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Metro Link Wants To Be Shown The Money
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I saw this article today in Linuxgram. It talks about how Linux Global Partners apparently has left Metro Link, one of its investments, high and dry. Wonder if this will affect Ximian or Gnucash." Metro Link, it turns out, has been doing pretty well in the meantime, but hasn't seen much of the $5 million dollars it expected from LGP, and as a result has been investigating other partners. The LGP portfolio lists Metro Link, but looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.
hmm.. LGP always used to mean leather goddesses of phobos
It's another market casualty, unfortunately. I shut down my own venture company (which is not to be confused with LGP) a while back, due to the investment climate.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
while historical data shows it as always regressing towards a value of 50% of the GDP
Historically a US company's market was almost all domestic. That is not true any more. A large US company often has 50% of it's revenue offshore.
Correcting for offshore economic activity and the 50 year average of 70% puts the current GDP/valuation at no more than 10% above historic norms.
Is this hyperbole, or is MetroLink responsible in some basic way for XFree86 and X.org?
Well, in terms of politics, they did donate the modular X architecture used in XFree86 4.0, which really cleaned up XF86s design and made closed source drivers possible (while some might not appreciate this, a lot pf people do).
In terms of technical brilliance, while Metro X currently lack some of the newer (currently nonstandard) X extensions that XF86 have developed, their X server does do a fine job of raw X performance versus the free competition, in nonpartial benchmarks.
Its a give and take relationship. I'm not saying Xfree86 doesn't rock, because they do. But so does MetroX.
until you have the check and its cleared in your account, you don't have an investor. Its a tough market out there and not everything is going to fly, as much as they might deserve to.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
A former customer of mine had that problem. They did the bridge loan (small investment to cover you between investment rounds), and got a decent piece of the company for cheap money. About 2 weeks later, the company closed on a much larger round at a higher valuation (as a bridge, the went in at the previous valuation), and the investment was looking good.
Unfortunately, they also chose a poor VC, and the VCs couldn't raise the money when one of the groups involved dropped out. The company that the client had invested in laid off 80% of its staff and was looking to sell its technology.
It's a shame. Slimy VCs screw a lot of businesses.
How did they the uneducated public "really screw things up?" They invested in things that looked promising (the internet,) and got burned when the profit models were exposed as bad ideas (by the lack of profits.) So what got screwed up? The markets continue to buy and sell stock.
I've a bunch of friends that bought Amazon or whatever, and complain to me on phone about the current price. My response is almost always the same: "why did you buy it? what was your reasoning as to why it's going to worth more five years from now?"
As we get back to having financial markets run by people who understand them and who are competent to decide which companies deserve investment, we'll see some real, solid prosperity again -- no mirage, but real creation of real wealth -- for the first time since the 1980's.
Well, there are two issues here: financial markets are "run" by providers of liquidity: they buy and sell in short term, hopefully pocketing enough spread to stay in business. The poeple deciding that companies deserve investment tend to have longer horizons: the day-to-day market moves don't affect their decisions. Companies live or die based on profits, not what the market is doing.
This ain't a crapshoot guys... do the math: look at capitalization, earnings, and sales. Avoid money-pits, buy real, underpriced businesses.
Free software doesn't pay...... Now, before you mod me as troll, think for a minute. If you're giving something away, and expecting to make it back in support, that might sound decent at first. However, I see several inherent flaws in this. A: It discourages functional product design. After all, if it's so easy to use, who needs support or expensive docs? B: It's target: Linux users, probably the most, as a whole, talented group of O/S users. Again, that's gonna hurt your support. C: It won't fly with coporate America. The suits see things only in terms of money. No cost = No value. Just ponder those points for a bit....
TODO: Something witty here...
We've had a few years where the uneducated public got into the stock market and really screwed things up.
I half agree with you here, there are members of the unwashed masses who got into the stock market and made very wise decisions, picking good stocks while they were low and sat on them, while avoiding to IPO rush. On the other hand there are the Day Traders, these are the people who tried to cash in on IPO's and make money on minute changes in the stock market, these people got what they deserved. It is an interesting stastic I read some time ago in Time Magazine, they said that 90% of Day Traders loose money, and the same 90% would have made money in 1999, if they had sat on the stocks they had in January all the way through December.
no mirage, but real creation of real wealth -- for the first time since the 1980's.
Maybe the 80's aren't such a good example, in the 90's we had Day Traders, but in the 80's we had Junk Bonds. Ever hear about the Savings and Loan bailout, that cost tax payers a few billion dollars. The only real fact about wealth which is not a mirage is the old saying "The Rich get richer and Poor get poorer". By its very nature money flows towards those who know how to get it and keep it (The Rich) and away from those who do not (The Poor). This fact has not changed regardless of which party is power or who the President is throughout the world and throughout history.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power - Benito Mussoli