Crowded Market. 369 VC firms fundraising last month :: Global Venture Capital Fundraising Market - May 2012 Preqin Report ::

Since the 1990s, venture capital (VC) has been at the forefront of the private equity industry and today it is still a prominent player in the private equity ecosystem, with venture capitalists continuing to find and fund innovative companies. As of May 2012, there were 369 venture capital funds on the road, targeting aggregate capital commitments of $50.5bn. These figures demonstrate a 26% increase in the number of venture capital funds in market and a 20% increase in the aggregate capital targeted compared to funds on the road in May 2011. Almost 53% of the total capital sought by VC managers is for funds that invest across all financing stages, while 22% is being targeted by expansion/late-stage vehicles, and the remainder by early stage and venture debt funds.

A geographic breakdown of Preqin’s Funds in Market data shows that the North American marketplace still attracts the most attention from fund managers and investors, with the highest proportion of both funds and aggregate capital targeting the region. There has, however, been a surge in Asia and Rest of World-focused funds over recent years. Currently, 73% more venture capital vehicles in market focus their investments throughout Asia and Rest of World than within Europe, and these funds are seeking 147% more capital. The challenging fundraising environment, as seen post-2008 global financial crisis, has resulted in an overcrowded market as of May 2012, and it is expected that many vehicles will not complete a successful fundraising process, or at the very least close below their fundraising target.

For further commentary on the venture capital market, read our Spotlight report for deeper insight into VC fundraising, as well as deal execution in this industry. In our May edition, we explore why this high-risk, high-reward potential investment strategy remains a significant part of the private equity realm.

Meet the man behind Europe’s hottest VC firm - GigaOm presents a good interview with Neil Rimer, Index Ventures

Neil Rimer doesn’t get a lot of publicity. Compared to some of his more high profile colleagues at Index Ventures, the cerebral investor tends to stay under the radar.

This is despite the fact that he’s one of the driving forces behind what must be Europe’s leading venture capital firm, certainly as far as the web is concerned. As one of the founders of Index back in 1996, he is intimately responsible for a business that has scored major coups with companies like Skype, MySQL, ASOS, Betfair and more.

So what is he interested in right now? What trends is he watching closely?

I caught up with him to find out where he plans to invest — and hear about the smart money in big data, the problem with Europe’s clone culture — and find out about the investments he wishes he’d made.

Index has invested heavily in online fashion in the last few years — most recently with money put intoNasty Gal. What is it that attracts you there?

The thing is that we’re big in marketplaces. We didn’t wake up and say “let’s do fashion because it’s sexy” — it just happens to be an amazing category for e-commerce. The things I’m really interested in are marketplaces, and the notion of using social networks to do much more valuable things.

I mean it’s valuable to connect people and keep in touch, but that’s just getting to know each other. So we’re in a company called Funding Circle, which isn’t that well known but is really transforming the way businesses finance themselves by connecting them directly with investors in the U.K.

I think that’s a very powerful application of a marketplace, and that’s just business finance. There are lots of other financial products we buy, like insurance, that I think could be transformed by these kinds of things. So marketplaces is still something I’m going to put a lot of money into.

Another hot marketplace you’re involved in is travel. You’re an investor in Housetrip, which istargeting the European hotel market in an Airbnb-style way. Meanwhile another European Airbnb competitor, the Rocket Internet-backed Wimdu, is doing well. How do you see this panning out?

Housetrip are leading in Europe and they want to own that space. But they’re focused on family travel, holiday rentals, and that’s different to Airbnb.

All these other guys saw Airbnb and just copied it. I mean that’s clearly what Rocket does — and I don’t think you get the best people by doing that. Eventually your own people clone you. But Airbnb is a different thing from Housetrip, it’s typically more social, you’re staying with someone, usually while they’re there. They also have whole places, but that’s not really in their DNA.

But even if you believe the market is different enough today, the reality is that Airbnb will need to expand — especially if they go public, which is clearly where their investors are pushing them.

Yeah, they want to be in this market too. There are very few markets where it’s one player takes all, and we look at it from a DNA standpoint — where are they coming from and what’s their guiding vision? They’re very different, and I believe that Airbnb is more in the eBay of resources: eBay for houses, eBay for cars, eBay for boats — rent everything. Housetrip is more like the Conrad Hilton of the 21st century.

You don’t get that when you’re defining yourself by those guys in a different market and saying “they’ll come and buy us one day.”

You’ve started investing pretty heavily in big data companies, too. What drives you there? Do you think there are payoffs we can’t see yet?

I think we are trying to be very pragmatic about all this.

Let me give you a counter-example: our foray into clean tech — which was really not a foray, since we entered the forest, took a look around and said it wasn’t for us. We are not ever keen to invest in an area because think it will be a good idea at some point in the future, but we don’t know how. So when we invest in big data, it’sKaggle, it’s Factual, and it’s Alertme: businesses where we can actually see and touch the way they are acquiring the data and turning it into something valuable that they can sell and scale. We’re not doing a lot of speculative stuff in big data.

