Courtesy Tableau Software

An example of Tableau’s chart-making ability, a Web Traffic Trends Dashboard.

For New Enterprise Associates, its investment return on Tableau Software was — fittingly — off the charts.

NEA’s $29.2 million stake in the digital chart provider, which made its stock market debut today, was valued at more than $925 million at mid-day, making the firm the top venture capital winner so far this year.

As any Silicon Valley pundit knows, the vast majority of venture capital bets fail. What makes the business work — and turns Ford drivers into Ferrari speedsters — is the very rare 3,000 percent gain on an investment, like the return NEA has thus far achieved on Tableau.

NEA first backed Tableau in 2004, a year after the company was founded, gaining two board seats and providing $5 million to “expand sales operations and invest in product development,” according to a statement at the time. NEA put in another $10 million in 2008 and $14.2 million in 2010.

Original post is Chart This: NEA’s Investment Return on Tableau — 3,000% by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Frank May/dpa/Corbis

Twitter’s IPO has been a source of speculation, but co-founder Jack Dorsey says it’s not on the company executives’ minds.

Twitter’s initial public offering could be the biggest for a consumer web company since Facebook. But executives have so far declined to say when it might happen, and co-founder Jack Dorsey said the company is “not even thinking about it” right now.

“A lot of people think of this as a goal you have to get to but it’s a milestone,” he said on a bench outside a Manhattan café. “If you think about it as a goal you’re rushing towards it and then stop, and that’s not the way to build a timeless company.”

Twitter was valued at about $9 billion after early employees sold $80 million in shares to a fund managed by BlackRock Inc., three people with knowledge of the matter said earlier this year. Twitter expects to generate at least $1 billion in sales in 2014, two people familiar said in June.

It’s been almost a year since the May 17 market debut of Facebook, which has lost about a third of its value since. Dorsey said there are lessons to be learned from that IPO and those of LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and Yelp.

But ”it’s going to be different for every single company,” he said.

Original post is Twitter Co-Founder Dorsey ‘Not Even Thinking’ About IPO by Tech Deals.

Photographer: Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg

The logo for SFR, a mobile-phone unit of Vivendi SA, sits on a giant display screen at one of the company’s stores in Paris, France.

In its unlikely transformation from a regional water utility into Europe’s biggest telecom and media conglomerate, Vivendi has ridden a lot of corporate trends. It may be on the verge of adding another to the list: the spinoff. Vivendi is considering getting rid of its biggest unit, French mobile provider SFR, according to people familiar with the situation. That would let it focus on faster-growing media businesses like Canal Plus, its pay-TV arm, and Universal Music Group (home to the likes of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber).

If this all sounds familiar to Vivendi-watchers, that’s because it is. A year ago, the company started exploring a break-up, with telecom assets (increasingly out of fashion as smartphone penetration plateaus) on one side, and zippier media properties on the other. After boardroom infighting that led to the ouster of then-Chief Executive Officer Jean-Bernard Levy, the plan was shelved in favor of seeking buyers for assets like GVT, a Brazilian broadband provider, and Activision Blizzard, which publishes blockbuster video games like “Call of Duty.”

Problem is, Vivendi hasn’t managed to find a taker for either at a price it’s willing to accept, so it’s back to square one. Splitting off SFR has obvious appeal. Vivendi could load the slow-growing but reasonably profitable phone group with most of its debt, leaving the media side almost debt-free. And doing so would put an end to a corporate structure that investors have always found a bit odd. But given last year’s misfires, they shouldn’t expect any immediate change.

Original post is Vivendi Goes Back to Future With SFR Spinoff Plan by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Tom Hawkins

Matt Mickiewicz left 99designs to start DeveloperAuction, an online marketplace that matches engineers and employers.

As co-founder of web startup 99designs, Matt Mickiewicz relied on 30 recruiters to find engineering talent for his company in the hyper-competitive market of San Francisco. Results were so poor that when one finally got a prospect hired, the recruiter sent 99designs a box of Krispy Kreme donuts as a way to say thanks.

It came with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars.

Frustrated by the inefficiency of the hiring process, Mickiewicz left 99designs a year ago to start Developer Auction, an online marketplace that matches engineers and employers. Since starting the service in August, the company has signed on 400 companies and helped facilitate $225 million in job offers.

