Venture briefs – 10th birthday for ‘dot-com bubble’ peak; ‘Startup Bus’ teams entrepreneurs for ideas; Carried interest debate is back; Weebly adds theme site creation tool

Posted Mar. 10, 2010 at 1:55 p.m.

Venture briefs – 10th birthday for ‘dot-com bubble’ peak; ‘Startup Bus’ teams entrepreneurs for ideas; Carried interest debate is back; Weebly adds theme site creation tool

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Highlights from various sources about the latest news in venture capital:

• “Dot com” bubble peaked a decade ago

Joanna Glasner, writing at PE Hub, notes Wednesday as the 10th birthday of the “dot com” bubble that drove Nasdaq to its record high of 5,132.52.

Wow, 10 years? Doesn’t it seem like yesterday?

Given the current economic nightmare, don’t you long for a return to the past even more despite the fact the dot com and telecom bubbles both eventually burst?

“I looked at historical prices for a few then-and-now comparisons. On March 10, 2000, shares of JDS Uniphase were selling for $276 (it’s now $11.60). Yahoo was $178 (now around $16.50). And InfoSpace was going for $245 (now around $12). There were 287 venture-backed IPOs that year, which raised a total of $25.6 billion, according to Thomson Reuters,” Glasner writes.

What’s your portfolio worth today?

• “Startup Bus” – a road trip for business ideas

A bus load of “tech geeks” are traveling to the “South By Southwest” tech and music show in Austin, Texas aboard the{{a href=”external_link-2”}} “Startup Bus,”{{/a}} Venture Capital dispatch from the Wall Street Journal reports.

Teams of entrepreneurs are focused on coming up with ideas for five startups before the bus completes the trek from San Francisco on Thursday.

In Austin, the teams will present ideas to an incubator group known as the Capital Factory.

({{a href=”external_link-3”}}For details, read here.{{/a}]

• PE Hub: Carried interest debate won’t die

Daniel Primack, a frequent visitor to the Triangle, says the tax debate involving venture capital firms and how their management fees should be classified for taxation purposes, is back – and he still wants change.

“For the repeated record: I favor a change to carried interest tax treatment. So do a lot of VC and PE pros, although very few are willing to discuss it on the record,” Primack wrote Tuesday and in comments distributed by e-mail Wednesday.

“Carried interest is a fee for service, pure and simple. Capital gains treatment was designed to stimulate investment, by giving additional upside to those who put their capital at risk (not for those who help manage that capital),” he adds.

({{a href=”external_link-4”}}For details, read here.{{/a}}

• Web site builder Weebly offers theme capability

VentureBeat reports that Web site builder Weebly is offering users and third-party designers to create themes for selection by its 3.5 million users.

“Not only can anyone submit a theme to the Weebly listing now (as long as it is approved), users can rate and comment on themes, provide feedback to their creators, and vote up the most popular selections,” writes Camille Ricketts. “In this way, Weebly’s theme catalog will be similar to Firefox’s listing of applications and personas, making it easier for others to sort and decide between them.”

For details, read here.

Tags: Venture & Innovation