World Investor: 2014

4.28.2014

Africa's Richest Woman Plans To Increase Stake in Unitel

Africa’s richest woman, Isabel dos Santos, plans to increase her stake in Unitel, Angola’s largest mobile phone company.
According to a report by Portuguese newspaper, Publico, dos Santos (who already owns 25% of Unitel) and the other Angolan shareholders of the firm, which include Angola’s national oil company Sonangol, recently sent a letter to Portugal Telecom informing them that they plan to exercise their right to buy the Portuguese company’s shares in the Angolan mobile telecom giant. Portugal Telecom owns 25% of the Angolan mobile network, Unitel, held via a holding company called PT Internacional.
In October last year, Oi SA, Brazil’s biggest phone company, agreed to merge with Portugal Telecom to create a behemoth trans-Atlantic carrier, but in the letter dos Santos and other Angolan shareholders sent to Portugal Telecom, they claim that PT Internacional violated a shareholders’ agreement in the process of signing a merger agreement with Oi , and argued that they have a right of first refusal to acquire PT’s stake in the event of a change in ownership, and that the company’s merger with Brazil’s Oi triggers that clause. Portuguese bank BPI recently valued PT’s stake in Unitel at 930 million Euros ($1.3 billion).

Isabel Dos Santos

“The merger indirectly implies a change in Unitel’s shareholder structure as the final controlling shareholder of PTI will no longer PT SGPS and will become Oi and CorpCo,” the letter read.
Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s president, was profiled by Forbes in 2013 in a piece titled “Daddy’s Girl: How an African ‘Princess’ Banked $3 billion in a Country Living on $2 a day. We now peg her fortune at $4 billion, earned largely from lucrative stakes in telecoms (Unitel), financial services (Banco BIC), media (Zon Optimus) and oil firm (Gap Energia) among other ventures.
Follow me on Twitter @MfonobongNsehe

3.26.2014

The World's Top 10 Venture Investors For 2014

Alex Konrad, Forbes Staff

Staff writer for ad tech, enterprise, venture capital and NY startups.

3/26/2014 @ 9:52AM |4,693 views

The new face at the top of this year’s Midas List of top venture investors owes his position to Facebook, the social platform whose 2012 IPO has propelled five investors into the top ten in the past two years.
Only this time, it’s because Facebook wrote a check—for $19 billion.
Facebook’s announced acquisition of WhatsApp meant a $3 billion return for sole investor Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital. But the meat of Goetz’s portfolio might actually be in the enterprise world, where he’s enjoyed four major public exits since 2012: Ruckus Wireless , Palo Alto Networks , Barracuda Networks and Nimble Storage. Sequoia’s the only firm with two partners in the top ten, as Doug Leone clocks in at #6 due to the hot IPO of security company FireEye in September.
(See how Sequoia has built an innovation factory of some of tech’s greatest companies over the decades in this year’s cover story.)
The rest of the top ten is dominated by Facebook and Twitter investors. Three-time reigning Midas List #1 Jim Breyer drops this year as he transitions to a smaller role at Accel Partners, but he still slots in at #5 with his early bet on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. And it’s good to be Marc Andreessen, as the Andreessen Horowitz investor stays at #2 after backing both Facebook and microblogging platform Twitter, arguably the splashiest IPO of the last year. Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital moves up three slots to #3 on this year’s list due to his early Twitter bet.

New faces to the top ten for 2014 include seed investor Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners (#22 and #11 last year) on the strength of Twitter and Facebook, respectively. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman stays in the top 10 at #7 thanks to Facebook. And LinkedIn helped keep Peter Thiel of Founders Fund (#4), also an early Facebook investor, and Scott Sandell (#10) in this year’s top 10.

