Earlier this week, we announced that we had closed a $525K funding round for CapLinked. Angels participating in the round included PayPal alumni Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal), Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir), and Aman Verjee (CFO of Sonos), as well as David Anderson’s 7th Rig. Read the full account on CapLinked’s blog to see how we used our own product to facilitate the raise.
I’m quoted and CapLinked is mentioned in this Bloomberg/BusinessWeek article on private company valuations. The article quotes a study documenting how secondary market valuations of VC-backed tech companies have risen a whopping 54% since June.
I’ll save musings about whether this is a potential asset bubble for another day, but I will add a clarifying comment to my quote in the article. Regardless of the valuations, companies such as Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, etc. are excellent companies. If this were 1999 or even 2005, I think most of them would be publicly traded now. But given the current business and regulatory environment, they’re choosing to stay private.
Last week GigaOM published my editorial contrasting the rise of Groupon and the long, slow decline of eBay. I made the case that the poor economy–which has been a key driver behind Groupon’s growth–should have benefited eBay, as well. Why not?
The reasons for eBay’s stagnation come down to leadership. During former CEO Meg Whitman’s tenure, the company’s culture became increasingly bureaucratic, and improvements to the site became few and far between. eBay hiked fees aggressively while doing little to improve its user experience. The company misjudged the threat posed by Google’s advertising network, which effectively decentralized ecommerce by making it viable for small businesses to sell directly from their websites. Also, as my former PayPal colleague Keith Rabois asserted, eBay started out as a fun, social ecommerce site but it failed to grasp the advent of social networking.
Click here to read the rest of my piece.
If you haven’t checked out CapLinked yet, take a minute to read this recent post from CapLinked’s blog entitled “Why the World Needs CapLinked.” It explains why Chris Grey and I started this company to help entrepreneurs and investors, how our platform is different from other services, and what it enables users to do.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking to raise capital or an investor who’s put money into private companies, I want to let you know that we’re getting ready to send out more beta invitations for CapLinked. If you’re interested in trying out our service, submit a request through our online form and we’ll notify you when the next batch of invites are ready.
In case this is the first time you’ve heard of CapLinked, it’s a secure online platform for private companies to raise capital and share updates with investors.
Entrepreneurs can use CapLinked to upload deal documents for a capital raise, reach out to potential investors using the social graph, and keep existing investors up-to-date with posts and a customized dashboard.
Investors can use CapLinked to review deals from entrepreneurs they’ve connected with and keep track of all of their private company investments in one place.
(Or, if you prefer Silicon Valley geek speak, we’re “mapping the investment graph” by connecting entrepreneurs and investors so they can share confidential information behind a walled garden.)
If you’d like to try out our service, request a beta account today.
While we’re putting the finishing touches on CapLinked‘s beta site, I thought I’d share a couple of photos of our team.
The CapLinked crew hard at work on site development.
Proudly displaying CapLinked's new sign.
