Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Both Pwc/NVCA and Dow Jones VentureSource released their venture capital numbers over the weekend, reporting that we had either $950M in deals for the second quarter (according to PwC/NVCA) or $868.3M (according to Dow Jones). In both reports, Southern California was number 2 again nationally in terms of venture capital dollars put into the region. Silicon Valley still dominates, but the strength in Southern California was interesting because of what I think of as the biodiversity in Southern California’s tech sector. For example, if you look at the Dow Jones VentureSource numbers from this quarter, a huge reason So Cal topped New England again was activity in the clean technology sector (namely, a big investment in eSolar). That took energy from $15M in investments in Q1, to $204M in investments in Q2. On the other hand, Consumer Internet went from $44.6M in Q1, to only $8.25M in Q2, in the opposite direction. But, averaged across the many sectors in Southern California, we still had a healthy aggregate number of fundings. That ebb and flow in industries seems to be working in Southern California’s favor, where we’ve got enough different industries on different cycles, we’re not just pegged to one or two industries in terms of venture and other activity.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.