Year: 2013

A Can’t Lose Deal… “Public” Venture Capital

After the debacle that was Solyndra, we hoped that “public” venture capital would die a much deserved death. Alas, we once again underestimated the arrogance and self-professed intellectual superiority of the bureaucrats! Well we, cynics of “public” venture capital (aka government sponsored business), should hide in shame. We obviously didn’t

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What comes after Marbles?

When I was a young child, like millions of kids before me, marbles enveloped my life. They were “The in thing”, desirable, a medium of exchange or barter, yet close to completely worthless in terms of intrinsic value. I remember the various shapes, sizes and colours. The little glass balls

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Coming – Phase II of the Mongolian Boom!

Since this blog is pretty much a running commentary of our “exploits”, today I decided to post up an email conversation I had with our colleague Harris Kupperman. I took a few liberties with editing, but only slightly so that it would make sense to you, dear readers. By now

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Conquering the Indonesian (and Mongolian) Frontier

I caught up recently with Ranjeet Sundher in Singapore to go over his latest projects and thought it would be worthwhile introducing him to you. I really like Ranjeet because he’s a nuts and bolts entrepreneur, the type of guy who is adaptive enough, smart enough and flexible enough to

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One Night Stand or Long Term Plan?

Far from the maddening crowds, Mark and I sit here on the edge of a primitive rainforest, overlooking a coral reef thousands of miles from the nearest industrialized continent. Not a bad spot to ponder life, our investments, and of course our personal projects, one of which is the reason

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How Traffic Jams Can Lead Us to Profit

The evolution of the Western shopper is well documented… Gone are the small local outlets from which our previous generation shopped. Modern adolescents now spend their waking hours roving shopping malls while glued to smart phones. I wrote an article on the topic of virtual crack a while back, it

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Venture Capital in Cambodia?

Frontier market venture capital and private equity is a unique niche. Therefore, when I first met Christophe Forsinetti, co-founder of DEVENCO, I knew I had to invite him to speak at our Cambodia Meet Up. His presentation was well received.   A little background… A relatively young Cambodian Frenchman, Christophe

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Investing in White Gold!

China circa 2008… six babies die from severe kidney damage while another 300,000 suffer kidney stones. As it turns out, melamine isn’t meant to be in infant milk formula! The result was a few Chinese businessmen taken out back and shot, literally… and a nation that, for good reason, doesn’t

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