Privately held social network Facebook just saw its prices go higher. Digital Sky Technologies has announced it will pay $14.77 a share for an additional stake in the social network, bumping its total position in the company to up to 3.5%. If this deal is completed, it would imply a total value of $6.5 billion – down about one-third from Digital Sky's last investment in Facebook.
Even the $6.5 billion a share value is optimistic. Investors have pushed the value to below $5 billion in private secondary market transactions over the past few weeks. Nonetheless, the relatively new company is still valued well above major technology and media heavyweights, including CBS (NYSE: CBS) with a $4.06 billion market cap and SalesForce.com (NYSE: CRM) at a $4.72 billion market cap.
After the dot-com implosion, there was much talk about the death of the venture capital (VC) industry. And, while there was some pain, many firms survived. But the death may have only been delayed.
Human resources can be kind of boring (except when there are lawsuits). And it is often an area that is largely neglected in terms of the budget. Yet this is not stopping venture capitalists from investing in the space.
When
This week, I had a chance to talk to Michael Braun, a veteran of the tech world. Back in 1981, he helped to launch the original 