Creating New Jobs and Value With Private Equity (ATKEARNEY)

"Forget what you might have heard about Private Equity (PE). Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that PE destroys companies and employment. In fact, the latest statistics reveal that PE accelerates the growth of jobs and generates value. Is it time for traditional firms to reconsider their strategies? Yes. Because every firm can enhance value creation and reach new levels of excellence.

PE has gotten a bad rap. The common misperception about PE is that investors overzealously focus on maximizing short-term returns and thereby eliminate jobs or break up organizations to sell off their various parts. On the contrary, instead of downsizing and exploiting organizations, PE investors often create a significant number of new jobs—one million over the past four years in Europe and 600,000 in the United States. And PE-financed firms, on average, generate employment at a much faster pace than comparable, traditionally financed firms."

Student-Run Private Equity Fund Featured on PEBlogger.com

UNC's student-run private equity fund was recently featured on PrivateEquityBlogger.com.

The Kenan-Flagler Private Equity Fund is a student-run fund with more than $1.3 million of committed capital under management. The fund launched in 2007 and is the first and only student-run fund associated with a leading US business school that seeks to provide real returns to its limited partners. Four second-year MBA students, Ray DeLaughter, Zac Frost, Michael Kopeikin, and Virat Mehta, and two BSBA students, Allen Mask and Swathi Putcha, manage the fund.

For more information on the fund, visit their website.

UNC Wins 2009 VCIC Competition!

A team from UNC Kenan-Flagler won first place April 18 in the international finals of the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC). Oxford Said Business School won second place. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management won third place.

UNC Kenan-Flagler founded VCIC in 1998, to create a new type of venture capital event for business schools. Unlike other business plan competitions in which students pitch their own ideas to investors, in VCIC students play the role of the investors, and real entrepreneurs pitch to them. VCIC began as an event for MBAs to learn about venture funding. It has become a marketplace for entrepreneurs seeking investors and a training ground for future venture capitalists. About 25 percent of participants go on to raise venture capital after gaining experience in VCIC. At the finals, two of five go on to get funding.

The UNC Kenan-Flagler team that won included: Tom Birchard (MBA ’09), Lewelyn D'souza (MBA ’09), Andrew Pearson (MBA ’09), Diana Selezeanu (MBA ’09) and Elin Szymanowski (MBA ’09). The UNC Kenan-Flagler team won the Southeast regional competition to make it to the finals. In that competition, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business won second place.

For more information on VCIC, visit http://www.vcic.unc.edu/

Learn through examples at LearnVC.com

A new web-site is now available, LearnVC.com, dedicated to educating entrepreneurs, future investors and students. The site provides guides, interactive examples of the core concepts, and a capitalization table to ease users through the steep learning curve of early stage financing.

Learning Venture Capital

This web-site is dedicated to learning about Venture Capital and Private Equity, especially for MBA students wishing to enter the industry for the first time. On the left side you have resources, and on the right there are a variety of great blogs. I would recommend stepping through the blogs, find those that you like and read them regularily. As a MBA student, the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) is also an incredibly valuable learning experience that is only available to MBA students at participating schools. Comments are welcome.

Welcome your feedback, thanks for your votes

I'm glad the feedback regarding our changes was positive. We'll update this web-site (at least the links) regularily to still cover the variety of sources of our learnings to date. Thanks again for your feedback, and please include your comments as you see fit.

Major Changes to our Blog

Those familiar with this blog will have noticed a major change. Instead of posting our thoughts on happenings in the VC community, we're trying a different approach. We've gathered the resources that we've used to learn about the Venture Capital industry in one single location. VC blogs shown below are the blogs we've learned from most recently. These feeds will be updated automatically. Additionally, other related learning resources are now captured to the left. Please vote (located at bottom left of blog) to let us know what you think.