The FilmLoop-Comventures Saga

Techcrunch has come out with a story accusing Comventures about unethical practices in pulling the plug on Filmloop, and forcing them to be folded into Frabrik, one of their better performing portfolio companies.

Unfortunately, the villain of this story is a guy called Keyur Patel.

Keyur has had a string of successful turnarounds under his belt, Inktomi and Maxtor to name a few, and ComVentures, under pressure from their Limited Partners, has brought Keyur in to clean up the portfolio, and change the mix of investments into something that makes sense.

The history of Comventures is, as the name suggests, in Communications and Networking. However, “Comm” has been, by and large, a dead segment for venture of late. Comventures has thus been struggling.

Enter Keyur Patel. Portfolio clean-up is in the order.

Filmloop, which, as Michael Arrington himself has said before, has been a deadpool company, and whether or not they had $3-$5 Million still in the bank, the fact that their investors don’t want them to spend that money in prolonging their death – how is that a bad decision?

Is this the first time that VCs have decided not to send good money after bad?