Private Equity Goes Public

One of the simplest metrics we have to measure interest in a company or industry is just how jammed the rooms are at the JP Morgan conference. It's there people can literally vote with their feet...and their elbows and shoulders and briefcases and pepper spray (well, not yet) to find a few square feet to take in a company presentation.

So if an SRO presentation reflects strong interest, then this year will be a big one for private equity and health care. (The entire discussion is available here, btw.)

Last week's Private Equity Panel discussion literally could not have been more crowded with every seat, storage container, alcove and appropriate patch of carpet filled by people eager to hear what four sages from the Private Equity World had to say about their own industry and health care.

The conversation was lively and informative, and since no one left early to hit the cocktail parties (the session started at 5 p.m.) we’re guessing those many in attendance found it useful.

Unfortunately, the conversation seemed more focused on the services sectors. This isn’t a knock on the collective wisdom of Madison Dearborn Partners (represented by Tim Sullivan), CCMP Capital (Steve Murray), Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe (Paul Queally) and Bain Capital (John Connaughton). All are well-heeled firms led by brilliant folks. But the firm we really would have liked to hear from was Warburg Pincus.

WP’s sweet spot seems firmly in line with our own: biopharma, devices and everything in between. Of course what moved us to write this is this week’s announcement that Warburg Pincus would spend $239 million to acquire Lifecore Biomedical Inc. The announcement came just after last week’s panelists suggested the criteria for “take private” would be much higher than last year, resulting in a slow down of such deals. “I think the vast majority of the deals done in the last 18 months will have very disappointing returns,” says Queally. “Risk was mispriced throughout the system. So I think it was a great time for public equity investors but not so good for private investors.”

But the panelists drew an important distinction. Murray says transactions aimed at taking a company private “because there was the availability of cheap financing and the other parts we’ll figure out later” will be scarce. But those firms with a plan to turn around or advance companies that have a strategic fit will still happen.

Warburg Pincus generally falls in the latter category. Last year, the firm paid $4.5 billion for Bausch & Lomb and invested $75 million in publicly traded Inspire Pharmaceuticals Inc. In 2006, Warburg Pincus secured a deal with French Orthopedics company Tornier.

IN VIVO Blog expected big things from the private equity industry in 2007 following the Biomet acquisition in 2006. (See our look at the new Biomet here.)


At first, the results were disappointing. Overall private equity dollars being used to acquire device companies dropped from 2006-2007. But the drop seemed far less significant when you realized that 2006 consisted mainly of the Biomet deal while 2007 figures were made of up of several smaller deals, including the Bausch & Lomb acquisition.

What’s going to happen in 2008? The panelists predicted a slow recovery as the private equity industry tries to digest all the companies consumed during the all-you-can-eat-affair of 2007. But we’re a little more bullish on the life sciences front. Warburg Pincus will still find deals. Meanwhile, firms like Avista Capital are identifying spin out opportunities from larger firms like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Boston Scientific. In fact, 2008 is starting with more than $1 billion in private equity acquisitions since Avista’s two deals didn’t close until this month.

Life sciences companies will probably draw much attention from the folks on the panel. “We will not take drug discovery risk,” says Connaughton. “But we love to build companies that help biotech and small and large pharma develop their drugs. But we do not want to take drug discovery risk, we're not smart enough.”

But then again. “We’ve done diagnostics, device and pharma,” says Queally. “It’s almost the nature of the company as opposed to the specific sector. In other words, is a company is going through dislocation? Is it maturing? The device industry over the past few years has matured to the point where they are trying to optimize a portfolio. Pharma is trying to figure out how to focus. All those things are things we bring to the table. If we can get those companies at appropriate valuations we can bring some value and generate some good returns.

“There was a time 10 years ago where every single device or pharma company was trading at 15 times,” he continued. “It’s very difficult given that leverage is a piece of our capital structure to garner that kind of return. But now they have come down and are going through dislocation. I would see a lot of opportunities in upcoming years.”

Well, this would explain why the room was so crowded.

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New Year's Resolution 2008: Create Infrastructure Strategy

It’s January 2 and so, in case you haven’t already settled on your New Year’s resolutions, we’d like to suggest one: figure out your infrastructure strategy.
A good place to start is with the number of people you need to do the job you’re in business to do. Since you will always have failures, you need a minimum number of programs to achieve a minimum level of return. Once you’ve figured that out, staff to that number of programs.

