Paul Maunders | Web log

In February of this year we invested in a startup called Furnish.co.uk, and I’m pleased to say that as of yesterday they have now gone live with their sleek new website.

Furnish.co.uk, as it’s name suggests, is a new way to find and buy luxury home furniture online. The site acts as a shop window for [...]

Since the summer of 2008, we’ve invested in a number of start-up companies. We’ve been looking for businesses that compliment our own, and specifically where we could leverage our existing assets and benefit from the economies of scale. As I’ve mentioned before, we look for people with a unique idea, who are prepared to work [...]

Once you’ve found a limited company to invest in, the next step is to complete the legal work required. So what’s involved? Generally the process is as follows (where company refers to the company receiving investment):

Agree the terms of investment, and make a contract / shareholders agreement based on this.
Check through the company’s Articles and [...]

With all the bankruptcies and job losses of recent months, and as we watch sterling slide against all major currencies, you’d be forgiven for thinking that UK plc is heading for the economic scrap heap. And in many ways it is – just look at our total government and personal debt, and the predicted budget [...]

Part of our strategy at Fubra is to invest a portion of our cash in business start-ups. In this post, I’m going to give you a few inside “secrets” as to our thinking when companies approach us for funding. If, after reading this, you think we sound like a good match then you should get [...]

There is an interesting article in this week’s Economist, All you need is cash, which talks about the new rush by businesses to accumulate cash in contrast to the massive leveraging that has taken place over the past few years. Of course, not all companies took on huge loans to expand, and the ones who [...]

Although I’m fundamentally a capitalist, and a strong believer in the power of free markets to allocate capital effectively, I’m not an absolute market libertarian. So whilst I’m convinced that an economy based on competition and creative destruction is far more able to generate productivity growth and technological advance than one that’s centrally planned, I [...]

OK so this is old news now, but it just dawned on me how much Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) paid for a bit of the Facebook pie. First, let’s put things into perspective:

Investor
Site
Unique visitors(GigaOM Sep 2007)
Traffic GrowthOn previous month
PurchasePrice

News Corp
MySpace
68,449,000
+0.1%
$580 million

Google
YouTube
47,486,000
+5.8%
$1.65 billion

Microsoft
Facebook
30,601,000
-9.3%
$15 billion ($240 million for 1.6%)

These figures are from Comscore, and I believe they cover [...]