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So do most of the people here on FR carrying water for Romney.

Here’s one of the most important distinctions about VC firms:

“A key attribute of a qualifying venture firm is that it does not borrow or otherwise use leverage, except for limited short-term borrowing.”

As an example: VC firms in Silicon Valley take in money from qualified investors who can withstand the risk of losing all of their investment and they invest the pooled capital in highly speculative startup companies at an early stage in the company’s life - often before they’ve done any IPO or broadened their capital base. We’re talking of companies with as few as a half-dozen employees to companies with a hundred or more employees.

The potential of return for a successful early investment is huge - eg, Sequoia’s investment in Cisco Systems prior to IPO of about $15 million returned hundreds of millions by the time they got out.

Bain Capital’s controversial investments were NOT venture deals. They were what we’d now call “private equity” and what was then called “leverage buy-out” deals in the 80’s and early 90’s. The typical pattern of their deal was to find a struggling company with substantial assets on their balance sheet, buy control of the company, load it down with a huge debt load, pull out their investment *and* the assets off the balance sheet with a large dividend issuance to the LBO firm, then leave the hollow husk for BK court or breakup and selloff. That’s NOT venture capital at work.

The number of people here on FR who don’t know what Bain Capital does is quite large. I’d estimate from the pro-Bain/Romney comments I’ve seen that 95% of the people defending Romney haven’t a clue what a VC is vs. a LBO/PE firm.

Most people haven’t ever met with a VC, don’t know what a “term sheet” is, nor what VC’s want in return for their investment, how VC firms identify firms to invest in, or anything like it.

I do. Been in Silly Valley, seen and dealt with VC’s, know what they do and how they do it.

Bain is not a VC firm. They have a offshoot that does some VC investing, but it is a very small part of their game and to my knowledge, nothing that Bain did in the way of VC investing has any controversy attached to it.

The PE/LBO side of their business, on the other hand, is a wonderful example of pillage and plunder by ‘financial engineering’ created by Harvard MBA’s throughout the 80’s to today. Is what they do legal? Sure. So was making loans to people who couldn’t repay them and then selling the loans to Fannie and Freddie. So was packing up sub-prime crap loans into CDO’s and peddling them to pension funds, because the prospectus for the CDO’s said in the very fine print that things could go wrong. And hey, the ratings agencies put a AAA on that crap... so ergo, by law, it wasn’t crap, right?

Just because it is legal doesn’t mean it is ethical, nor does it make Romney a qualified candidate for POTUS.

BTW, Want to see some future plunder and destruction? Just keep your eyes peeled on Remington and other gun companies owned by “The Freedom Group,” which is owned and controlled by the PE firm Cerberus.