The Midas List 2014: Tech’s Top Investors
Click here for complete coverage

Even though Twitter’s the fresher exit, Facebook’s market cap of over $160 billion is a full order of magnitude higher than many Midas exits. And venture capitalists don’t need to back a massive company in order to deliver excellent returns to their limited partners (think university endowments and other large institutions). Besides FireEye and Nimble Storage, other major movers include the 2012 IPO of Workday, last year’s IPOs of Tableau Software and ecommerce site Zulily, and this year’s offering for Castlight Health.
FireEye helped return nine-time Midas List member Promod Haque onto the list at #27 and brought on Michael Goguen of Sequoia and Wing Ventures partner Gaurav Garg at #44 and #86. Nimble Storage helped Accel Partners’ Ping Li and Wing Ventures partner Peter Wagner back onto the list at #49 and #53. Zulily pushed Dan Levitan of Maveron and Craig Sherman of Meritech both onto the list at #56 and #71. And Castlight Health returned Ann Lamont of Oak Investment Partners at #46 and helped put The Social+Capital Partnership cofounder Mamoon Hamid onto the list at #80.
Perhaps the biggest trend of 2014, however, is the rise of valuations of private tech companies that can impact the rankings (see more on the Midas List methodology here). Some of the more notable: Airbnb and Dropbox, as well as IPO-bound file-sharer Box Inc. The $10 billion-valued Dropbox helped five of this year’s Midas Listers, including debut entrants Bryan Schreier of Sequoia and David Lee of SV Angel at #72 and #82. And the company helped Daniel Rimer of Index Ventures and Matt Cohler of Benchmark just hang on, dropping down to #85 and #99.
Three members of the top ten—Andreessen, Thiel and Hoffman—are all Airbnb backers. But Airbnb also gave a big boost to Sequoia’s Alfred Lin, who moved up from #90 to #26, while bolstering the credentials of no less than five other list members. And that’s before the company closes a new round at a $10 billion valuation of its own that will make its founders billionaires, a round that just misses counting for this year’s list. (Also just missing: King Digital Entertainment’s public offering and Facebook’s recently announced acquisition of Oculus VR. Wait until 2015!)
Box, meanwhile, just filed its S-1 on March 24 but already counts for Midas as another major private company adding value for this year’s list. That was good news for Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine and Byron Deeter at #19 and #36 and five others including newcomer Hamid, who guided his past firm U.S. Venture Partners to a 13% stake in the company. Box’s largest venture stakeholder, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, had two partners benefit, Randy Glein at #42 and Josh Stein at #97.

Both Box and Dropbox should continue to exert major influence on the Midas List in years to come as they eventually go public. Others to watch include business intelligence company Domo, audio hardware company Jawbone, energy software company Opower and database company MongoDB.
WhatsApp was the largest acquisition on the list—it’s actually the largest venture-backed private exit ever—but it’s not the only one that made a splash. This year’s top woman on the list is Mary Meeker at #21, the growth-stage specialist from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and famed former analyst making a smart bet on Waze, which Google acquired for about $1 billion. Even bigger was Google’s purchase of Nest Labs this year for $3.2 billion. That produced two Midas newcomers, Peter Nieh of Lightspeed Venture Partners at #83 and the list’s final member, Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins.

With new billion-dollar “unicorns” earning lofty valuations by the day and the public offerings continuing to flow, this Midas List saw more turnover than any list before. The firms at the top largely remain the same, as Sequoia’s nine partners this year just edges last year’s leader Accel’s eight this year. But with 20 fresh faces and seven returnees, the 2014 Midas List is a testament to the big dollars and even bigger bets investors are making today in tech. Time will tell whether the frothy market can keep rolling into 2015.
Follow Alex on Forbes, Twitter and Facebook for more tech coverage in startups, ad tech, enterprise software and venture capital.

3.12.2014

French Billionaire Vincent Bollore Invests In London's Electric Car-Sharing

Natalie Robehmed, Forbes Staff

I cover the world's billionaires.