The problem is determining when a program achieves its minimum level of success. To answer that question, we’d ask another: for what are you looking to get paid?

As it stands today, companies can get paid -- pretty well, too – for doing a variety of jobs: creating INDs, for example (like Plexxikon); or getting a compound through proof-of-concept (like Exelixis or Vertex); or taking a product from Phase II to approval (like New River). It is by no means always necessary to do all of these jobs -- and therefore no need to staff them.

Think about the drug business like professional sports: the same guys who play in the NBA aren’t ever likely to qualify for Wimbledon; and none of them are likely to end up playing for the New England Patriots or worrying Tiger Woods. The physical requirements are different from sport to sport. And where they’re not, the training and focus required to perform at a high level in any one sport usually precludes excelling simultaneously at another.

The real question is to figure out what game you’re playing – and which team you need to play it. Presumably, you’ll need different players for the IND game than if you play the Phase III game. And you’ll need different numbers of players for each game.

Most Big Pharmas, thanks to tradition, feel they need to play all the games and therefore staff themselves to compete in each. But in fact they have traditionally played only one game – the commercial game. The only way a Big Pharma wins is by launching a product successfully (remember: what you get paid for doing determines which game you’re playing).

In terms of infrastructure, therefore, Big Pharma is playing at a huge disadvantage. The math goes something like this: to get one discovery compound to Phase I, you need to start with about eleven programs – and by the time you’ve gotten your one successful compound into Phase I, you’ll have spent $23 million in cash, without adding any capital or opportunity costs. (See a more in-depth analysis here). Infrastructure: 50-75 people.

On the other hand, to be relatively sure that you’ll get one discovery program all the way to market, you probably need to start with more than 100 programs – or a discovery cash outlay of more than $200 million. Rough estimate: 500 – 750 people. That math works, incidentally, only if discovery infrastructure is scaleable – that is, if ten times the people can actually do ten times the work. Given discovery’s requirements for rapid feedback and a certain anti-bureaucratic creativity, it seems more likely that at some point, the larger the discovery organization, the less productive it is.

In any event, in the worst case, if you’re making your money at Phase I, you need just one-tenth the discovery infrastructure you need if you’re not getting paid until a product reaches the market.

Same logic with development. If you’re getting well paid by a licensee or acquirer for moving a compound from Phase I to Phase III – not from Phase I to the market – you need fewer compounds to succeed because you don’t have any FDA or launch risk in your business. Fewer compounds, fewer employees. Nor do you need the same kind of infrastructure our discovery-focused player required. You need a different kind of infrastructure for finding new compounds to develop.

For this logic to work, you need to get paid, on a relative basis, about as well for doing a more focused job as for doing the traditional soup-to-nuts work of the traditional Big Pharma. And in fact you can. Phase II compounds now generate upfront licensing fees of $70 million and up – with royalties in the high teens or higher (and there is an increasingly competitive marketplace of companies willing to buy out those royalties, in case you want your returns right away). Domain Associates has done well for itself in-licensing a Phase I compound or two, wrapping a company around it, and hiring no more than a dozen people to manage the compounds’ development, largely through a network of CROs – then selling off the result at huge profits to J&J (Peninsula), or Forest Laboratories (Cerexa), or Merck (NovaCardia).

You can argue how repeatable those models are and therefore how much additional infrastructure you might ultimately need. Celtic Therapeutics – the new follow-on private equity fund building on PE predecessor Celtic Pharma (see here and here, for more) – figures that Domain’s math of onesies and twosies won’t work consistently. Given standard clinical failure rates, Celtic is thus amassing a larger portfolio of projects for which they’ll need a larger number of managers. But because Celtic is focusing only on later-stage development, it will still only need a relative handful of workers (20 projects = about 65 people, says Celtic managing director Stephen Evans-Freke).

We admit that we are oversimplifying the infrastructure debate to make a point. There will be companies who do multiple jobs and will require multiple infrastructures. A Big Pharma might be able to get paid for Phase I to Phase II primary-care development (e.g., Bristol-Myers Squibb’s deals with AstraZeneca and Pfizer) and simultaneously get paid for launching new specialty medicines… or vice-versa. There will be Big Pharmas who can create INDs and get paid – in cash or kind – for distributing them to development partners (Lilly is doing something like this with its Nicholas Piramal relationship).

