Peanut butter manifesto scribe seeking to raise $150M venture fund?
Update: Brad Garlinghouse has gotten in touch and given us his new email address, which has SilverLake Partners in the domain name, implying he has some sort of job at that private equity firm. He wouldn’t comment on his exact position. He did say the article below is inaccurate, but wouldn’t elaborate much. This may suggest any such plans to raise a fund may have been put off. He wouldn’t comment on whether he’d worked with Rolnick to raise a fund. Also, apologies to Brad for not trying to reach him directly. We’d originally reached out twice to Rolnick for comment, assuming they were a pair, and because a past effort to reach out to Garlinghouse had gone unanswered.
The last thing anyone in their right mind would do these days, you’d think, would be to try to create a new venture capital firm.
The list of the walking dead venture firms is growing, because the sector has performed terribly in recent years, and the economic downturn promises to make things tougher. But we’re hearing Brad Garlinghouse, the Yahoo executive who wrote the much-discussed “Peanut butter Manifesto” more than two years ago, is seeking to raise $150 million for a new firm called Spring Ventures.
Garlinghouse’s memo, you’ll recall, was an internal warning to Yahoo that it had lost its focus, spreading its efforts across too many fronts — like a thin layer of peanut butter, that in the end wasn’t doing anything effectively. Let’s hope that Garlinghouse (right, in image above) has a focus for his new fund. Earlier in his career, he was a VC at @Ventures, a firm that ended up not doing that well. Somewhat strangely, we’re hearing that he’s hooking up with Michael Rolnick (left), the former partner of ComVentures, the firm that fell apart when several partners left to form Velocity Interactive Group. Rolnick was awkwardly left out of that effort. We tried contacting the two for comment, but didn’t hear back.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
