Pete Bennett for many years for focused on developing software for the real estate industry. Bennett began with the early stages of IDX, BORIS and realtors in the San Francisco area. Around 2004 he was contacted to develop a concise proposal for an existing Real Estate Patent for Kevin Keithley. Eventually he filed a patent claim against Realtor.com and related companies.
During June 2008 Alston Bird called Bennett stating his proposal had surfaced during e-discovery. He was told he would be deposed and compensated for expert testimony.
He was never paid but connections other parties then unknown he was evicted.
Bono
Singer-Songwriter
Paul David Hewson, KBE OL, known by his stage name Bono, is an Irish singer-songwriter, musician, venture capitalist, businessman, and philanthropist. He is best known as the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of rock band U2.
LinkedIN Witness Retaliation, Bono, The Rise Fund, TPG Growth - Ensuring Pete Bennett remains homeless?
Impact Investing is basically tech dominance over access to social media where many resumes, history and work references reside.
In response to patent litigation filed by Wilson-Sosinia The National Association of Realtors retained Alston Bird to defend the patent challenge.
In the middle is Pete Bennett who provided a very clear proposal in 2004 to businessman Kevin Keithley of Tren Tech based in Silicon Valley. Bennett inserted several lines about the voracity of the patent but Keithley likely never read the proposal. In June 2008 via e-discovery Bennett's proposal popped up.
By the end of June 2008 it was clear Bennett was under attack, Alston Bird cancelled the testimony and deposition but Bennett was summarily evicted with almost zero cause.
Perhaps Wilson Sonsini use their omnipotent powers to destroy Bennett for the roughly 400,000 in court costs must have really pissed them off
In a dark file cabinet belonging to the National Association of Realtors there is a proposal presented by Pete Bennett to Kevin Keithley.
Billionaires’ Ball: Deconstructing TPG’s $2 billion RISE Fund
Talk about raising expectations. The RISE fund scored an Andrew Ross Sorkin exclusive in the New York Times, led by Bono, backed by all-stars on the impact billionaire circuit, and driven by TPG Growth, with more than $8 billion under management.
For all the signals that the big boys are arriving in impact investing, the $2 billion RISE Fund appears to be the biggest. It’s one of the first to put 10-figure capital behind a solid impact strategy. And there are more billions where that came from, if TPG can really deliver impact “alpha” – market-beating financial returns because of, not in spite of, a savvy impact investment thesis.
The fundraising goals for RISE has apparently doubled since a $1 billion fund was first announced in September. Maya Chorengel of Elevar Equity, which has been tapped by TPG to both develop deal pipeline and raise funds for RISE, has said the day is not far off for a $5 billion fund, once deal tickets and fund sizes can get to the scale needed for big institutional investors. TPG Group en toto manages about $74 billion.
If Sorkin knows the identity of “at least two large pension funds and one sovereign wealth fund (that) have committed nine figure sums” – he’s not saying. (Send tips.)
Sorkin and TPG’s William E. McGlashan teamed up to ensure nobody was confused about whether RISE was conceding any returns to deliver impact. Sorkin used an older term, “double-bottom line,” for what has become known as impact investing. He summed up the performance as “mixed results; either investors lost money, or the social impact was negligible or nonexistent.”
Bono himself laid down the gantlet, slamming the rigor of most of impact investing to date. “There is a lazy mindedness that we afford the do-gooders,” Bono told Sorkin. It has become “a lot of bad deals done by good people.”
EARLY ADOPTERS
It’s not clear whether Bono’s unnamed do-gooders but bad dealmakers includes folks like Jeff Skoll, Pierre Omidyar, Richard Branson, Lynne Benioff, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs, all of whom are board members and investors of RISE. The club is an A-list of the kind of Silicon Valley-based, solution-savvy billionaires who are increasingly committing investment capital – not just philanthropic money – to generate social and environmental value.
Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Groupnow manages $5 billion in assets. Capricorn has made big bets on satellite-imagery, healthcare diagnostics and cleantech. Skoll took the lead, with TPG Growth’s McGlashan, to enlist Bridgespan Group consultants to design the impact reporting schema.
Laurene Powell Jobs, the head of the Emerson Collective, one of the new breed of non-foundation impact funds, technically an LLC, which can invest in both for-profit and non-profit organizations. With nearly $20 billion, Powell Jobs is one of the world’s wealthiest women, based on holdings in Apple and Disney built by her late husband, Steve Jobs.
