Finance Geek

Yahoo! Finance: The Daily Ticker. What Will $1.50 Get You At Starbucks? Plenty, Says CEO Howard Schultz. Onward: CEO Howard Schultz on How Starbucks Got Its Groove Back …

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Yahoo! Finance to Ring the NASDAQ Stock Market Closing Bell … Yahoo! Finance launched a new original Web show, Breakout, (http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker …

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In The Great Depression Ahead, author and economic forecaster Harry Dent makes the case for why the worst isn’t behind us, despite the economy’s recovery and the stock market’s revival. In a nutshell, Dent’s grim forecast comes down to the “deadly Ds”: Debt, Deleveraging and Demographics. “We have to go through the detox process of [...]

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The Associated Press News Registry has implemented support for Mozilla’s Do Not Track header across 800 news sites, which see more than 175 million unique visitors every month.

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Sixteenth in a series of weekly posts by myself and Nicholas Lovell of Gamesbrief which answer the fifty questions you should ask before raising venture capital.  We expect the series to run for a year after which we will collate the posts into a book.  You can find the rationale behind the series here, and the list of questions here.  We welcome your comments on any and every aspect of what we are doing.

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One of the big trends in startup financing is that value is being created earlier in the life of a company and the VCs who want to invest before the value inflexion point increasingly need to evaluate companies that have yet to generate meaningful revenues, and therefore before the strength of the product has been validated by customers to any great extent.  In this situation we evaluate the product in the following ways:

• Detailed look at the limited customer data available, maybe from an alpha or beta release, or free trial.  75% of new product launches fail and many VCs find it hard to invest without at least this minimal level of customer validation of the product.  (The major exception being when they have previously backed the founder.)
  • How customers are using the product.
  • The benefits they get from it.
  • What they say about it.
• View a product demo and compare it with other competing products.  Application speed, user interface, ease of use, and fit with existing practices are the things I look for.  Product demos are increasingly common in first pitches.
• Analysis of the feature set compared with the competition and the customer requirement.
• Solicit the view of trusted experts – typically these will be members of the VCs extended network who have knowledge of the startup’s market and they will opine on multiple areas of the business, including product.  This includes discussion with prospective customers.
• Online research – what do people say on Twitter, Quora, blogs, etc.? have any analysts commented on the company or its competition?
• Assessment of the product management function.  The key things to look for are experience, passion for the product, understanding of the customer problem (many of the best products are built by founders because they themselves needed the product and would have been customers and hence have an intimate understanding of the requirements), and the extent to which the organisation obsesses about having great product.  The younger a company is the more focus there should be on product.
• Assessment of the likely profitability of the product – particularly its gross margin potential.

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The disaster playbook is a well-thumbed document these days as investors try to make money in the wake of the disaster in northern Japan. The typical sequence of events in any disaster begins with sheer panic, followed by predictions of utter chaos, spooking financial markets and causing prices to plummet.
Eventually the panic subsides and it becomes clear that the impact on the global economy is slight. The playbook tells the investor to buy while there’s blood on the floor and profit from the market’s overreaction.
The evidence to support the playbook is strong. The man-made…

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Five years after the housing market peaked, conditions are not improving in most areas. The latest data shows housing prices are still down and housing sales are sluggish. New home sales hit a record low in February and the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index suffered it’s sixth-consecutive price slump in January. Unfortunately, the halcyon years of [...]

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The first quarter comes to a close today with major averages at or near multi-year highs. Expect “substantial” further gains for stocks before a “major top” occurs in late summer, says noted forecaster Harry Dent, founder of HS Dent and The Dent Method. The good news, for those long, is Dent predicts the Dow will [...]

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How’s this for the pot calling the kettle black? Microsoft has made an official complaint to the European Commission, claiming that Google is behaving in an anti-competitive way when it comes to search. Namely, their acquisition of YouTube back in 2006 meant that competing search engines were restricted from ’properly accessing it for their search results.’

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WASHINGTON–A House subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce holds hearings Thursday on labor union transparency and accountability.
The central question that the Education and Workforce Subcommittee seeks to answer is: how much information do union officials have to disclose to their rank-and-file about union finances?
The Republican-controlled subcommittee is holding the hearing because the Obama Labor Department, under Secretary Hilda Solis, seeks to loosen the financial disclosure requirements put in place during the Bush administration. As a witness at the…

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Google has chosen Kansas City, Kansas. as its testbed for its project of putting in ultrafast net connections, an effort designed to prod the nation’s ISPs to speed the net up for citizens.

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If you buy into the energy speech President Obama delivered on Wednesday, it sure sounds like we’re headed for drill, drill, drill. It would be a total reversal of policy. I guess $100-plus oil and near $4 gas at the pump — along with a consumer economic-political revolt — will do that to you.
After bashing oil and gas companies for a couple of years and instituting a virtual drilling moratorium, President Obama now says yes to offshore oil and makes a big pitch for natural gas. There may even be incentives for faster leasing and smaller royalty payments to the government.
Is it…

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More than 60 million customers visit Starbucks each week. So, it should come as no surprise that most people seem to have an opinion about the company or its coffee. The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task sat down with Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz to ask him your questions submitted to us via Facebook. Watch [...]

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In the new memoir Idea Man, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen makes some eyebrow-raising charges against his childhood friend and former business partner Bill Gates. Among other things, Allen accuses Gates of “scheming to rip me off” by trying to dilute Allen’s stake in the software pioneer.

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Do corporations pay enough taxes? Is America too business friendly or not friendly enough? The issue has been hotly debated here and elsewhere this week after a NY Times story claimed GE didn’t pay taxes last year — a claim GE hotly contested. While the truth is somewhere in the middle (see Henry Blodget’s coverage [...]

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