To keep growing the 13-person startup, Developer Auction announced today that it raised $2.7 million in a venture financing led by New Enterprise Associates and Sierra Ventures. Crosslink Capital, Google Ventures, SoftTech VC and Step Partners also contributed.

“We’re disintermediating recruiters and agencies and allowing companies to compete for talent on equal footing,” said Mickiewicz, 29, who co-founded the company in San Francisco with web entrepreneurs Douglas Feirstein and Allan Grant.

Developer Auction picks 150 candidates every month — out of  thousands of job seekers signing up on its site — to engage in a two-week auction process with employers. Companies get to look at the profiles and submit interview requests to those they like along with compensation information. Engineers can choose to accept the interview and, if there’s a match, an offer is extended.

For successful placements, employers pay Developer Auction 15 percent of the new hire’s first year of salary, and the service then gives 20 percent of that fee to the employee as a signing bonus. In its first year, the company is on track to record millions of dollars in revenue, Mickiewicz said.

In addition to competing with traditional recruiters, Developer Auction is  taking on LinkedIn, which has more than 200 million members. According to Mickiewicz, demand for programming talent is so great in the Bay Area that any engineer with a Stanford degree in computer science and some experience at Google or Facebook is inundated on a daily basis with LinkedIn messages from recruiters. He equated that approach to hiring as spamming, and Mickiewicz avoided using the professional-networking site when he tried to fill positions at 99designs.

He’s now hiring through his own site, competing for talent with his customers. Of the five engineers at Developer Auction, three were hired using the service, Mickiewicz said.

Other companies turning to Developer Auction include Groupon, Lookout, RichRelevance and AdRoll. And, somewhat ironically, news-reading service Pulse is also a client. That’s the startup LinkedIn is reportedly buying for up to $100 million, according to AllThingsD, citing people familiar with the matter.

Hani Durzy, a spokesman for LinkedIn, declined to comment.

Original post is How Donuts Gave Rise to Site Where Employers Can Bid on Engineers by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Scott Halleran/Getty Images

Tiger Woods plays a bunker shot during the WGC-Cadillac Championship last week in Doral, Florida.

As if there weren’t enough sources of celebrity gossips, Trace Sports, whose TV shows cover the private lives of stars from golf legend Tiger Woods to hoops wizard LeBron James, has its eyes on the U.S. even as it’s working on a new reality series where women compete to marry a European soccer player.

The Paris-based channel is already beamed into 30 million homes in 90 countries and soon TV watchers in the Land of the Free will satisfy their thirst for items on the hottest rugby players, athletes not yet married and what’s going on behind the scenes during the National Basketball Association’s trip to Milan.

The 18-month-old pay-TV channel, which aims to do for sports what E! Entertainment did for Hollywood, is part of a portfolio of channels owned by parent TRACE, which includes pop music station Trace Urban and Latin-inspired music channel Trace Tropical, where Shakira can be found shaking her hips.

In a TV market where competition for sports rights is soaring, and companies like BT Group, the U.K.’s former monopoly phone provider, are paying hundreds of millions of pounds to show English Premier League soccer matches, Trace Sports plays a complementary role, Laurent Dumeau, the CEO of Trace Sports, said at a gathering of European cable TV executives last week in London.

“With sports rights increasing so quickly, this is a way we can monetize them more rapidly,” said Dumeau, who’s also the former chief financial officer for NBC Universal in France.

Trace Sports has a deal with ESPN to send a production crew to the X Games in Tignes, France, this year for behind-the-scenes looks at nightlife, parties and how the stars are unwinding after a day of extreme sports.

Clearly, TMZ faces stiff competition.

Original post is Tiger Woods Behave! Trace Sports TV Aims Its Lens at U.S. Shores by Tech Deals.

That’s according to a March 5 report from Carlos Kirjner, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. Kirjner estimates that AWS is worth $24 billion, or $52 per Amazon share, on a standalone basis, after generating $1.8 billion in sales last year. Based on Kirjner’s research, AWS accounts for 19 percent of Amazon’s value even though it made up just 2.9 percent of 2012 revenue. Amazon doesn’t break out AWS’s financials, leaving analysts to their own devices. Macquarie Securities wrote in January that sales last year reached $2.1 billion and will climb to $3.8 billion in 2013.

