Sometimes, if you keep plugging away, you can pull something off — even if its daunting during the low points along the way.
Two years ago, we wrote about San Francisco’s Yipes, which provides “managed ethernet services” for corporate customers. At the time, it was raising yet another $24 million more in venture capital. The funding cycles seemed endless. Launched in 1998, it had gone through bankruptcy had raised a whopping $385 million — a seeming impossible amount to generate a profit from. One more symbol of the excess of the Bubble.
We called the company “Yikes.”
Today we learn the company has just been acquired for $300 million by Reliance Communications. Groups like NEA, Focus and Sprout kept investing in the company through the years and probably didn’t make much, if anything. But newcomer Crosslink Capital, which led the turnaround beginning 2005, has apparently done very well — because it’s stake wasn’t watered down by the restructuring, and it held a major chunk of the company. At least someone is a winner in the saga.
3 Comments
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Zaid said:
You should dig up more on Reliance. It is part of India’s Reliance Corp. that recently went through a split following sibling feuds. These are the same guys often credited for India’s mobile phone revolution. Now they are gearing up to bring true broadband to Indian home and go head to head with India’s VSNL which has so far maintained a crappy monopoly refusing to release bandwidth.
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jj said:
have you seen valuation calculations, or are you merely assuming Crosslink remained undiluted?
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Padma Lakshmi said:
Hey!…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Thursday .
