We love what we do, so ClearCreek writes and publishes pieces for a somewhat irregular blog about emerging companies and the capital markets. Or we did for a while anyway, then we did less, and apparently we stopped entirely. But we kept the old posts below. Any errors are ours exclusively while the occasional sharp insight is probably borrowed. We hope you find them of interest, and we always welcome feedback.
As the new year slipped into memory, two transactions may provide the footnote on the hyped expectations that accompanied the last decade. First is Friendster. The pioneer social networking company and Facebook’s predecessor, Friendster had lost virtually all of its US market share…
Read MoreSOPA – federal legislation that would either protect or constrain content on the internet, depending on your corner – was recently killed thanks in no small part to the entrepreneurial online community. But the best post we saw on the issue talked less about legislation and more about business models…
Read MoreIn 2006, after a sudden shift in the outcomes of a promising drug, Pfizer’s market cap plummeted by $21 billion in a week. Stories like this are common in the pharmaceutical industry, only this one was different…
Read MoreThe roughly $2 billion deal between Facebook and Goldman Sachs is so chock-rich of material it will surely spawn a series of longer pieces once it has settled into historical view. To begin,..
Read MoreFunding options and pathways for early-stage companies are changing – more rapidly now than at any time in the past quarter century. We’ve detailed many of the changes individually…
Read MoreThe crises at Penn State threatens to eclipse the college football bowl season, but at least one writer identified a source of shame in college athletics far before anyone could pronounce Sandusky,…
Read MoreF. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote “there are no second acts in American lives.” But there might also be no second acts for second lives. Most of us are taught not to dwell on failure…
Read MoreThe espionage field has always been portrayed as having special access to great technology, so it was somewhat of a surprise to find the newest consumer of the great time vortex known as the Twitterverse: none other than the Central Intelligence Agency…
Read MoreThis month’s list of the five best blogs includes: Josh Kopelman on the increased speed of revenue traction in early stage companies; five lessons on scaling from CEO’s who have done just that…
Read MoreThat Twitter is an impressive distribution network for breaking news is increasingly a given; however its sheer ubiquity for the immediacy of big events is now also leading to some intriguing analyses about the patterns and speed…
Read MoreWhile the impact of the 2008 financial crises on Wall Street has been both well documented and seemingly short-lived, there was considerable collateral damage. A recent article in The Economist suggests that law firms also suffered…
Read MoreAlthough an unabashed, unapologetic believer in the inherent virtues of both capitalism and entrepreneurial culture to drive economic growth and raise overall living standards,…
Read MoreVenture deals in 1Q of 2011 were big money… but they were also small volume: PwC’s MoneyTree report shows 736 deals (a decrease of 6.5% from 1Q 2010) with a value of almost…
Read MoreThis month’s list of the five best blogs includes: James Surowiecki on the NFL’s Labor Dispute; Felix Salmon on Grouponomics; a piece asking if America’s brightest minds are being…
Read MoreWhat if the USA were a business? Not a novel concept, but trust Mary Meeker to take the idea a little further than simple metaphor. Meeker, internet research queen before joining the venture firm
Read MoreFor the vast majority of its history (as captured in this 2007 article), music service Pandora was on the brink of shutting its doors. Sheer perseverance, a tapdance in business models, the easing of regulatory and litigation risk…
Read MoreThere were two companion pieces recently published by venture capitalists: why VC returns are going up (WSJ) and investing at the bottom of the VC cycle (NYT). Both of these pieces look at the amount of money committed to venture firms in 2010…
Read MoreA recent piece in the McKinsey Quarterly makes a simple, if maternal, point: technology results in information overload and attention fragmentation, and the more responsibility one has
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