What about those who criticize big data, and are concerned that it can deliver lots of information, but not really produce useful insights?

I was surprised to hear that there are a lot of skeptics of big data. I don’t know how you can be skeptical of it: more data is better than less data, and more ways of extracting insight from that data is better than fewer.

So: you’re excited by marketplaces and big data. What other trends do you think will become more important over the next few years?

The other one is education and knowledge, which where we’re just getting started in. I led an investment inStack Exchange, and I really love that company… they’ve kind of cracked the best way to aggregate and curate knowledge about a wide array of topics. Everyone knows Stack Overflow, but few people know aboutphoto.stackexchange.com or gardening or DIY, but they’re very good sites and they’re infinitely better than the crap Google used to point you to.

We can do a lot with that, and they pay nothing for that content, and they pay nothing for their traffic.

We’re going to look a lot more around education — the technology just enables this stuff. Teaching stuff online, this stuff wasn’t usable for a long time. Like video conferencing 10 years ago wasn’t usable, but today I’m avoiding travel because of it.

You’re not alone in thinking that — but doesn’t change in education take a long time? It can take a couple of years, five years, 10 years — even a generation — for the impact to really shake out.

It depends. All the vocational stuff, where you’re trying to learn a skill or achieve a level of proficiency in a language, or coding, or in English — we know in China what a big deal learning English can be, and what a difference that makes for someone in terms of their earning power. That’s measurable.

People make these decisions over a long period of time, but I think there’s less stickyness that we think — a lot of these things have been institutionalized, but people aren’t happy with them. There are a lot of degrees you can get in the U.S. that are worthless, but they are companies that make a lot of money.

The technology and these platforms for exchanging knowledge and helping people get to a different place in their life, I think that’s going to be a big area for us.

So what’s the company you wish you’d invested in right now?

Kickstarter, honestly. I think Kickstarter is a profound, profound company. The execution’s obviously great, and we’re just at the beginning. Most people don’t even know it exists yet.

We didn’t see it, so it’s not like I’m kicking myself for making the wrong call… but I think that’s a very, very important company — not just in what it’s doing, but in the theme it’s unlocking. It changes the social dynamic, and it shows also how much pent up goodwill there is among people to fund stuff with no financial return. Imagine what they’d be willing to do, by the way, for financial return.

Photographs used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Lift Conference

The High-Tech Tortoise | Think Quarterly

BY Leslie Berlin
Conventional wisdom suggests that speed to market is crucial to business success. But the history of Silicon Valley contains stories of second-placed competitors who ultimately triumphed over their speedier opponents. We go in search of insights from the archives.

Need To Read: VCs Tell Us Their Top Summer Books - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ

by Laura Kreutzer

Venture capital professionals are probably (along with entrepreneurs) among the world’s biggest workaholics, logging endless hours strategizing, networking, listening to pitches and taking part in board meetings, not to mention massive amounts of time spent on planes, trains and automobiles. However, many of them also somehow manage to squeeze in time for some summer reading. Here are some of their recommended reading picks:

Getty Images

When beach season hits, even VCs take a break to immerse themselves in a good book.

Jeff Bussgang, general partner, Flybridge Capital Partners

“The Finkler Question,” by Howard Jacobson — “A wry fictional work about philo-Semitism (as opposed to anti-Semitism)”

“Delirious,” by Daniel Palmer — “A mystery novel about a start-up CEO gone mad, written by a former start-up executive”

Sandy Miller, general partner, Institutional Venture Partners

“Civilization: The West and the Rest,” by Niall Ferguson — “A fascinating sweep across global history. How the West ‘won’ and how we are losing now. Rich with amazing stats and facts and very readable. The best book for me in a long time.”

Jules Maltz, general partner, Institutional Venture Partners

“Rework,” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of 37Signals — “It is about simplifying your life and focusing on what really matters. It’s just as applicable for a start-up trying to launch its first product as it is for a venture capitalist trying to manage her meeting calendar.”

James Garvey, chairman, SV Life Sciences

“The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” by Leonard Mlodinow — “It’s an intriguing book that mixes baseball, war events and [other topics to examine] how accidents and random events rule things.”

John O’Farrell, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz

“In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror And An American Family In Hitler’s Berlin,” by Erik Larson — “This book fed my fascination with Europe in the 1930s and the powerlessness of the liberal democracies to resist the rise of Nazism. It’s an excellent blend of personal dramas and massive societal change.”

“Rule 34,” by Charles Stross — “This one is the most relevant to the world I work in as a VC. Stross does an amazing job of describing the potential progression of many of the technologies we’re investing in, as well as the evolution of spamming and other nefarious future uses of technology.”

“Skippy Dies,” by Paul Murray — “This is a funny and sometimes sad novel set in a boarding school in my native Dublin. As a father of teenagers myself, I felt Murray captured the teenage psyche brilliantly, as well as evoking my own school days in Ireland.”

–Russell Garland and Deborah Gage contributed to this post