Impact investors face a startup market that has few acquisitions, fewer IPOs, and is filled with entrepreneurs who liken selling their companies to selling out. How can investors earn a reasonable/market-rate return given these realities? This webinar will share a series of alternative investment structures used to create a return on investment without a traditional exit.
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Other people, see things and . . . say ‘Why?’ . . . But I dream things that never were– and I say: ‘Why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw This has shown in my 30+ year career repeatedly. Most recently a few months ago, when pondering the “Missing Middle” of capital for startups in general, and SMEs in Africa specifically. Why? Why is it taking so long for...
Venture capital funds often tout cash-on-cash returns of 2x-3x over 10 years. That is the supposed “norm” for successful funds. But despite the industry being tracked investment by investment in detail, the industry as a whole is notoriously opaque when it comes to the returns of the funds. Thank you to Dan Gray (@credistick) who tweeted the following table, with data from 1981...
Is every investee at Africa Eats and Africa Trees an SME? Are they all small. Are any big enough to be medium? Did the biggest grow beyond SME status last year? Where are the edges to these categories? There is no global authority to answer those questions, but the EU does have a definition that they’ve not only published, but have updated at least once. The boundaries between...
Why did New York need another stock exchange in 1968? Why was the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, and Pacific Stock Exchange insufficient? An unprecedented bull market coupled with paper-based systems. I’m in my 50’s and don’t remember “Wall Street” not having both the NYSE and NASDAQ as the two main exchanges. I am old enough to remember the AMEX...
Ars Technia published a lovely history of the changes in market leadership in computers, tables, and smartphones. My takeaway is another reminder of how much more difficult foresight is than hindsight. Especially when I was reading the prospectus to the Apple IPO, where the risks were about the TRS-80, Atari 400, Commodore PET, and other competitors of the day. We all think of Apple today as a...
