endroits tels que Vanuatu, les Îles Cayman, Monaco et les Barbade. Je pense qu’il est réaliste d’indiquer que Thiel, comme Rupert Murdoch, est contre l’impôt et les taxes. Il aime également la mondialisation de la culture numérique parce qu’elle rend les banquiers mondiaux difficiles à attaquer. « Vous ne pouvez pas avoir une révolution des ouvriers contre une banque, si la banque est domiciliée au Vanuatu, » estime t-il… (..)

    Ainsi, Peter Thiel essaye de détruire le monde réel, qu’il appelle aussi « nature », pour le remplacer par un monde virtuel, et c’est dans ce contexte que nous devons regarder le succès de Facebook. Facebook est une expérience délibérée dans la manipulation globale, et Peter Thiel est une lumière pleine de promesse pour les néoconservateurs, avec un penchant pour les folies utopiques de la technologie. Pas vraiment quelqu’un que je souhaite aider à devenir riche pour ses projets…(..)"

    • With friends like these ...
      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

      Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook’s current valuation of $15bn , would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

      Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him “one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country”. He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled “The PayPal Mafia” by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

      But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself “way libertarian”.

      TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: “Rod is one of our nation’s leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses.”

  • Millions of taxpayers’ cash spent on venture capital fund run by Tory donor
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/millions-of-taxpayers-cash-spent-on-venture-capital-fund-run-by-tory-

    Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being spent on a venture capital fund overseen by one of the Conservative Party’s biggest donors, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

    The British Business Bank, which is run by the Department for Business, has committed £7.8m to the Dawn Capital II investment fund, Whitehall documents show. Dawn Capital II’s parent company is Dawn Capital, whose chairman is Adrian Beecroft. Mr Beecroft has donated more than £700,000 to the Conservative Party, making him eligible for David Cameron’s “Leader’s Group” of top donors who are granted exclusive access to the Prime Minister.

    #corruption #connivence

  • CIA-backed #Palantir valued at $9bn - FT.com
    http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/996fa9e0-5dde-11e3-b3e8-00144feabdc0.html #paywall

    Palantir’s initial funding came from #In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s not-for-profit venture capital firm, and it has received several rounds of funding from the Founder’s Fund, a venture capital fund run by former PayPal chief executive and Facebook backer #Peter_Thiel. Other venture capital investors include Glenn Capital Management and Ulu Ventures.
    The company raised almost $200m in a fundraising round less than three months ago, and then also would not disclose the identity of the investors. Founded by #PayPal alumni and #Stanford computer scientists in 2004, the company has raised almost $800m in total.

    The CIA and the FBI use the Palantir platform to seek patterns in large amounts of disparate data which can be used to help guide their actions, for example, in the tracking of terror suspects, drug trafficking or cyber crime.

    But Palantir’s work for the private sector is the fastest growing part of the business, and now makes up more than 60 per cent. It offers companies anti-fraud services, warnings about insider trading threats and programmes which promise to help accelerate the research and development process in the pharmaceuticals industry.

  • MySpace: is this the beginning of the end? - Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/myspace/8243301/MySpace-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end.html

    The restructure, which will see the majority of MySpace’s depleting workforce reside in the US alone, as the London, Sydney and Berlin offices are left with a skeleton staff, is a very similar strategy to AOL’s final handling of Bebo, before selling the struggling social network on for a comparatively small sum to a venture capital fund.

    • Tiens tiens :

      The asset was briefly valued at $12bn when News Corp attempted to merge it with Yahoo in 2007.

      Ceux qui écrivent « Facebook vaut 50 milliards de dollars » devraient donc se méfier.