Best and Worst Industries of Decade, or, Why Children’s Clothes Makers Need to Get Into VoIP.  Paul Kedrosky, Infectious Greed

Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets.  Vivek Wadhwa, via TechCrunch

The Startup Visa And Why The Xenophobes Need To Go Back Into Their Caves.  Vivek Wadhwa, via TechCrunch

Rangel Puts Carried Interest Back On The Agenda.  Wall Street Journal Private Equity Beat

Memo to Congress.  There are legal issues with taxing carried interest as ordinary income.  Paul Koenig, peHub

15 Google-y Perks That Will Make You Jealous.  Nicholas Carlson, Silicon Valley Insider

Why Don’t Fortune 100 CEOs Care About Social Media?, JCM at SpataillyRelevant.org

Disney’s four funnels.  Forget fairy dust. M&A in the Magic Kingdom is all about process.  Richard Morgan, TheDeal.com

Barack Obama Has Better Things to Do Than Tweet.  Ryan Tate, Valleywag

Sometimes Twitter Accounts About Sh*t Your Dad Says Get You TV Deals.  MG Seigler, TechCrunch

Things VCs Never Say . . .

Survey finds venture capitalists rely heavily on ‘gut feelings’.  Pepperdine University finance professor John Paglia, director of the new Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Study, said he was startled by one finding in its recent survey of financiers

StatShot: U.S. Web Users’ Time on Social Networks Has Tripled.  Nielsen reports 300% increase between August 2008 & 2009.

VCs: Enablers? Value Adders? Scourge of the Earth.  Lee Hower’s analysis of Vivek Wadwha’s controversial TechCrunch post.

Soviets Built a Doomsday Machine; It’s Still Alive.  A pretty chilling reminder that the Cold War isn’t quite over yet.

“Long Tail Effect” Doesn’t Work As Advertised, Say Wharton Researchers.  In short, the researchers say that the Long Tail effect described by Chris Anderson is much less important in the real world than popularly held.

Why I took the job instead of doing a startup.  Serial entrepreneur Tac Anderson explains his decision to join corporate America instead of doing one more startup.

There are some small signs that liquidity events in the tech market are beginning to return.  Don’t confuse this with the Internet bubble heydays of the late 90′s or the private equity cheap debt fueled boom of 2003 to 2007.  But even a few signs of liquidity after this long winter of discontent are welcome in today’s gruesome market. 

A bidding war between Accel-KKR and Vista Equity Partners has broken out over SumTotal Systems (SUMT) – the #1 player in the mature Human Capital Management marketplace.  SUMT is trading at <1X EV/Revenue and has <3% EBITDA.  Perhaps private equity firms are finding restructurable bargains in companies with strong market positions, similar to how the last private equity tech boom started.  Check out PEHub’s assessment here.  Vista’s bid has been subsequently topped by Accel-KKR. Update: On May 26 SUMT accepted a revised bid from Vista and paid Accel-KKR a $6.67M breakup fee.  Nothing like a good auction between a couple of private equity firms.

Cisco continues to pay significant premiums for acquired properties.  Cisco’s recent acquisitions of Tidal Software and Pure Digital generated 7.2x and 6.7x returns for their VC investors.  The deals were priced at 8.4x and 6.1x revenue multiples versus the typical 1.5x ttm revenue valuation most public software companies trade at today.  Cisco’s strategy ensures that Bay area VCs will continue to give them access to the best deals and technology to sustain Cisco’s meteoric growth rates.

The door to the tech IPO market has cracked open a little bit with the recent IPO of OpenTable.  OpenTable delivers reservation management software to restaurants through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues.  As TechCrunch’s Eric Schonfeld noted “This is an extremely healthy IPO. OpenTable is not a blowout Internet company. But it is a solid Internet company that matters. It pulled in $55.8 million in revenues last year and a net loss of $1 million (largely due to expansion-related costs). In the first quarter of 2009, it managed to turn a net profit of $366,000 on revenues of $16 million. (For a deeper financial analysis, see this earlier post).

