Peanut butter manifesto scribe seeking to raise $150M venture fund?

April 21, 2009 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

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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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • stone
    this guy has "zero" chance of raising any amount of money. go accomplish something significant, first, before trying to leapfrog normal hurdles.
  • To the extent they can raise the money, I think today's a great time to start a VC firm since will have no existing portfolio companies to maintain until the IPO or M&A windows open and there are likely a lot of opportunities to make investments at ground floor valuations compared to investments made just two years ago. I don't know whether these guys can execute, but if they can raise the money and place it wisely, the firm's timing couldn't be better.
  • Alex
    I agree with stone..
  • The man who fails to respond to reporters' inquiries has only himself to blame when the reporter doesn't get the story right.