Breaking news: TNInvestco was a bad idea.
It was basically a give-away by Tennessee's former governor, Phil Bredesen, to some politically-connected venture capital investors. It is awfully hard to take this program seriously, and I don't. In essence, it amounts to the government saying, to some very plugged-in investors, "Here's $20 million for each of you. See how you do investing for a few years, in Tennessee companies. At the end of it, give the taxpayers back half, and you keep the rest. But pay yourself a fee from the corpus in the meanwhile, of course."
Not only was the concept very poor, but the oversight is giving cause for some concern, too. This is according to a piece by Ken White in the Nashville Post, and another from Brian Reisinger at the Nashville Business Journal.
[Edited 12/10/12]
