Of Snipers and Virgins

I wonder how long the Middle East War analogy can carry me into the PEHUB universe. BTW, how do you pronounce peHUB? PEE-HUB? PEE-WEE-HUB? Judging from the responses to my virgin steps onto the blogosphere, I think that’s probably pretty close.

I’ve been tracking recent military developments in Iraq to learn that, in addition to the virgin-seeking suicide bombers I referenced in my first posting, a relatively new opponent has surfaced by way of judicious snipers cornering American troups as they advance into urban areas of Iraq.

That’s how i felt when my glorious first-day-in-the-blogosphere was assailed by a couple of peHUB snipers. Like in Iraq, their identity was concealed so even a well-armed and trained infantryman couldn’t easily see the source of well aimed fireshots. I was particularly amused by the sniper whose identity was listed only as “Poor Taste” anID presumably fabricated only for this response unless the assailant plans of moving forward in the shadows with this moniker in future. I’m hoping for both his sake and the future of PEHUB that theID will change, if only to help increase the “registered user” count on the site. Soon Dan will need to count *unique* users in his daily body count.

Holding the high ground, I thought mostly about the reader whose suggestion that a lack of concrete counter-evidence to the poor market conditions cited by what I described as venture capital suicide bombers would better qualify me for service in the Bush White House than in making VC prognostications. To this I say: “That is a fair point!” In the service of bringing some hard data to the discussion, I collected the following list of acquisitions of venture-backed companies made by Cisco over the last approximately 3 years. The list follows.

After the name of each lucky aquiree is the amount of the transaction as disclosed in industry sources.

Perfigo, $74M; Protego Networks, $65M; NetSift, $30M; Okena, $154M; Airespace, $450M; Metreos, $28M; Audium, $4M; Latitude Comm., $80M; Topspin, $250M; Arroyo Video, $92M; Actona Technologies, $82M; FineGround Networks, $70M; P-Cube, $200M; Roverhead Networks, $39M; Sheer Networks, $97M; Sheer Networks, $97M; Orative, $31M; DynamicSoft, $55M; Parc Technologies, $9M; Procket Networks, $89M

I offer this list as a mere sampling of the post-bubble M&A environment for venture-backed deals and posit that making money is in fact possible once expectations (and cap tables) are adjusted to the new market reality. One can repeat this exercise with a dozen other buyers without even getting to Google, the acquirer du jour. We can lament the end of the (IPO) world as we know it but we shouldn’t. BTW, anyone care to guess in what order these Cisco deals are listed?