Richard Branson, everybody’s favorite globe-trotting impact billionaire, who has his fingers in everything from the Carbon War Room and the B Team to the all-star human rights advocacy group, the Elders.
Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn, just acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion, making Hoffman’s stake worth nearly $3 billion. Hoffman is an outspoken provocateur, having pledged $5 million to aid veteran’s if President-elect Donald Trump would release his tax returns.
Mellody Hobson is president of Ariel Investments, the $10 billion fund manager based in Chicago that is one of the country’s largest minority-owned investment firm.
Lynne Benioff, who is building the philanthropic complement to husband Marc Benioff’s platform at Salesforce for advocating corporate responsibility.
Mo Ibrahim, the billionaire founder of Celtel International, which is riding the mobile wave sweeping Africa — an historic infrastructure leapfrog that is a key driver of any emerging market investment thesis as falling prices of connectivity and energy open new customers and new opportunities.
Pierre Omidyar, whose Omidyar Network is one of the earliest LLC’s investing as both a foundation and a venture fund. Since 2004, Omidyar network has invested $1 billion and helped drive much of the research and marketing field-building agenda of the impact-investing community. Omidyar has been a longtime investor in funds managed by Elevar Equity, which has been tapped by Rise.
Elevar, which raised its own $74 million fund last year, has been low-key about its activities. (Maya Chorengel of Elevar lays out a good primer on the firm’s investment thesis in this video panel, which also includes Matt Bannick, head of Omidyar Network.)
Bill Gates was not among the publicly announced list, but folks like Hoffman and Branson are also investors in the Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Coalition. Breakthrough is also pegged as a multi-billion dollar fund and also specifically pegged to meeting specific impact goals, namely, staying below the 2-degree temperature rise limit set by world leaders in the global climate treaty now in force. The Gates Foundation has deployed more than $1 billion in so-called program-related investments in profit-making firms with a clear charitable intent.
MEASUREABLE IMPACT
RISE expects to split its money between U.S. and emerging markets. Domestic investments include healthcare, education and clean energy. Emerging market sectors include financial services, housing and education. Rise claims to have created strict metrics to measure social impact and has hired an outside auditor (but will tie fund manager’s compensation only to financial performance, not impact).
The notion of TPG – or Bono, for that matter – rising in as a white knight to rescue impact investing didn’t sit so well with veterans of the movement to shift capital toward social and environmental progress.
Use of a failed social impact bond in New York as an example was the kind of apples-and-oranges benchmark that Sorkin would never have used in “serious” business reporting. That bond was backed by Goldman Sachs at the behest of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but fell short of its goals to reduce the recidivism rate for adolescent offenders at Rikers Island.
FRONTIER CAPITAL
McGlashan cited as an example of the opportunities TPG’s investments in Apollo Tower, a cellphone tower company in Myanmar. TPG began backing Apollo in 2014, before Myanmar emerged from military control. Myanmar went from nearly 0 percent cellphone penetration to 70 percent, accounting for more than 5 percent growth in G.D.P. (Our friends at Unreasonable.is have a good update on Myanmar’s march toward mobile money.)
The company’s value has more than doubled. As for impact? Sorkin vaguely endorses the notion the investment “helped to increase transparency in a country known for tight control of its information, helping the nation take steps toward democracy.” Again, for his serious deal stories, Sorkin would ask for more proof. Interesting tidbit: McGlashan left San Francisco in 2013 and moved to India for a year.
Sorkin didn’t probe deeply on RISE’s investment thesis, but a mashup of Elevar’s approach and the well-documented strategies of Omidyar Network would suggest that it will target emerging middle-class consumers around the world. Importantly, that means families with $10 a day, not the extreme poor with live on under $2 a day. Omidyar laid out the opportunities and risks in “Frontier Capital,” a 2015 report that outlines an approach to investing in businesses serving low- to lower-middle-income people in emerging markets.
Bono tried belatedly to scale back expectations, agreeing to report back in a year or two and “be actually a bit tough on ourselves.” But he also made clear that more is at stake than the success of a single investment fund.
“Capitalism is going up on trial, and I think that it’s clear that putting profit before people is a nonsustainable business model,” Bono told Sorkin. It’s not that capitalism is immoral; it’s amoral. It’s a better servant than master.”