But the key will be figuring out which jobs you can consistently get paid for. And then to stop doing the jobs – and thus hanging on to the related infrastructures –you’re not getting paid for.

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Yule Blog: The Virtual Are Only Virtuous Thanks to the Substantial

It’s time once again to sing the great Christmas Paradox—the annual carol that venerates the Immaterial in the temples of the Material.

And as everyone knows, it’s just fine that we do. Our economy’s fortune ebbs and flows with the CPI – the Christmas Paradox Index. That’s why – as some significant fraction of us proclaim that the only present we want is you or family or world peace -- the news we evidently want to hear is about the health of retail sales.

We are not, however, going to babble on about this particular holiday cliché. Instead, we want to point out that our industry has a parallel Paradox – the Infrastructure/Anti-Infrastructure theme now playing in the drug business almost as insistently as Deck the Halls in shopping malls.

At Windhover’s Bio/Pharma Partnerships conference, for example, Randy Woods noted that his old biotech company, Corvas, needed plenty of scientists just to get to the clinical-stage deal its investors wanted. Now, given the gap in Pharma’s late-stage pipeline, VCs want to fund the development themselves, entirely without partner money -- but with only enough infrastructure to manage the CROs and consultants they hire to do the work. Investors want all their dollars to go into development – not offices and certainly not salaries.

That’s exactly what happened with Woods’s more recent employer—NovaCardia (12 people; two products; sold with just one of the products to Merck for $350 million) and what will likely happen with current company Sequel (which inherited the same people, NovaCardia’s second product, and its investors).

Or Bristol-Myers Squibb. Senior BD director Lynne Croucher spoke about its “selective integration” strategy (and discussed at greater length here, here, and here) which, along with risk reduction, effectively reduces requisite infrastructure – off-loading costs and responsibilities onto primary-care partners. That’s why Bristol can without significant business pain cut some 4800 jobs.

And now Peter Corr, the former R&D boss at Pfizer, the industry’s most fully infrastructured business, has ended up at Pfizer’s philosophical opposite, the anti-infrastructuralist private-equity player Celtic Therapeutics (here’s the savvy assessment by the WSJ’s Health Blog).

The fund (an outfit we first wrote about in late 2005) is an ambitious follow-on to private-equity pioneer Celtic Pharma, which has deployed nearly all its $250 million in capital (plus an additional $151 million in debt) in buying up nine development-stage programs, whose development it funds using a network of CROs. It then wants to sell the successful programs to the highest bidders (so far it’s sold one and lost one). The new fund apparently hopes to do the same thing but on a much larger scale--according to the Financial Times, it’s aiming to raise $1.5 billion. Corr expects the first close of the fund this January.

Big Pharma’s infrastructure “isn’t meeting its needs,” he says. In fact, despite billions spent on R&D, drug companiest don’t even “have the flexibility to fund new projects, or more from one project to another based on science” because they’re funding infrastructure instead. Celtic Therapeutics will employ maybe 65 people managing 20 projects.

You see the paradox, no doubt. It’s not that the infrastructure doesn’t exist. It’s still there—in CROs, for example. And it’s still there in the companies that ultimately fund Celtic’s returns. If it weren’t, Celtic would have neither advantage nor customers (low-infrastructure Big Pharmas could presumably license the same programs Celtic can).

In sum, most of those caroling along about the virtues of a virtual industry know that without the infrastructure someone else is paying for they wouldn’t have much to sing about at all.

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Deals of the Week: Beyond Biogen

Most of the chatter over the past few days has been about you-know-who and the deal that wasn't. Or the Novartis pink slips. Or the letter written to Schering-Plough and Merck by a couple of Michigan congressmen. But plenty of ink dried elsewhere this week, and we know that you know that we know that you've grown to expect Deals of the Week to talk about deals, not so much the deals that didn't happen, the layoffs, or the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. And damnit, we're not going to let you down.

• Eisai/MGI Pharma: We wrote a bit about this acquisition on Monday, and look for more in the January issue of IN VIVO. The short of it is this: the price tag, at $3.9 billion, suggests more than a little competition for the oncology/acute care specialist, and following on the heels of Celgene's $2.9 billion acquisition of Pharmion only a few weeks ago, reinforces our view that consolidation in the specialty pharma space will continue. And although the deal is by far the largest acqisition of a non-Japanese company by a Japanese pharma, perhaps it is not predictive of a wave of similar deals. Eisai boasts more of a US base, and we're told therefore, more of a dealmaking culture than its compatriots.