Who says tech-related debt refi deals are dead?  Recently EasyLink Services International Corporation successfully refinanced the senior portion of their convertible debt.  Quarterly interest payments were reduced by over 70% and quarterly principal payments were reduced by almost 50%.  As a bonus the equity dilution posed by York Capital’s conversion options were significantly reduced which will eventually help lift ESIC’s share price. 

Technology roll ups start rolling again.  American Software (AMSWA) recently announced that it would acquire the remaining interests in its publicly traded subsidiary Logility (LGTY).  While on one hand it’s an admission that the spinout of Logility from AMS in 1997 has failed to deliver long term value.  On the other hand, the efficiencies that can be gained from eliminating the public company costs of Logility should bring some solid benefits to AMSWA.

Consider the following.  Here’s a Google SketchUp of what $10,000 looks like:

Here’s what $1 million looks like:

Here’s what $1 trillion looks like:

 Images like this help us understand the scale of the challenge we face.

I was pleased to see today; however, that one of SpatiallyRelevant’s other posts got some great feedback from Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing.  Steve is one of the real movers and shakers in the technology product management space and his praise does not come easy.

“For an entire product management primer in a single post, read Product Plagiarism: Answers are There if You Know How to Spin It by Jon Gatrell.

And if you want more, you can always check out my ebook, The Strategic Role of Product Management.”

Steve is one of the real movers and shakers in the technology product management space and his praise does not come easy.  If you have an interest in product management I would highly recommend that you check out SpatiallyRelevant’s post and subscribe to his RSS feed.

• Cool Story About a Dying Boy and His Tractor Parade
• Calvin & Hobbes Predict Today’s Bailout in 1994 
• Surviving the Drama of the Twitter Awards – WSJ.com -
• Law Firm Blunder Reveals Value Of Facebook Payout To ConnectU: $65 Million -

“Maybe Carvalho has it right when trying to find a person to help you with social media:

You need to find somebody (who) believes in the product, maybe somebody that’s an evangelist, and really help that person get the job done online,” Carvalho said. “You can’t expect a person (who) knows the tools to also be able to genuinely go into a community and ignite people to start talking.”

Maybe it isn’t about metrics, evangelism, references and case studies; perhaps the tastiness of one’s Kool-aid is all that matters to be an expert.

Gone to make some purplesaurus rex for micelf to prepare for SoCon09!”

So what color is your social media Kool-Aid?

• People Paying Good Money To Cheat Pointless Twitter Competition – TechCrunch
• Cerberus Capital Planning Staff Cuts Approaching 10% – WSJ.com -
• How to Profit From the Credit Crunch – WSJ.com -
• peHUB » Mid Market “Responsibility” vs. Large Market “Irresponsibility” -
• Seeing Both Sides: Why Do “Asshole VCs” Survive? -
• In 2009, Layoffs Is the Business to Be In — NY Times
• Presidential Limo: Presidential Gatling Gun-Equipped Suburban Badder Than New Cadillac Limo -

• Why Google Employees Quit – Techcrunch -
• Hedge Funds, Unhinged – NYTimes.com -
• 21st Century Excuses | Project Rethink -
• Pew Internet: Adults and Social Network Sites -
• Web 2.0 is so over. Welcome to Web 3.0 – Jan. 8, 2009 – CNN - 
• Brilliant move by Hyundai: Assurance a Brand Promise – Spatially Relevant
• Marketing: Social media’s hidden bubble | The Social – CNET News
• Identity: Identical Choices and Opposite Positions – Spatially Relevant
• Why Your Infant Needs GMail | Dad-o-Matic

• CEO Firings On the Rise As Downturn Gains Steam – WSJ.com -
• Tech Spending to Decline in ‘09 – Digits – WSJ.com -
• What Executives Can Learn From Obama’s BlackBerry Saga – John Baldoni -
• Wave of Bankruptcy Filings Expected From Retailers in Wake of Holidays – WSJ.com -
• Pfizer Plans to Lay Off Up to 800 Researchers – WSJ.com -
• The Satyam Truth: Outsourcers Don’t Work For You – Susan Cramm -
• Idea for a new magazine – to be named later « Searching for the Moon -
• The End of the Private Equity Party | Investing | Financial Articles & Investing News | TheStreet.com -
• 11 Habits of the Worst Boss I Ever Had – David Silverman -