[seperator style=”style1″]Disclosure[/seperator]
Photo credit: Tillman Global Holdings
ImpactAlpha has business relations with some of the investors named in this story.
In 2008 attorneys representing Bono, elevation partners and realtor.com contacted Bennett in the matter of Home Store patent defense with Kevin Keithley trendtec
Alston bird Representatives the National Association of Realtors and then at the end of the day Pete Bennett ended up homeless as a result of activities perpetrated on Pete Bennett connected to Bono who's friends with William mcglashan indicted for bribery which I suspect is going to turn into a much bigger case.
It goes much deeper but let's start here Utah tech executive Erin Valenti, of Salt Lake City, went missing during atrip to the Bay Area on Monday, and now her family and friends are pleadingfor the public’s help in finding her. She was last seen in Palo Alto. (Photo courtesy of Harrison Weinstein)
Erin Valenti, a 33-year-old entrepreneur, whose husband said she had no history of mental illness, was on a business trip to Silicon Valley from Utah when she went missing Monday night. Her parents said they last heard from her close to midnight, when she was driving a rental car through residential neighborhoods of the Almaden Valley in South San Jose, off-course from her plans to drive from Palo Alto to catch a 6:40 p.m. flight home from the San Jose airport.
The young woman, with thick blond hair down to her waist and driving a gray Nissan Murano, hasn’t used her phone or credit cards since.
Her mother, Whitey Valenti, flew to San Jose from New York with her husband and two sons to join her daughter’s husband in the search. She said Saturday that her daughter is an intense, brilliant young woman who graduated with high honors from Georgetown University before entering the private equity world.
“We talked to her for hours on and off” on Monday night, Valenti said. “Her thoughts were disconnected. She talked a mile a minute. She’d say I’m coming home for Thanksgiving, then in the next she was saying she’s in the Matrix,” a reference to a science fiction movie about a virtual reality world.
The family planned to hire someone on Saturday with a drone to search the rugged areas of Quicksilver Park in the Almaden Valley. On Friday, they reviewed security camera footage at gas stations and plastered missing fliers throughout Almaden, including the areas around Redmond and Camden avenues and Washoe Drive. Verizon Wireless picked up pings in that area on Monday.
Attempts to locate her through “find my phone” apps and other digital search tools have been unsuccessful. During the phone calls with family members Monday night, Valenti said she was low on gas. With a request from the family, a San Jose police officer contacted Valenti by phone Monday night.
“The officer said she wasn’t making any sense. They drove around looking for her on Monday night and never found her,” Valenti’s husband, Harrison Weinstein, said.
Police consider her case a “voluntary” missing person and “are not doing any active search,” Weinstein said Saturday. “We are extremely upset about that.”
When reached by email Saturday, San Jose Police Sgt. Enrique Garcia didn’t explain the department’s approach to the case, saying only that “we are not sharing additional information about the investigation at this time.”
Weinstein, a psychologist, said Valenti checked out from The Nest Hotel in Palo Alto on Monday afternoon.
“There’s never any history of anything like this, no mental health diagnosis, no hospitalization, no substance use, no arrests — as clear of a record as you can get. This is incredibly unlike her,” he said. “She is an extremely high achievement, successful person.”
Valenti missed a ceremony Tuesday in Utah, where she was looking forward to receiving a “women in tech” award. S She founded her own company, Tinker Ventures, and is an avid rock climber, mountaineer and skier, her family said.
“I always say she’s intense,” her mother said, “because she always has to be the best. I’d say, ‘calm down, you don’t have to be the best at everything.’”
Valenti and Weinstein met in Palo Alto in 2003, when he was a graduate student at Palo Alto University and she was working for Summit Partners private equity firm. They’ve been married since 2011.
During her trip to California the week of Oct. 1, the couple spoke each night, he said, and everything was fine. She stayed at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Beach for an executive leadership workshop called “Create the Powerful,” and on Thursday flew to San Jose and rented the Nissan. She drove to a tech conference in Monterey late in the week before returning last weekend to the Bay Area to reconnect with old friends and colleagues.
Nothing seemed amiss until she called her parents about 3:30 p.m. on Monday after she met with a former colleague on Sand Hill Road, and said she couldn’t find her rental car. Once she found the car, she stayed on the phone with her parents, her conversation became bizarre.
“It’s a nightmare,” her mother said. “I don’t know if the car ran off the road. Why can’t they find a car? How can you hide a car?”
Sorkin and TPG’s 