• Boston Scientific/Avista Capital Partners: Consider this the other shoe. Boston Scientific officials promised during their round of conference presentations last month that they’d be announcing the sale of its fluid management and venous access business sometime this month, and they did just that. The Natick, Mass. company agreed to sell the business to private equity firm Avista Capital Partners, $425 million in cash. This sale is be the last significant piece of their wholesale restructuring that would cut costs by $500 million and trim its headcount by 12% to 13%, and it’s a nicely matching bookend to last month’s sale of its cardiac and vascular divisions to the Getinge Group for $750 million. Analysts covering the company say the restructuring should help Boston Scientific go forward with its cardiovascular and cardiac rhythm management businesses. The cash also could come in handy to pay the $1.15 million Boston Scientific will pay to Advanced Bionics Corp. for its pain management program, a result of the nasty break up between the neurostim company and its one-time acquirer. Read more in the upcoming IN VIVO magazine.
  


• GSK/Oncomed: GSK's external development CEEDD and Oncomed inked a strategic alliance to discover and develop up to four antibody therapeutics against cancer stem cells, emerging oncology targets discussed in depth in this 2006 START-UP feature. The potential biobucks deal value is enormous, but the upfront payment, which is a mix of licensing fees and an equity stake, is undisclosed. Oncomed will handle development through clinical proof-of-concept, at which GSK has an option to license the MAb. The most advanced candidate, OMP-21M18, should enter the clinic next year. Bonus GSK: The pharma also teamed up with Belgian biotech Galapagos this week, paying €3.5 million in technology access fees plus milestones and 'double-digit' royalties to tap Galapagos' natural product discovery platform in the anti-infectives space.
  


• Shire/Alba: Prolific dealmaker Shire strikes again, landing ex-US, ex-Japan rights to Alba Therapeutics' AT-1001, an inhibitor of barrier dysfunction in GI disorders. The peptide is in Phase II for Celiac disease and Shire will have a look-see at Crohn's disease and other potential indications as well. Alba scored solid terms: $25 million in up-front payments plus milestones and royalties. In other Shire news, in the understated press release "Board Changes," the company said CEO Matt Emmens is stepping down, er, up, to the chairman's role, replacing retiring chairman James Cavanaugh. CFO Angus Russell will succeed Emmens next June. Somehow we doubt this is Emmens' last deal in the drivers' seat.

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Another Look at Asia

As a small follow up to our post last week on Sofinnova Partners' hiring an Asia-focused professional, VentureWire Lifescience reported this week that Canaan Partners added a principal whose partial duties include finding deal flow from Asia.

Mickey Kim will from Canaan's Westport, Conn. office. He joined the firm in July according to his bio.

Mickey joined Canaan from Pacific Point Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in healthcare infrastructure companies in Asia. Prior to co-founding Pacific Point Ventures, he invested in biotech and medical device companies at BioVentures Investors, including ActivBiotics, Applied Spine Technologies, Cylene Pharmaceuticals, Hydra Biosciences and Sciona. Mickey also served as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and CSC Healthcare, and co-founded an Asian technology venture capital fund.

Canaan doesn't appear to have any health care portfolio companies in Asia at this point. It does have two IT-oriented deals in India.

No doubt there will be more news like this to come.

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While You Were Packing for New York

A few notes from the weekend that was. We hope you had a good one. Several of your resident bloggers will be converging on New York this week for our Pharmaceutical Strategic Alliances conference (remember, UBS isn't the only game in town this week!). Hope to see some of you there. Stay tuned to IN VIVO Blog for a few updates from the conference on Wednesday and Thursday.

• Profit up but care down at many PE-backed nursing homes, says the New York Times in a Sunday feature.


• Pfizer gets maraviroc approval in the EU--here's the early morning release--and Novartis gets an EU OK for its transdermal Exelon mild-to-moderately-severe Alzheimer's disease patch. Both approvals were expected.


• The WSJ is the latest paper to take a gander at GSK's slightly unusual CEO succession contest, while the FT wonders who will replace Jon Symonds as CFO at AZ (hat tip, Pharmagossip).

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Why Financiers Like Virtual Companies

Capital hates a vacuum.

In this case, the vacuum is Big Pharma’s late-stage pipeline. As deal prices rise for post-proof-of-concept products, investors and clever packagers of financing are stepping into the financing void which, at least relatively speaking, opens up pre-POC. For more on this, see our analysis here and here.

