Newhouse eyes $400M raise for ’Frisco VC unit
THE Newhouse family, owners of Advance Publications and Condé Nast, has spun off its San Francisco venture business into an independent company — and will now look for outside investment partners to join the new fund.
The venture firm, Advance Vixeid Partners, scouts for deals from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley.
Advance Vixeid is looking to raise up to $400 million, according to a recent SEC filing.
It is believed the venture already has a war chest of around $400 million — which came after the sale of $500 million in preferred stock in cable network Discovery Communications in late 2010.
The family is forecasting continuing struggles in print for its magazine and newspaper empire, and was worried that its pace of investment in digital and tech was not proceeding as quickly as hoped, several sources said.
The new venture firm, however, is still looking to place bets on a series of small to midsized investments just beyond the startup stage rather than on a few mega deals.
“AV Partners targets investments of between $5 million to $25 million, with the ability to make investments of up to $40 million,” it said on its new Web site, which went live in the past week.
“With Advance and other select limited partners as coinvestors, in unique instances we can provide up to $100 million of equity capital,” the Web site states. While based in San Francisco, Advance Vixeid Partners also has an office at the new Condé Nast headquarters at One World Trade Center.
Advance Vixeid Partners now includes many of the investments that Advance Publications made when it was still an internal investment arm run by Andrew Siegel, who had been reporting to the Advance board. The Advance Vixeid umbrella now stretches over sites including: Moda Operandi, a luxury online retailer; Farfetch, an online ecommerce plat form; and Rent the Runway, an online service that provides designer dress rentals.
In the runup to becoming its own venture firm, Advance Vixeid Partners had contributed funds to two other investment operations: Raine Partners, which includes Tom Freston and Ari Emanuel and is among the many investors in Vice Media, and Trigger Media, which was an early investor in Daily Candy and Zynga and is headed by Andy Russell.
But the company now includes three other top dealmaking executives, according to the SEC filing: David Ibnale, formerly of TPG Growth Partners; John Murray, formerly at GCA Savvian; and Courtney Robinson, formerly at American Express Ventures.
Siegel, chairman of the new Advance Vixeid, citing SEC restrictions, declined to comment.
The new company flexed its muscle in late June by leading a $20 million investment in Nativo, a company that produces rich media that can be used in native advertising videos.
Nativo said it previously raised a total of $11.2 million from Greycroft Partners, Signia Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investment, e.ventures and others.
BuzzFeed, which is partially owned by Condé Nast rival Hearst, is among the companies that has capitalized on native ads, turning a profit last year for a digital publishing company that eschewed the digital banner ads but did run socalled native ads from a wide variety of bigticket sponsors.
Advance already seems to have one hit on its hands. In January, it sold iSocket to the Rubicon Project for an estimated $25 million, even though iSocket had revenues of only $207,000 as recently as 2013.
iSocket is involved in programmatic guaranteed ads that allow advertisers to purchase a specific number of “eyeballs,” or impressions,, from publishers at a preset price.
According to reports, iSocket may have been a little early to the market, however, and was burning through several million dollars a year. But its sale price was an eyepopping 100 times its 2013 revenue.
Carter gets Sirius
Former New York Times television reporter Bill Carter has landed his own hourlong radio show on SiriusXM.
“The Bill Carter Interview” will debut in August with a weekly onehour show on Mondays on channel 121 at 6 p.m. “It will be mostly media and entertainment figures,” said Carter, who was among the 100plus journalists who opted for the lucrative buyout offer from the Times late last year.
“I always thought there was life after the New York Times and it turns out there is,” he told Media Ink.
He is also working on a book about the current crop of TV talk shows for Viking. He is estimated to have snagged a low sixfigure advance.
Carter’s first book, “The Late Shift,” about the latenight TV wars between Jay Leno and David Letterman,m was a bestseller that was made into an HBO film.
There’s no pub date set for the latest tome, in part because the landscape on the talkshow hosts — Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, James Corden, Larry Wilmore and others — has completely turned over in the past 18 months.
“I have quite a lot of reporting to do,” he said, adding that he “will be inviting [the new talkshow hosts] for sure” to be guests on the new radio show.