Benchmark Capital Scores With Instagram, Demandforce and IPOs

The hits keep coming for Benchmark Capital.
Following Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram earlier this month, the venture firm scored again today after Intuit agreed to buy e-mail marketer Demandforce for $423.5 million. Benchmark, the Silicon Valley firm that gained fame from its early investment in EBay, was the biggest institutional investor in Instagram and Demandforce.




It’s not just acquisitions. Benchmark owns a $56 million stake in software maker Proofpoint, which sold shares to the public last week, marking the firm’s fifth IPO in the past 13 months. Adding in the others — Yelp, Servicesource, Zillow and Zipcar — Benchmark owns about $500 million of stock in newly-public companies.
Like any venture firm, Benchmark has had its share of duds. It famously invested in Friendster, the social-networking site that beat Facebook to the market only to get trounced by the now $100 billion juggernaut. The firm also bought a stake in solar panel maker Nanosolar, which is struggling to compete with low-cost Asian manufacturers.
For obvious reasons, the partners prefer to talk about what’s working. Bill Gurley, a 13-year veteran at Benchmark, sounded off on the public market wins at a conference on April 4 in Menlo Park. He said the firm is having its best run in the IPO market in more than a decade.
“It’s becoming acceptable and interesting again for entrepreneurs to be public,” he said. “We’ve had a long period where there was almost a complete lack of interest in being public.”
And with the dollars being shelled out for Instagram and Demandforce, he’ll take that too.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Euro gains on ECB; stocks up with economic data

The iPhone Almost Had a Physical Keyboard [REPORT]

Barack Obama pledges to 'finish the job' in Afghanistan