snewe

Impressive data on the history of debates within the Federal Reserve Board.

It is a bit misleading to label all private equity as "massively leveraged." None of the major investors in "unicorns" of VC use leverage (e.g. Uber https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/investors). In fact, the typical VC fund is legally barred from using leverage in their investments.

The buyout side of the PE market is leveraged, however, the investments in those investors' portfolios typically have big balance sheets to support the debt loads (and the interest payments).

Perhaps Mac users are wealthier than the average Windows user? I am not so sure about the Linux differential. It would be interesting to see the differences conditional on income.

Many of these actions are a consequence of the tax code: non-profit institutions such as universities can borrow for capital projects at the municipal rate and invest at the market rate (the latter is usually higher than the former). Most university have ample endowment for these capital "improvements," but this quirk of the tax code effectively subsidized a bit too much of it.

Blog spam? Original story: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120803VL204.html

One might argue they didn't invest -- or the company said no! -- for the same reason corporate VC is sometimes frowned upon. Taking capital from corporations with related products can scare future partners or customers. Moreover, why sell equity if you can simply sell pre-orders?

Here's an academic article on the pay for entrepreneurs backed by VCs:

http://www.stanford.edu/~rehall/HallWoodward6.pdf

High average returns driven by huge exits and most entrepreneurs earn 0.

You have to believe that the (huge) growth rate is perpetual. Most firms do not grow faster than US GDP growth in the long-run.

An API for the raw data that underlies this system would be extremely useful to academics. Databases like compustat and execucomp are expensive and lack some of the most interesting details in SEC documents. I have worked on trying to extract deep information in footnotes in financial statements (e.g. foreign cash holdings and option exercise tax shields) and found even Turk/Crowdflower couldn't handle the complexity. If they can figure out an algorithm to pull out such data, they will have both a great academic and private sector product.

Awesome, sounds like you automated and crowd-sourced quality control. Will definitely check it out.

Sounds interesting. Similar to Crowdflower, but with less management on the user end. Crowdflower provides "gold tests" that help filter out mistakes and makes it my go-to source for Turk tasks with a bit too much complexity. Of course, that means I have to manage questions, gold tests and review results. The value proposition here is thus quite appealing. Suppose we wanted to grab information from historic form D's:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/03/9999999997-03-0208...

These older forms lack consistency and would probably require lengthy instructions for data extraction. How do you do quality control?

Ah, you are right, it's 'max'!

To be precise, the cost of repatriation is min[(35% - foreign tax),0].

Not mentioned: Google makes about 1/2 its revenues abroad and that cash is costly to bring back to the US (tax laws). So borrowing money in the US could bring their available US cash balance up to the "optimal" level.

See pg. 21 of their 10-Q:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125111...

Download link: http://qsapp.com/download.php

Great idea, but if you don't use instagram (i.e. share your photos with the world) there is one alternative that I could find in 5 minutes of Googling: shoot it!

http://www.shootit.com/

They appears to send it from the nearest country you are in.

Thinking about this a bit more, Mark Cuban is essentially arguing that recent VC investments are equivalent to the activity that takes place on Second Market and others like it. If that was so, Twitter, Zynga and Facebook would have to buy all those servers and pay their employees out of profits. Of course, most of these VC-backed firms aren't profitable, so VC money must be going to the firm.

Mark Cuban's statement is only true if the VC financings are simply a buyout of previous investors. Many of Facebook's recent financings were capital injections + buyouts of founder and early VC shares. I don't believe this is the norm. Simply, VCs at round t-1 typically participate in round s > t and if they don't, future investors will not buy them out. If they did, it would simply mean that none of the money going to firms like Twitter and Zynga is used for investment.

Important caveat:

"I’m not kidding when I say that I spent probably more than 24 total hours in the past three weeks having a blast on this thing creating itineraries, checking mileage, and figuring out where the heck I could go without going over the limit."

Now that is one area the academic literature on venture capital and entrepreneurship hasn't studied: the social networks of entrepreneurs and bargaining power. Putting that on my list.

Perhaps the ycfounders list is a selected sample: it produces or selects above-average quality founders that are more likely to get a good Series A price (in terms of both control and pre$). I suspect that YCombinator's focus on founders for investment decisions also results in start-ups with assets closely tied to the individuals who run things (rather than say a patent). This leaves future VCs with less bargaining power when forming boards.

Publication lags -- sometimes 3-4 years in economics/finance -- make the news feed they built less useful. If instead they built the feed around http://ssrn.com or http://ideas.repec.org, it could have value for fields where publication occurs after a paper has its impact.