Entrepreneurial

– Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. He is the author of “Mastering the VC Game”. This article originally appeared on his blog www.seeingbothsides.com. The views expressed are his own. –

I almost never agree with a single thing written on the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. Yet, I found myself muttering “amen” a few times as I read this morning’s editorial on “Whatever Happened to IPOs?”. It’s just stunning to me how little interest there seems to be on the part of a supposedly pro-business Congress and (more recently) Executive Branch on this one simple thing that would unleash innovation and jobs – watering down Sarbanes-Oxley.

The IPO market has improved somewhat in 2011 and so perhaps that has taken some pressure off, but the fact is that the regulations and costs associated with an IPO are so overwhelmingly daunting for our young venture-backed companies that they simply avoid them altogether. I used to hear from investment bankers that a company north of $100 million in revenue and consistently profitable can find a welcome public audience. But recent conversations that I have had with bankers has carried a different, even more depressing message.

I am now being told by investment bankers that if a company’s revenue is less than $200 million and the projected market capitalization less than $1 billion, they are at risk of being relegated into the “public company ghetto” – a sad corner of the public markets where you have no analyst coverage, no float and so no liquidity. Your stock simply drifts down and down without any institutional support. And so even $50-100 million companies in our portfolio and others – growing profitably and creating real value – look at the IPO as an unattainable goal. I profiled a number of companies in New York and Massachusetts that fit this criteria in response to Bill Gurley’s excellent piece (IPO Anxiety) from a Silicon Valley perspective a few months ago. But when I talk to CEOs and board members at these companies, they roll their eyes at the IPO prospect – it feels simply too unattainable.

Some complain that the source of the problem is the lack of mid-tier investment banks. Others complain that the lack of analyst coverage is the issue. In both cases, it’s a cause-and-effect problem. The cause is Sarbanes-Oxley and the lack of volume. The effect is that bankers and analysts follow the money. If the rules were more relaxed, there would be more bankers and analysts, for sure. This is the Information Age – analysis and bankers will follow opportunities. They may not be as well known, but banks like Jeffries & Co, Needham & Co, GCA Savvian and now BMO are aggressively courting companies to help them go public and would be all over a more robust market for companies in the $300-600 million market capitalization range.

– Matthew Romaine is Co-Founder and CTO of myGengo, a crowd-sourced translation platform launched from Tokyo, Japan. Born in Boston to an American father and Japanese mother, Matt has lived in Tokyo for a total of 17 years. The views expressed are his own. –

As I write this entry traveling 200 kilometers per hour (124 miles per hour) on a bullet train bound for Tokyo, I’m anxiously curious to catch up with my colleagues in person. One returns from Hong Kong today, another from Taiwan. A third is returning from a remote island south of Kobe, and three are making plans to return from Melbourne. Just last week we were all in the same room focused – or at least attempting to focus – on growing our crowd-sourced translation platform myGengo, from Tokyo.

We are a startup that gathers translators from around the world, qualifies them, then unleashes a sea of bite-size content – from emails, tweets, and iPhone app descriptions – for translators to work through. Users enjoy the convenience; translators like the work-flexibility. Our team is small and international, representing 8 nationalities, and our system relies on a stellar 2,000-member strong translator pool from every timezone.

Continuing its push to provide small companies with resources necessary for growth, the Obama Administration on Tuesday is hosting an all-day conference in Washington designed to decode the difficult process of raising capital.

Replete with heavy hitters, the speakers include Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner; SBA Administrator Karen Mills; Scott Case, co-founder of Priceline and head of the government’s newly formed entrepreneurship advocacy group StartUp America Partnership; and Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric and chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The conference — “Access to Capital: Fostering Growth and Innovation for Small Companies” — aims to explore methods of securing investment at each stage of expansion, from the early stages through IPO or buyout.

– Stephanie Rabiner is a contributor to FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –

The immigration debate continues: Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar have reintroduced a startup visa bill into Congress.

The bill, which has been modified since it first burst onto the scene last year, is designed to encourage partnerships between U.S. investors and immigrants in a way that benefits the national economy. The Senators hope that the StartUp Visa Act will attract innovation and innovators to the country, creating jobs and propelling the United States back to the top in the realm of technological development.

– Stephanie Rabiner is a contributor to FindLaw’s Free Enterprise blog. FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –

March Madness is here and ready to distract your employees. They will be filling out brackets this week, crumpling them up, picking No. 5 seeds for upsets.

And they’ll be gambling the whole time, too.

You may have let it slide during the Super Bowl, but with office pools cropping up everywhere, you’re probably wondering whether you have a legal obligation to shut them down.

Carbon Day Automotive, a distributor of electric vehicle charging stations in the Midwest, said interest in its products has been rising along with the high price of gas at the pump. The problem is automakers aren’t keeping pace by delivering enough cars.

“The Midwest has been overlooked,” said Brian Levin, Carbon Day vice president and partner. “We’re definitely the chicken before the egg.”

Cars like the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf are being rolled out initially in more concentrated urban areas such as the coastal regions. That’s because the cars have a limited range that make them somewhat inconvenient in areas where consumers tend to travel longer distances, said John O’Dell, editor of Edmund Green Car Advisor, which tracks the industry.

– Connie Loizos is a contributor to pe HUB, a Thomson Reuters publication. This story originally appeared here. –

How hot is the New York tech scene? Maybe a little too hot, suggests Owen Davis, managing director of NYC Seed, a three-year old seed fund that provides up to $200,000 to New York startups via a partnership with the New York City Investment Fund, the New York City Economic Development Corp, and other local organizations.

Davis said seed rounds are up 50 percent from where they were a couple of years ago, and that valuations are up as much as 30 percent over the last year. “A startup says we want an X amount for our valuation, and all it needs is to get a few people to say yes to it. Then it can say to everyone else, ‘Look, this is what the market is supporting.’”

– Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. He is the author of “Mastering the VC Game”. This article originally appeared on his blog www.seeingbothsides.com. The views expressed are his own. –

I had the pleasure of teaching a new case at Harvard Business School recently on Foursquare that I co-authored with professors Tom Eisenmann and Mikolaj Piskorski as part of Tom’s new course “Launching Technology Ventures“.

Foursquare executives Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and Evan Cohen were kind enough to allow us to interview them in preparation for the case, which framed some of their current key strategic issues and looked back on the choices they made in the early days to draw pedagogical lessons of lean startup best practices, building a platform business, network effects and running monetization experiments.

– Joanna Glasner is a contributor to pe HUB, a Thomson Reuters publication. This post originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own. –

There may or may not be a bubble in Internet startup valuations. But one thing in which there is definitely a bubble is in talk by journalists, investors and anyone else looking to raise their online profile through constant punditry about bubbles.

A recent Google News keyword search for instances of “Internet” and “bubble” unearthed 960 links. Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are bubbles, said one. Is Yelp: the dot com bubble part deux? asked another. One more asked: Is Twitter the harbinger of the second bubble?

– Melanie Attia is the product marketing manager for Campaigner email marketing. The views expressed are her own. –

In business, there are fads and there are trends. While fads help pay the bills in the short-term, a good small business understands the longer-term viability of its products and services that will be for sale in the seasons to come.

The same holds true for marketing. It’s essential for growth and these days marketing trends continue to shift from offline to online programs.