As highlighted in a Bloomberg Businessweek story this week, AWS is staying ahead of competitors such as Google and Microsoft with offerings like Spot Instances that dramatically bring down the price of computing capacity.

“We believe Amazon will continue to cut AWS prices to pass along technology-driven efficiency gains to its customers,” Kirjner wrote.

The business is just getting going. Kirjner predicts that AWS revenue will top $10 billion in 2016 and double that in 2020. Those kinds of projections are spawning an ecosystem, with startups emerging to sell services on top of AWS. One such example is Newvem, an Israeli company that provides analytics to AWS customers, helping them maximize their utilization and manage governance and risk issues involved with operating in the cloud.

Zev Laderman, a former Oracle executive and veteran of tech startups, founded Newvem in 2010 to take advantage of the shift to the cloud. Backed by $4 million from investors including Greylock Partners and Index Ventures, Newvem is now providing data services to companies spending anywhere from $2,000 to $2 million a month on AWS. Eventually, Laderman expects to do the same for customers of Google. And he’ll know when the time is right, because Eric Schmidt, chairman of the search giant, is one of his investors.

“We started with AWS because they’re the king of the block,” Laderman said. “The real vendor that can give Amazon a run for their money is Google.”

Original post is What If Amazon Web Services Were a Standalone Business? It’d Be Big by Tech Deals.

Presenting at the Deutsche Bank media conference in Palm Beach, Florida, Bewkes was asked about reports that one of his divisions, Time Inc., has entered into merger negotiations with magazine publisher Meredith Corp.

Bewkes responded, “The press is very active,” and followed that up by saying, “Who knows if they know what they’re talking about.”

For the record, Time Inc. publication Fortune Magazine broke the news about those merger discussions.

Who said print is dead?

Original post is Time Warner Boss Wonders If Press Knows What They’re Talking About — Including His Own Reporters by Tech Deals.

Now he’s hired a chief financial officer to help prepare the company for the next stage of growth: a possible initial public offering.

Ned Sizer was named YouSendIt’s CFO.

Ned Sizer, a former finance executive at Ancestry.com, is joining YouSendIt as CFO, Garlinghouse said in an interview this week. Sizer previously joined two startups as they prepared for IPOs — Omniture, which went public in 2006, and Silver Spring Networks, which has scheduled its IPO for March. He sees a similar opportunity for YouSendIt.

“I bring a lot to the table around capital markets, IPOs and acquisitions, because I’ve been in the Valley,” Sizer, 47, said in an interview. YouSendIt is “an undervalued asset with the right team in place.”

Most of that leadership team has joined since the arrival of Garlinghouse, a veteran of AOL and Yahoo who has poached former colleagues to fill his management bench. Eric van Miltenburg, senior vice president of interational, business and corporate development, and Matte Scheinker, chief product officer, are both Yahoo alums. Communications chief Kiersten Hollars and human resources head Lynne Collins worked with Garlinghouse at AOL. These managers, along with marketing chief Mike Trigg, all joined YouSendIt in the past year.

Garlinghouse said YouSendIt will benefit from the experience his deputies have in building and marketing consumer Web applications as he attempts to create easier-to-use tools for businesses. Of the 40 million customers who use the site’s tools for storing and managing data, about 60 percent are businesses, he said.

“We started life as a consumer-centric tool to help you send files and now we have Fortune 100 customers,” Garlinghouse said. Offering simple software that works as easily as an online app “will be a critical success component to any company going after the enterprise market.”

The CEO has more changes in store. He plans to relocate the company’s 200-plus employees from their current headquarters in Campbell, California, to an office that’s closer to San Francisco and easier for commuters to access. And sometime this year, he’ll christen the company with a new name — YouSendIt sounds too much like a consumer file-sharing product, he said.

While Garlinghouse sees an IPO as a strong possibility, he’s learned a lesson from technology startups in recent years that have gone public too soon.

“We as an industry have witnessed companies that might have gone public prematurely,” Garlinghouse said. “We are going to learn from that and be in a better and stronger position to deliver for our current investors and future investors.”

Original post is YouSendIt Hires Finance Chief With IPO Track Record by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Kelly Ryerson

The lawsuit is the latest flare-up in what’s become an increasingly acrimonious relationship over affiliate fees.

