I recently talked to Cameron Lester, who is a venture capitalist at Azure Capital. His firm has backed breakout companies like VMware (NYSE:VMW) and Bill Me Later, which was sold to eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY). Cameron also was an early investor in Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM).
For the most part, we talked about his portfolio companies, especially Zend (provides cloud technologies) and Twitvid (allows for sharing of videos on Twitter). But I also snuck in a couple questions about the IPO market.
For the most part, he does not expect to see a flood of IPOs hit the market, at least over the next year. As should be no surprise, he thinks serious macroeconomic issues will continue to make things difficult for companies to come public.
Despite this, Cameron definitely sees a few companies that could be the next Facebook or Zynga. One he mentioned was Tumblr, a microblogging service that makes it easy to share posts, comments, photos and videos.
Tumblr has more than 30 million blogs, which generate 13 billion page views per month (early this year, Tumblr was at 2 billion page views). A key to the growth has been the focus on mobile platforms like Apple�s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and Google�s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system.
In late September, Tumblr received $85 million in venture capital. The investors included Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, The Chernin Group, Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Also participating in the round was Virgin�s Sir Richard Branson, who certainly has a good sense for an emerging brand.
Despite its impressive activity numbers, Tumblr is relatively unknown compared to its bigger competitors. Expect this to change soon. This week, President Barack Obama started using Tumblr for his 2012 re-election campaign. It’s hard to get more star power than that.
Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog �IPO Playbook,� a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of �All About Short Selling� and �All About Commodities.� Follow him on Twitter at @ttaulli. As of this writing, he did not own a position in any of the aforementioned stocks.
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