Personality premiums

Few months ago, Paul had a fantastic post on personality premiums of US public companies. We did see quite a bit of that in the past few weeks:

• VMW plunged by more than 25% the day VMWare CEO Diane Green announced her departure.
• Yesterday, MOT jumped 11.5% on the news of Sanjay Jha, COO of Qualcomm, joining MOT as the head of headsets division as well as co-CEO
• On the same Sanjay Jha story, QCOM fell 4.7%

Quiz of the day

With IPO exits dried up for VC funded startups, it wont be too early to see this question in quizzes around the world. "When and which was the last venture backed tech startup to do an IPO exit?" The answer ofcourse is KPCB led digital secuity company ArcSight, which went public in early Feb, raising over $61.7M from the public markets. Almost six months without an IPO exit, the VCs must be feeling the pinch and I am sure this will reflect in the future VC investment activity.

Hilarious Carl Icahn-Jerry tussle

Hilarious account of Carl Icahn seeking Jerry's help in setting up his blog. Interesting quote from the above post:

On Wednesday Jerry dropped by my office, saying he was going to code my blog just like he coded Yahoo! in 1994: "By HTML in MS Notepad." He said the only downside would be I'd have to e-mail him every post, and it'd take him at least two hours to get it on the web. I said fine. The less time Jerry has to attempt to manage Yahoo!, the better it is for shareholder value.

Actually, the content is not far from reality - I am surprised why Yahoo doesn't have an established blogging platform yet. Here is the actual Carl Icahn's blog.

CDNS-MENT marriage good for LAVA

Today, Cadence (CDNS) went public with its' unsolicited offer to buy Mentor Graphics (MENT) for $16 a share valuing the 27 year old company at around $1.6 billion. Whether the acquisition would be good for CDNS/MENT shareholders is an issue to debate in a separate post, here's why I think this deal would be good for Magma Design (LAVA):

1. This further consolidates the already concentrated EDA market, which will help LAVA as it will be recognized as the third biggest EDA vendor.
2. Chip design companies already suffering because of low competition in the industry would be more inclined to keep LAVA in business - Would result in more business and dollars for LAVA.
3. It reduces competition for LAVA (and SNPS) in the Design Implementation space - MENT recently acquired Sierra Design to enter this market and if acquired by Cadence, the Sierra suite would overlap with Cadence's Design Implementation Platform, which would force the company to get rid of one of the tools, further benefiting LAVA.
4. Cadence does not have a very good history of integrating acquisitions - Going by its' history of past acquisitions, it may very well loose Mentor's strong foothold in the Physical Verification space, further benefiting Magma's suffering Mojave physical verification suite.


With the announcement, MENT is up over 23%, CDNS is down 6% and LAVA is up 6%.

Disclosure: Long LAVA

The height of inflation

Recently came across this restaurant bill in Zimbabwe. Seems pretty scary!
I am still wondering whether this was the agreed upon price at the time of ordering the meal or did the prices change over the course of the meal! (via bigpicture)

Rockin' at Holi Party

Had some real great fun at the holi party here at Wharton. Teamed up to form a band (named "Bandish") couple of days before the event and it turned out to be one of the memorable events of Wharton so far.. Here's one of the videos with me playing guitar:

Yahoo Video vs Yahoo Videos

With today's launch of a "new and improved" Video sharing service, Yahoo is re-entering the arena dominated by YouTube. What continues to amaze me is the sheer inconsistency Yahoo properties exhibit. With a newly launched Yahoo Video service, Yahoo still has its old Yahoo Videos service. This is how Yahoo Video looks like:
compared to the old Yahoo Videos (which still exists):

I am sure a lot of users will inadvertently go to Yahoo Videos to check out the new service, only to feel dejected and promising themselves to never try a newly improved Y! service. While I remain a big fan of certain Yahoo properties such as Yahoo Finance, I have reasons to blame Yahoo for causing it's own debacle. Here is my latest laundry list of Yahoo inconsistencies/limitations that piss me off at times:

1. On the above Yahoo Videos search page, if you click on "Web" to redirect to Yahoo Search, here's how the page looks like:

Look at how the Yahoo logo has changed from "Yahoo Search" in the top center to "Yahoo!" in the far right corner.

2. Most Yahoo properties still use the old styled red Yahoo logo (Look at Finance, Mail, Search etc.),while some of the new services are coming up with their new logos making it inconsistent. Look at Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Hotjobs to see the difference:

3. I like the new Yahoo Tech-Ticker, but why is that not a part of Yahoo Tech.
4. It continues to amaze me why Yahoo still doesn't have a blogging platform. Google last quarter made 34% of it's revenue from the Adsense program and Yahoo can add billions too to it's topline by providing a blogging platform and partnering with millions of publishers like us. What's stopping it from acquiring great platforms such as Typepad.

Updated: Sovereign Wealth funds investment

An up-to-date listing of Sovereign Wealth Funds investment from WSJ

Revolutionizing the way we absorb content

A friend of mine just launched his startup that promises to change the way we absorb content. Instead of reading blogs, the website offers service that will enable us to listen to blogs on laptops, iphones and other personal gadgets. Check out my feeds on the playlist displayed on the right.

2007: the year of Sovereign Wealth Funds

Happy New Year 2008!

Looking back, 2007 was the year of Sovereign Wealth Funds. With Investment banks still announcing massive write-downs owing to subprime mortgage crisis, Sovereign Wealth Funds did a great job in amassing significant stakes in major global investment banks. With investing over $20 billion alone in the fourth quarter of 2007 in western financial arms, the funds have scooped up stakes in Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Bear Stearns, Barclays, HSBC, Carlyle Group and Blackstone. Here's my compilation of the prominent deals done in later half of 2007:

Bank	Investment amount	Acquirer	%age Stake
Merrill Lynch	$4.4B	Temasek Holdings (Singapore)	9.90%
UBS	$9.75B	Govt. of Singapore Investment Corp.	9.00%
	$1.77B	Undisclosed Stategic Middle East investor	1.80%
Citi	$7.5B	Abu Dhabi Investment Authority	4.90%
Morgan Stanley	$5B	China Investment Corporation	9.90%
Bear Stearns	$1B each	Citic Securities (China)	-
Barclays	$3B	China Development Bank	3.10%
	$2B	Temasek Holdings (Singapore)	1.77%
Blackstone Group	$3B	China State Investment Company	10%
HSBC	Undisclosed	Dubai International Capital	Undisclosed
Carlyle Group	$1.35B	Mubadala Development Co. (Abu Dhabi)	7.50%