Why can’t we be friends?

You may have read yesterday that Cablevision is suing Viacom for forcing it to take lower-rated channels along with its most popular networks, a practice the pay-TV company claims is illegal.

Cable operators and networks weren’t always so adversarial. After all, they’re in a mutually beneficial business. Every cable subscriber means money not only for the operators, but for the networks as well.

That’s the way the business works: If you sign up for Cablevision’s cable TV service, you’re now also a customer, indirectly, of Viacom. For each subscriber Cablevision signs up to watch Viacom’s cable networks, it pays the media company an affiliate fee.

So even though you pay your cable bill to Cablevision, some of that money is also flowing to Viacom if you get channels such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. And, yes, money also flows to Viacom for its less popular channels such as VH1 Soul, MTV Hits and Nicktoons.

SNL Kagan

Basic cable network affiliate fee revenue

Cablevision’s lawsuit is the latest fissure in what’s become an increasingly acrimonious relationship over affiliate fees, which have gone through the roof. Programming fees are set to rise at least 10 percent this year for the largest pay-TV operators, Comcast and DirecTV. Companies like Cablevision won’t raise prices on their customers that fast because they fear subscribers will cancel their service.

Of course, Viacom loses, too, when cable-TV subscribers quit. But Viacom can still make money from those who cut the cord through over-the-top options, such as Netflix and Amazon, which stream content over the Internet.

This leaves Cablevision in a tough spot. To make up the difference from customers who cancel video service, the cable operator will need to keep raising prices on its Internet service. Cablevision already announced it was raising broadband prices in 2013 by $5 a month per customer. But more price increases won’t easily make up the $88 dollars an average customer pays per month for Cablevision’s video service, according to Telsey Advisory Group.

So what happened? What caused affiliate fees to skyrocket and push pay-TV operators to the brink?

Retransmission consent fees: The 1992 United States Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act allowed broadcasters to ask for money from pay-TV operators in exchange for carrying their programming. This meant that CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox could start charging for their local affiliates, owned by companies like Gannett and Sinclair Broadcast Group, and national networks. These channels used to be free. In 2012, they cost pay-TV operators $2.4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. If operators are now paying billions for retrans fees, their belts become a little tighter with all of the other cable networks in the industry.

Sports became cable’s glue: Whether it’s “Monday Night Football” or your local baseball team, you’re paying big bucks to watch sports on TV. Contracts for sports rights have jumped in price as demand to watch games remains high and live events become essential for why people need cable at all (instead of an online-only option like Netflix). That’s led ESPN, the top-rated sports network, to charge about $6 a month per subscriber, according to Kagan. Regional sports networks typically charge a few bucks per month, too. It’s caused DirecTV, Verizon FiOS and Cablevision to introduce additional monthly fees to customers in recent months to absorb the costs.

Cable programming improved: The most popular drama on TV right now is AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” That’s for all television — broadcast included. Guess what that’s going to prompt AMC Networks to do when its next rights contract is ready for renewal? It’ll charge your cable provider more, and your cable bill will rise. AMC is going to want to be compensated for shows that cost more to make and generate big ratings. Does it matter that AMC Networks also owns lower-rated networks such as IFC and WE TV, and Sundance Channel, which isn’t rated at all by Nielsen? Not if AMC can bundle those networks with its flagship station. They’ll get paid for them, too. And that’s what the Cablevision lawsuit is all about.

There are other reasons the relationship isn’t what it used to be:

• The introduction of online competition made content less exclusive.
• Programmers demanding additional payment for online rights lead to slow progress on what’s known as TV Everywhere.
• Diminished household formation from the recession meant fewer new homes with cable connections, which put pressure on operators’ profit margins.
• Cable TV has become a low-growth, mature industry.

But it’s the rising cost of cable TV that may transform the industry. Cablevision’s lawsuit can be seen as an attempt to slow down what could eventually lead to a huge drop in profit for pay-TV operators — and low-rated cable networks — everywhere.

Original post is Cablevision’s Viacom Lawsuit: How We Got Here by Tech Deals.

Original post is Draper University Gets Aspiring Entrepreneurs Out of the Classroom by Tech Deals.