I came across this New-York Times article about MySpace, its economics and challenges: For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher (sub req’d). It is full of interesting data points, and is especially interesting in the light of the growing importance MySpace has in the Web 2.0 ecosystem. Not only is MySpace the second largest Internet web site in page served, it has also become a common launchpad for new startups that offer widgets that can be integrated in users’ home pages. Bambi Francisco had a good piece on this “trick” two weeks ago: MySpacenomics (sub req’d).

Interesting snippets:

MySpace now has over 70 million signed users (but the article does not mention how many users are actually active – logging at least once in the last 90 days). As mentioned, only Yahoo serves more pages than MySpace which is getting close to one billion pages per day. The yearly … Read more »

And Tali Aben is her name.

I was very happy to see that my good friend Tali just joined the ranks of the VC bloggers, and be the first VC blogher in a long time – which is great. Tali is a General Partner at Gemini Israel Funds – a Tier 1 Isreali firm, and is based in Silicon Valley. You will no doubt find her experience of helping Israeli portfolio companies interesting, and her wit and frank style enjoyable.

As she puts it in her first post:

I suppose, there’s a first time for everything…. and it’s high time to get this blog started. I’ll start by saying what it is I’ll be blogging about:

* Issues facing Israeli startups * Raising 3 boys (ages 2,8 and 12) * Professional women * Digital Photography

I suppose that will keep me busy for awhile….. stay tuned.

Welcome Tali. … Read more »

Buddy Will Price has the Venture Investment Statistics for 2005, from VentureSource, a division of Dow Jones and Ernst & Young.

Commitments to VC Funds, $22.2 bn. Up 18.7% from 2004 VC Financings, $22.1bn. Up 2.8% from 2004 IT Financings, $12 bn. Down 4% form 2004 Software Financings, $5.11bn, Down 6% from 2004 Number of Active Firms, 1,417 Down 49% from 2000, 61% if you define active as > 4 deals per year. Number of exits, 397. IPOs: 41, down 38% from 2004, with $2.24bn raised via IPO M&A: 356, down 12% from 2004, with $27bn in total exit value Number of private companies funded since 2000 net of 2005 exits: 5,406 with $132bn invested in them Average of $24.4m invested in companies At current exit rate, will take 13.6 years to get through backlog (amount available to VC firms for investments / total investments per year) Median M&A exit $47.5m Median Pre-moneys (across sectors) Seed … Read more »

I mentioned two days ago the continued decrease of the volume IPOs of VC-backed companies. Discussing it with a VC friend, we sort of joked about the efficiency of the Sarbanes Oxley regulation that is essentially scaring away from the public markets a generation of companies – hence reducing in a round about way the potential for fraud and abuse from these new companies.

This morning, Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley is pointing to a Wall Street Journal piece (that I could not read b/c you need to be a subscriber) from the CEO of the Nasdaq market warning of the potential demise of US Markets due to Sarbanes Oxley:

He is properly concerned that the overly bureaucratic Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) processes could lead to the end of global domination by the U.S. capital markets. Ironically, the two gentlemen that created SOX did it with the intention of “preserving” U.S. capital market leadership. Their fear was that people … Read more »