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News & Updates - Friday, April 15, 2005

Accel Gives it The Old College Try

Back in November, there was some scuttlebutt about the poor performance of the VC firm Accel Partners. Our take was that Jim Breyer, the golden-boy who single-handedly built Accel on the backs of Macromedia, UUNet, and Real Networks investments, has done a weak job of building a deep bench of VC partners with his gift for picking winners.

Now a mole tells us that in an effort to restore Accel to its former glory, Breyer and his partners are throwing a lot of junk against the wall and hoping that something sticks.

The case in point is thefacebook, a college social networking site, that was recently in the midst of raising a round from "an East coast media firm" at an already bubble-like valuation, when Accel swooped in and jacked up both the valuation and the size of the investment. We've seen the supposed figures - they make us dizzy. We don't know if the deal has been finalized.

OK, we know VCs pull these brinksmanship maneuvers all the time, but is thefacebook really the next Real Networks? After all, it's a social networking site that is barley a year old and is run by a kid from the class of '06. If our mole is right, this strikes us as a hasty move by Accel. Then again, back in the day, we thought eBay was a silly concept - so we'll wait and see.

Read: Accel Partners' Problems - [a:c]
Read: Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website - [The Harvard Crimson]