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Allen Latta Speaking at SuperReturn US West - Feb. 12-14 in San Francisco

1/25/2018

I am pleased to have been invited to speak at the SuperReturn US West conference being held on February 12-14 at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. Here's a link to the conference website: https://finance.knect365.com/superreturn-us-west/

I will be speaking on two panels. The first is an Emerging Managers Workshop, where we will discuss best practices for raising a fund. This workshop will be held on Monday, February 12 at 4:00 pm. The second panel will be on Emerging LPs in Venture and Tech, where we will discuss the LP environment for venture capital, tech and crowdfunding. This panel will be held on Tuesday, February 13 at 4:45 pm.

I hope to see you there!

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LP Corner: Private Equity Fund Performance - An Overview

1/20/2018

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This one of a series of posts on fund performance metrics. Other posts in this series include:

Introduction
How do LPs measure performance of a private equity fund? It’s not a simple as one would think. This post introduces a number of concepts, each of which will be discussed in more detail in future posts.

The following are the basic metrics used to evaluate fund performance:

Rate of return. This is also called internal rate of return, or IRR.
Multiples. These multiples include Total Value to Paid-in-Capital, Distributions to Paid-in-Capital, and Residual Value to Paid-in-Capital.
Relative performance. This is performance relative to comparable funds (also called quartile performance).
Public market equivalent performance. This is known as PME, and has a number of variants.

Each of the above performance metrics have positives and negatives.

To read more, please click on "Read More" to the right below.

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Some Thoughts on Spotify's Direct Listing

1/4/2018

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Stockholm-based music streaming service Spotify has confidentially filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") to undertake a direct listing of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE"). This is very intriguing to me, as when I was an investment banker I worked on traditional firm-commitment initial public offerings. I never worked on a direct listing of shares (probably because they are very rare and is there was little to no money to be made by the investment bankers.

Spotify is eschewing the traditional IPO approach where the company typically raises money by hiring an investment banking syndicate to sell shares in an IPO. In traditional IPOs, the investment bankers usually receive a fee of 7% of the price of the shares that are sold in the IPO. As a direct listing, Spotify is not raising capital - it is simply registering its securities that will trade on the NYSE. The trade-off here is that by not raising capital in an IPO, Spotify won't have to pay the standard 7% underwriter fee (note that this 7% commission is typically lower in very large IPOs).

To read more, please click "Read More" to the right below.

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The $100 Billion Venture Capital Bomb - II Article on Softbank's Vision Fund

1/2/2018

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I have been intrigued by Softbank's $97 billion Vision Fund, the largest corporate venture fund in history. The Vision Fund is making waves across the venture capital spectrum, with investments made or planned in companies such as Uber, WeWork, Roivant, Fanatics, Slack and Plenty. The article by Hazel Sheffiled for Institutional Investor titled "The $100 Billioon Venture Capital Bomb" is a very interesting exploration of the motivations for the fund by its founder, Softbank's Masayoshi Son. It's an interesting article, and worth a read.

Link: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b15ywfxthq1f16/the-$100-billion-venture-capital-bomb

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Allen Latta Speaking at SuperReturn US West - Feb. 12-14 in San Francisco

LP Corner: Private Equity Fund Performance - An Overview

Some Thoughts on Spotify's Direct Listing

The $100 Billion Venture Capital Bomb - II Article on Softbank's Vision Fund

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