Take Drug Royalty. It’s made a good business monetizing royalty streams from approved products but now is moving upstream, looking to package still unapproved products on which they’d take a percentage of future revenues.

Or Morgan Stanley. Its PhaRMAs (Pharmaceutical Royalty Monetization Assets) likewise package a set of development-stage products into a debt security. The earlier-stage the assets, or the smaller the portfolio, the higher the interest rate. But for the issuer—the biotech with the products--the return is capped: once it’s paid off the investors, the biotech gets all the upside.

It isn’t just biotechs, like NPS and Alkermes, which are exploiting Morgan’s PharMAs. Morgan also used its security idea to place $150 million in mezzanine debt for private-equity firm Celtic Pharma – essentially an investment management team, funded by a set of limited partners, which has acquired a set of eight projects from various biotechs.

Despite its financial structure, Celtic looks a lot like a virtual biotech, exploiting a network of consultants and CROs to get its products developed. And like other virtual biotechs, it has no intention of creating any sort of sales force. The point is to serve the needs of investors, the supreme anti-infrastructuralists.

Most of these investors, usually hedge funds and insurance companies, want “alpha” from these kinds of investments – in this case, a return uncorrelated with major public markets like equity, debt or real estate. Since Big Pharma buys rights to these products regardless of what the markets are doing, they theoretically should provide plenty of uncorrelated return. But once a product is wrapped in infrastructure—into a real company, with an HR department, office politics and an investor-relations group—then its returns begin to correlate with the equity markets.

And the reality is, says Celtic’s founder Stephen Evans-Freke, products are worth more “without the companies wrapped around them.” Big Pharma, he says, needs “more fixed costs like a hold in the head.” And once there’s infrastructure, companies have social and economic incentives to keep working on programs which should be killed. For investors, the faster a developer kills a drug that’s already fated to die, the better – money, being fungible, can be applied elsewhere. Less easy to do with employees.

“The only reason to wrap all that corporate infrastructure around these projects it to take them public,” says Evans-Freke – who, in his days at PaineWebber or in founding companies like Sugen, found plenty to like about IPOs.

And there are indeed other virtues to owning infrastructure. Discovery doesn’t get done without it, for one thing. Happy accidents—like discovering an alternative use for a drug, for example—would be less frequent. It’s hard to think Genentech could have happened without enough R&D infrastructure to figure out which biologies made a difference.

But the virtual is also now real—and investors like it. The development is another unintended consequence of Big Pharma’s earning-driven appetite for variabilizing its costs, creating a vast and technically expert world of CROs and consultants available for anyone to hire. Whether that’s a good thing or not for Big Pharma (and we think in general it’s a good thing—another way to get products), it certainly has opened up a new way for disenchanted pharmaceutical investors to stick with the industry.

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Higher Tax, Fewer Deals?

The IN VIVO Blog has been somewhat mum on the carried interest debate. Frankly, this topic is being covered to death elsewhere (The link goes to PE Hub but there's no shortage of discussion.)

This topic is important, no doubt, crucial even, but Mom always told us if you don’t have something fresh and interesting to blog about than it’s better not to blog at all. (Well, she would have said that.)

So we’ve been asking around a bit, trying to get a sense from our VC community on the potential impact of these changes. To be honest, the change put forth by the Democrats didn’t really sound the alarm bells in our virtual hallways. But the same apparently isn’t true in the actual hallways of VC firms investing in life sciences. IN VIVO Blog expected VCs to answer queries with a “Congress will be Congress” attitude similar to the one put out when discussing changes at the FDA or CMS.

But there’s some genuine concern here. No question, much of that concern most likely has to do with a diminished paycheck. But there’s some fear surrounding the impact these changes could have on the availability of capital.

An email from one West Coast VC:

I really believe that these proposed new taxes will make it so that some new companies will not get funded. These taxes essentially raise the cost of capital and if the returns are not there to the GPs then they will not get funded eliminating many high risk or sometimes questionable deals. One has to remember that often deals look promising and then don’t make it while the opposite is true as well but maybe not to a greater extent. If the cost of capital is high then those marginal/high risk deals won’t get done.

It is the same concept as lower interest rates and lower borrowing hurdles allowed the housing market to boom. If the cost of capital rises then it eliminates those who are at the margin. The same is true in our business. Those on the margin lose—fewer jobs and lower growth.

