Guest Blogger Scott Killingsworth is the Chief Operating Officer of vcfo, inc. With over 800 clients to date, and offices in Austin, Dallas, Denver, and Seattle, vcfo has been an industry pioneer and continues to be a leading provider of financial, human resources and systems implementation services to companies ranging in size from emerging to public. So you are ready to take the plunge? You have a market changing idea, the nerve to leave your [...]
Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Mark McClain, CEO & Founder of Sailpoint, a company that is gaining significant traction and market momentum in the IT security industry. The company was recently named one of "10 IT Security Companies to Watch" by Network World. Give us a little bit of history of the company and how it got started. Kevin Cunningham and I founded the company with Jackie Gilbert in 2005. We decided to give the [...]
If you’re not familiar with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, their mission is to advance entrepreneurship and improve the education of children and youth. Their website contains great information about entrepreneurship, investing, and innovation. They recently released a report named Returns to Angel Investors in Groups, which says in short that organized angel investors saw an average 27% IRR, compared to historical VC returns in the mid teens. Some of the key findings: The distribution [...]
What’s in your wallet? Apparently not a NetSpend cash card. Way back in August we reported on CapitalOne’s planned acquisition of NetSpend for $700M in cash. We kind of forgot about it, and figured it was a done deal by now. Today it’s announced that CapitalOne has called off the deal. They instead acquire a minority interest in NetSpend, with rights to buy more later, according to a Reuters report. Nobody seems to be talking [...]
Creditcards.com announced today that they are going to delay their IPO, which was scheduled to price this week. Citing the famous "market conditions" line, no other information was made available. This is really bad news in many respects. What could have happened? We have no insider knowledge on this deal, but we can speculate. The roadshow is where you shop your offering to all the major securities dealers to get them to sign up for [...]
HelioVolt, which recently announced a huge fundraising to build their production plant, today announced two new directors. Ken Pentimonti is a principal at Paladin Capital where he focuses on homeland security issues. He’s got some strong ties to the folks in D.C. so maybe someone in our nationals capital understands that energy and national security go hand in hand. Also joining the board is Ron Bernal, a partner at Sequel Ventures. Ron was a VP [...]
Austin-based Troux Technologies has raised $7.85M of a $10M Series E round, according to a regulatory filing. The money brought in so far is from returning investors Austin Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Verdane Capital. In previous rounds the company raised $34M since it was founded in 2001. We expect the official announcement in the coming months as the company secures the last few million on the deal. Company founder and former CEO Hank Weghorst announced [...]
Debix, an Austin startup that has been flying under the radar, made a splash today after appearing in an article in the New York Times on identity theft. The NYT article focuses on the case of Gideon Yu, the CFO at Facebook, who had his identity stolen for over two years and racked up thousands by using his name and credit card number to make fraudulent purchases. Mr. Yu is not alone in suffering from [...]
We speculated that the hardware device had to launch pretty soon. The holiday season is coming, after all. Today the Slacker portable music player is available for pre-order. Shipments will begin in early December. The company also announced the premium version of the Slacker music service, which not have the images ads, and will allow you more freedom to skip any song (not just 5 per hour) and replay songs — a licensing limitation from [...]
Austin-based ON Networks, a creator and distributor of high quality short form video programming, announced today that they have raised a $12M Series B from existing investors Austin Ventures and AT&T, plus new money from Accel Partners. Former Hallmark Entertainment CFO Allan Grafman recently joined the board of directors of the company. The company also announced support for the iPhone platform over the summer. Momentum has been building for the company based upon a new [...]
