Mayfield Fund doesn't think so. The firm, once considered the peer of the biggest names in venture capital, has raised a $395 fund and says it did so within its anticipated timeline and amidst high demand.
In February, when we last took a look at Mayfield, Kevin Fong, a partner and once considered one of its brightest stars, was departing, and the team was engaged in a conscious changing of the guard. It has hired a series of younger partners. At the time, we noted that since hitting a few home runs in the dot-com days, Mayfield had fallen on less-than-spectacular times and hadn't in a long time seen the kind of exit that gets a firm compared to the likes of Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark.
But despite a slightly faded rep, the firm has maintained a strong position and has been able to invest in a handful of promising start-ups. Among them are Facebook app maker, Slide, which recently raised $50 million at a reported $550 million valuation, Rubicon Project, an ad optimization company that's been raising capital fast, and Gigya, the widget distributor that pulled in $9.5 million back in March.
Mayfield said it will invest its new fund in a variety of sectors (enterprise, consumer, service provider, semiconductor and cleantech sectors), and that it will do so in seed, early and growth-stage companies. Moreover, it will invest in "cross-border global" companies, defined as companies that target markets other than their local one. This broadening of focus matches the creep seen at many other firms, so this isn't surprising.
And what of the epic events unfolding on Wall Street? In a letter to VentureBeat, the Mayfield team said that "while the current financial climate is challenging, it is still a good time to be a venture capitalist," and that "great entrepreneurs...are forming companies against a backdrop of widespread Internet usage among consumers, enterprise customers and service providers."
Whether that widespread internet usage will turn Web 2.0 into major cash anytime soon is the billion dollar question.