The suggestion that this could eliminate “many high risk or sometimes questionable deals” rings true and does sound an alarm. After all, doesn’t that describe most biopharma deals and a good deal of device companies as well.

Could this change in taxation have a particularly detrimental impact on the life sciences industry, pushing VCs even further away from funding true start-ups? Even worse, would this aggravate the diversion of dollars away from smaller, venture capital firms looking to do these deals. Or perhaps, as A VC Blog suggests, the best VCs will just invest their own money, forget the institutional dollars.

A VC Blog also had what I thought to be a very thoughtful position later on.
Mom did teach us not to covet other people's stuff, so the "Tax the Rich" crowd won't get a sympathetic ear here. Still, the suggestion that the GP's carry on "other people's money" goes beyond that simplistic idea. The idea that this income should be taxed as salary isn't that far out (or far left) as some would like it to appear.

We’ll update with interesting points of view as we continue to talk to folks. But don't feel like you need to wait for a phone call. Consider this an open invitation to opine on what impact the suggested changes will have on the life sciences industry.

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Private Equity: Muscling in on Big Pharma at Biotech's High Rollers' Table

Talk about co-dependency. Pharma needs biotech’s products; biotech needs pharma’s cash. Oh, they say they need other things, but when it comes down to it – that’s about the equation.

So if biotech had a different source of cash (or Pharma had a different source of products), well – this marriage would turn open.

That’s why private equity has become such an interesting game changer. PE firms, stuffed with too much cash as it is and incentivized with management fees to stuff themselves still further, are all chasing the same buyout opportunities, throwing ever greater sums at owners and managers in order to get into the deals.

Biotech, which certainly needs cash, doesn’t return money on anything like a PE firm’s preferred timeline. But biotechs are also relatively unmined territory. Therefore cheap. That’s why you’re beginning to see major private equity players doing things private equity rules say they shouldn’t do.

Consider this progression. In 2004, KKR put something like $200 million into Jazz Pharmaceuticals—a theoretically stable, spec pharma-ish kind of investment. The financing underwrote Jazz’s takeover of the commercial-stage Orphan Medical, so KKR at least got some cash flow, which PE investors like to see. And there was no discovery risk—but certainly development risk. (Not that it's worked out brilliantly, so far. See our recent post.)

Two years later, New Mountain enables the Ikaria/Ino deal – creating a theoretically self-financing company (like Jazz, it has a commercial organization providing the requisite cash flow) but it nonetheless depends for its success on the crapshoot of discovery.

And now The Invus Group is putting $205 million into Lexicon, with the potential to add another $345 million down the road. They’ll get a minimum of 40% of the company and could end up owning far more. But now the whole thing is based on discovery – and not just me-too discovery, but Lexicon’s novel-target, novel-compound approach (see our upcoming article in the July/August IN VIVO).

In short, private equity is moving into pharma territory, funding companies the way only pharmas once could. The whole point is to build organizations of such size that a biotech can do its deals on relatively equal terms with pharma – which means that if it doesn’t get its deal price, it can walk away and do its own development and commercialization, continuing to increase its assets’ value.

The theory underlying this game is that biotechs are still leaving way too much value on the negotiating table. That’s the value the PE investor needs to retain in order to counterbalance his basic disadvantage as a purely financial, not strategic, buyer. That strategic buyer—Big Pharma--can pay more for particular assets because they can do more with them (like shoring up a fading portfolio or keeping profitable and busy a sales they don’t want to lose). Can PE use its money to extract that strategic premium biotechs on their own can’t? It’s an interesting gamble: both biotech and Big Pharma need to get to know the new dice-throwers at the high-rollers’ table.

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Playing Through

This has absolutely nothing to do with pharmaceuticals or devices.

But if you’ve never been to Sand Hill Road and you’re wondering how KKR spends its hard-earned management fees (or if you’re intensely interested in the future of media and need to know whether Roger McNamee’s right fist represents audience or content) then Kara Swisher's visit to Elevation Partners is worth watching.

Although she's a tad unkind to VCs for our taste, kudos to Swisher, of the WSJ’s All Things Digital, for the pre-interview tour. (IN VIVO Blog has to get one of them fancy cameras in the budget.) And a big giant nod to VentureBeat directing us to the video.

McNamee’s somewhat famous co-managing director was out of the office doing something.

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