Oregonstartups.com Blog

According to CNET,

After years of heated debate and lobbying, the Patent Reform Act of 2007, which passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and was scheduled for a Senate vote this session, has been taken off the Senate’s calendar. It can be revived, but its momentum has effectively fizzled.

Apparently, the Senate has better things to do with its time.

John Cook’s Venture Blog has a May 15 posting that links to a Google video interview with Seattle several entrepreneurs. Some lessons learned:

Fund raising is you other full time job
Avoid venture financing for as long as you can
We never would have been able to sell out for $10 million if we’d taken a large VC round

John Cook’s VC Notebook reported last week that OVP is working on investments in two Seattle-area digital media companies and two others in clean tech. That’s a shift from OVP’s historical focus on digital biology, computer networking and security. Check out the full article for an overview of OVP’s focus today.

The Portland Business Journal reported earlier this week that Portland-area startup iMove closed a $4.2 million venture capital investment. Oxantium Ventures, a new Washington DC based fund, was the lead investor.

Each month we feature a new chapter from Mark Paul’s book Entreprenreneur’s Survival Guide.  This month: learn how to keep product development costs down and increase the odds of success for any project.  Read it now.

In an entertaining but also insightful blog post, In Over Your Head – The Life of an Entrepreneur, Jeff Bussgang talks (from a position of experience) about being in over-your-head as the CEO of a startup.

In a recent blog post, Marc Andressen argues for dual-class stock structures for public companies:

A dual-class stock structure means that a company has two different classes of common stock. Each class of stock has the same economic ownership of the company, yet different voting rights.

In a typical scenario, Class A shares have a single vote per share, whereas Class B shares have 10 votes per share, for any shareholder vote.

Using this mechanism, for example, the Class B shareholders might only own 20% of the company in economic terms but have a clear majority voting position relative to the Class A shareholders.

Although he used to be a believer in single-class stock, Andreessen lists a number of reasons why dual-class stock is in fact a good thing. Most of them have to do with the factors that cause companies to do the wrong thing for long-term success because of the pressures imposed on management by the stock market itself. His summary comment:

The huge advantage of a dual-class stock structure is that it lets the company’s core management simply ignore most of this stuff and stay focused on the long-term goal.

A VentureBeat article this week listed some of the latest statistics for Cleantech VC investments. A sampling:

VCs invested $2.2 billion in Cleantech in 2007 (45% growth)

Solar investments grew by 133% to almost $600 million

Wind investment grew by more than 10x to $115 million

A very interesting article in Techjournal South starts with the early history of venture capital, takes it through the bubble, and comments on current trends. Along the way, there is a lot of information about how the venture capital industry works.

A Portland Business Journal article today featured Bend-based PV Powered, which makes inverters for solar cells (inverters convert the DC current that comes out of solar cells to the AC current that residential and commercial users need). The article lists a few industry statistics:

“Over the most recent years, VC (Venture Capital) has been flowing into these companies at an incredible rate,”, said Mark Bachman, an equity analyst with Portland-based Pacific Crest Securities. “It’s enabled the industry to grow and reach technological innovation quicker than we’ve done in the past.”

Clean-energy investment increased from $55 billion in 2006 to $77.3 billion in 2007, according to the latest report from Clean Edge, which has offices in Portland and San Francisco.

The solar industry is now a $20.3 billion business, according to Clean Edge, and could grow to $74 billion by 2017.