ENTREPRENUER BREAKS
Breaking business barriers, on a Coffee Break.
Twenty-Two Billion For The Blueprint Drawer
Schneider Electric has agreed to buy PTC for $22.6bn in cash, which is the largest cheque the French group has ever written and the clearest statement yet of what the industrial giants think they are short of. PTC's shareholders took the news as a windfall and sent the stock up around 35 per cent. Schneider's own shareholders took it as a bill and marked their holding down. Both reactions are rational, and the gap between them is the whole...
The Shelf Life Of Patient Capital
YoLa Fresh raised roughly nine million dollars to fix the distance between a Moroccan farm and a Moroccan shop, and has now closed because it could not raise the next round. The product worked in the sense that mattered to customers. Produce moved, shopkeepers got stock, farmers got paid. What ran out was not demand. What ran out was the money that had been quietly doing two jobs at once. This is the structural trap of capital-intensive...
The Founder Takes The Corner Table
Twelve years is a long time to run anything, and an unusually long time to run a cybersecurity company, where the threat model is rewritten every eighteen months and the average chief executive tenure reflects that. Mickey Boodaei has stepped down from the top job at Transmit Security after that stretch and moved to chairman, handing day-to-day control to Matt Thompson, formerly president of Socure and a co-founder of ID.me. The successor's...
The Queue Before The Bell
DeepSeek is reported to be closing in on roughly $12 billion of new capital ahead of a listing, with Tencent and CATL among the names attached and the public offering pencilled in for 2027. The sum is enormous, the structure is ordinary, and the pattern is now so familiar that it barely registers as news. The money is arriving before the bell, and the people who will eventually buy the stock on an exchange are standing outside a door that the...
The Market Learns To Sip
US private equity deal value fell 14.1 percent in the third quarter, according to PitchBook, and the industry has responded with the particular calm of people who would like you to think this was the plan. Meanwhile an Andreessen Horowitz-led round put 870 million dollars into a single company, which is roughly the opposite behaviour, performed in the same quarter, by people reading the same spreadsheets. Both things are true. That is the...