3/12/2014 @ 1:56PM |607 views

French Billionaire Vincent Bolloré plans to introduce a car-sharing scheme for electric vehicles. The green campaign, a four-wheel extension of London’s environmentally-friendly “Boris Bikes” program, will let Londoners hire an electric car for 15 minute slots.
Bolloré Group’s IER company will reportedly spend $166 million on the Source London program to quadruple the number of outlets for charging electric vehicles, ultimately equipping the city with 6,000 recharge stations. It plans to launch its automotive-sharing scheme with 100 green vehicles by the end of 2014, scaling up to 3,000 cars by 2018.
Founded in 2011, Source London was launched by the capital’s Mayor Boris Johnson, who introduced nearly 1,400 electric vehicle charge points across 300 sites including grocery stores, car parks and hospitals. Transport for London (TfL) selected IER to take over the management and operation of the initiative from summer 2014.
“It’s now time for a private sector operator to drive the scheme forward, working under normal market conditions and clearly demonstrating electric vehicles are here to stay,” said Nick Fairholme, the TfL Director responsible for Source London.
Bolloré Group already runs similar programs in France and the United States, including Paris’ Autolib auto-sharing service. Launched in 2011, it now registers 315,000 reservations a month. Autolib will be profitable in the third quarter of this year, according to Bolloré, while initial predictions estimate Source London will be profitable in six to seven years, Bloomberg reports.
“TfL and Bolloré Group share a common ambition for creating a better environment for Londoners by facilitating the uptake of EVs,” said Vincent Bolloré, the groups president.
Londoners will have to spend for it: According to City A.M., users will pay a monthly membership fee in addition to $16 an hour to use the cars.
With a net worth of $7.4 billion, Vincent Bolloré is the 14th-richest person in France, and #183 on our list of 1,645 billionaires. This isn’t the first time he’s profited from green technology: The Bolloré Group’s Blue Solutions, a manufacturer of patented lithium-metal-polymer car batteries, went public in 2013. The batteries power the Bolloré Bluecar, used in Paris’ electric car-sharing service.
Follow me on Twitter @natrobe.

Natalie Robehmed Forbes Staff

A reporter on Forbes’ wealth team, I cover (and uncover) the world’s 1,645+ billionaires, examining how they make, spend, and give away their fortunes. When I’m not counting the zeros for our Billionaires and Forbes 400 lists, I’m writing about these entrepreneurial titans. A musician in my other life, I also co-edit Forbes’ Hip-Hop Cash Kings and Cash Princes list and have a penchant for turning rap lyrics into financial advice. I first joined Forbes as an intern in January 2012, covering startups and entrepreneurship. A graduate of Columbia University, I learned the ropes at The National newspaper in my hometown of Abu Dhabi and got my first taste of business journalism at CNN.com in Hong Kong. Follow my Internet persona on Twitter , Instagram , Facebook and SoundCloud , or get in touch: nrobehmed(at)forbes(dot)com. You can send me sensitive documents anonymously and securely at SafeSource.forbes.com.

Natalie Robehmed’s Popular Posts

100 Best Websites For Entrepreneurs 139,535 views
How Hard Is DJing? Count To Four 123,677 views
The Hottest Startups Of 2013 107,317 views
5 Ways To Get Rich Online 104,303 views
10 Personal Finance Tips From Hip-Hop Lyrics

3.04.2014

Patrick Drahi

Mr. Patrick Drahi is the Owner of MIRS Communications, Ltd. Mr. Drahi serves at Groupe Altice as a Founding Partners. He is Founding Partner of Altice One SAS. He is an Officer at Liberty Global B.V. Mr. Drahi was the founder of French Cable Operator, Sudcable Services in 1994. He was the founder of French Consultancy CMA, advising multimedia and telecom companies in 1993. Mr. Drahi has been Chairman of Altice SA since January 13, 2014 and has been its director since January 06, 2014. Mr. Drahi was Director of Satellite and Cable Television Marketing for Philips. He completed graduation from Ecole Polytechnique.