Quattrone, Qatalyst, Historical Venture-backed IPOs

At the AlwaysOn event yesterday, Frank Quattrone offered some great historical context on the current state of the Venture-backed IPO market, andby extension, the venture capital business in general:

"Over the long term, venture capital firms have typically taken one-third to one-half of their companies public, Quattrone said. Today, only about 10 percent of their portfolios go public, he said. Quattrone expects that to fall further, to about 5 percent, in the next two to three years."

21, MIT, Kate Bosworth, Torrent, aXXo

21 just came out of DVD, and I saw it for the first time. Pretty fun. Among other things, 21 features Kate Bosworth as a hot chick from MIT who changes her name ;)

In addition to DVD, 21 may or may not also be available, here.

Valuation Negotiations - Jeff Clavier Tweet

Jeff Clavier: Valuation negotiations are always interesting & tell you quite a bit about the way the relationship with the entrepreneur might go post deal

Pithy in 140 chars.

Apes & Androids - Siren08 Afterparty

By lucky coincidence - I went to this Apes & Androids concert and it kicked ass.

Johnossi - All They Ever Wanted - New Album

Johnossi has a new album coming out in Sweden called All They Ever Wanted. The first 2 songs (18 Karat Gold, and Party With My Pain) on the myspace player are insane - Johnossi will get huge with this album - huge - swear to god!

18 Karat Gold



Party With My Pain

It Is Keyword Time Again

Here are some of the most recent keywords that Mattishness readers come in through:

faacebook
mattishness
20 seconds of joy dvd
how to visit cuba
italian postal bonds
positronic seattle
shiftboard
orolix
tsa spot
viral loop

A little bit too nice

Seattle Startup: Gathering 6/17 @ Owl and Thistle

Savan & I & other startup friends are meeting this Thursday at 6pm at Owl & Thistle in Pioneer Square to talk shop - hope you can join us.

Blanka Vlasic dancing - Track is a great sport

Blanka Vlasic celebrating a big jump with this great dance.

New blist tagcloud

blist now has a tag cloud on the dashboard to help you visualize what's going on in the community better. For the moment you'll need to be logged in to see/use it.

Click here to check it out.

Ahmed Rashid - Descent Into Chaos

I'm currently reading Ahmed Rashid's new book Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.

Crawlable SWF Questions

My top three unanswered questions about Googlebot crawling through SWFs on the blist blog.

Seattle Startups: RIPL Resurfaces

I wrote about RIPL back in April 2007 - since then they've been very quiet - as is common, they have been doing a certain amount of poking around trying to find the right business model, team, technology, and marketing strategy. Well, today RIPL resurfaced for me - just a little with this email. Watching with interest.

Was ist das Blinkenlights?

Was ist das Blinkenlights?

Great Day For Brown T&F - Anna Willard Steeple AR

Adobe Flash SEO & Monkey Magic

Yelp API, Compete.com, Quantcast

Yelp is doing well, but not as well as Compete.com would have you believe. In fact, this might be the single biggest Compete.com fail I have observed. In most cases, Compete tends to quite accurate - and a good way to estimate traffic to third party websites - but in the case of Yelp, they are wildly off. Quantcast, Alexa, and various anecdotal sources peg Yelp traffic at a healthy ~3.5M monthly uniques - nowhere close to the ~15M shown by Compete. Compete uses a mixture of data from toolbars, panels, and ISP log samples to compute their traffic estimates. Yelp has an API - what Compete seems to have managed to do is pull their ISP data sample from directly between Yelp and a large consumer of the Yelp API. 'ISP data' always sounds very robust compared to an audience panel or toolbar data - but it's important to remember that it's only a sample - not a 'full set' of ISP data - and is just as susceptible to sample bias as data collected any other way.

Sziasztok from blist!

blist made a nice list of useful & innovative web applications on pcworld.hu

So for all the Magyar speakers out there: Sziasztok from blist!

Blist
Ha van egy kisebb üzleti vállalkozásunk, valószínűleg szükségünk van egy átfogó adatbázisra, amely az összes fontos információt jól átláthatóan tárolja. Kiváló megoldás erre a Blist, amely az üzleti felhasználás mellett számos egyéb adminisztrációs lehetőséget tartogat.

Webes: www.blist.com

Bill Gurley: 15 Portfolio Companies >$50M Revenue

Nice for thing for a VC to be able to say:

"The Benchmark portfolio current has over 15 companies north of $50MM in revenues, and they are all private. This would have never happened in 1995 (even pre-bubble) where most of these companies would ALREADY BE public."
-Bill Gurley

Yahoo Mail Forwarding - Premium Features - What Not To Do

This is what you shouldn't hold back as a paid, premium feature when Gmail makes forwarding so easy for free.

In related news:

Please scrape this address:

mathewgustav@gmail.com

Iran Article Day

I am planning on reading these two articles on Iran tonight:

Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker


Thomas Powers, in the New York Review of Books