Venture Capital

A suave Main Line swindler has pleaded guilty to federal securities and mail fraud charges in California, four days before his trial was to begin. Thomas D. Dempsey, 52, entered the plea on Friday in U.S. District Court in Santa Barbara and will be sentenced there on Oct. 28. He faces a maximum sentence of 30 years' imprisonment and a fine of $1.5 million. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey B. Isaacs, who handled the case in California, said he did not expect Dempsey to be tried in Pennsylvania.

Raymond R. Rafferty Jr., 59, of Rosemont, a well-known Philadelphia attorney and former banker, venture capitalist, and publisher of the Legal Intelligencer, died of pancreatic cancer Tuesday at Lankenau Hospital. Mr. Rafferty, a graduate of Villanova University and its Law School, formerly served as senior vice president of First Pennsylvania Bank and was a former partner in the Philadelphia law firm of Stradley, Ronon, Stevens & Young. In the early 1980s, he switched into venture capital and in 1982, he founded the Delaware Valley Venture Group, a professional association for the venture capital industry in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

RESEARCHERS for the Kauffman Foundation surveyed more than 500 founders of successful businesses in high-growth industries to see what they had in common. These are some attributes that stood out: The successful entrepreneur's average age was 40. Nearly 70 percent were married when they started their company, and nearly 60 percent had at least one child. More than 90 percent grew up in middle-class or upper-lower-class families. Their average birth order was second in the family.

Most venture-capital funds look to make money for their investors. The Sustainable Jobs Fund (SJF) hopes to do that and a little bit more. The fund's focus also is to help inner-city residents find long-term work and, at the same time, to help the environment. "We use venture capital to generate jobs in economically distressed areas," SJF comanaging director Sandra Walker said. "The whole concept is, we're not here to generate jobs in suburban America, where our target employees have to travel to get there.

In the last two years, the pension plans for Pennsylvania's state employees and teachers have lost nearly $15 billion - about a seventh of their total value. Now, like a gambler doubling his bets, those plans are wagering that big, risky investments in small, unproven companies will help recoup the losses. If they're right, everyone wins: This strategy will pay for the pension increases that legislators approved last year for themselves and other future retirees, without boosting taxes.

Pension plans and other big investors keep pouring money into venture capital funds, ignoring last year's VC-fueled tech-stock collapse as a mere pothole on their road to high-tech riches. The Philadelphia area's biggest venture capital group, TL Ventures of Wayne, said yesterday it had raised $675 million for "early-stage companies in information technology, communications and life sciences. " That nearly doubles TL's total investments, to $1.4 billion. Investors include the Pennsylvania State Employees Retirement System and the City of Philadelphia's pension plan, each of which pumped more than $10 million into the TL V investment fund, according to managing director Stanley Tims 2d. Past TL investors have included Safeguard Scientifics Inc., the Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System, the Pew Charitable Trusts and banks such as First Union, Mellon and PNC. TL invests nationally, with special emphasis on Texas and Southern California.

While the Philadelphia region has 88 colleges and research centers and attracts hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and grants, there's a gap in turning academic discoveries and ideas into businesses and commercial ventures, a new study says. Philadelphia stacks up pretty well among nine metropolitan areas in some measures of connecting promising academic innovations to industry - called "technology transfer" - in order to promote regional economic development, according to a report by the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia.

When I was in first grade, local banking officials came to my school to open an account for each student. We saw a slide show about the bank and the route our money would take throughout the community. Every other month a teller would arrive at our school, collect the money we had saved, and post it in our passbook. At the end of the year, we were invited to come to the "big" bank downtown to see where our money was deposited. One summer morning my mother took my sister and me to the bank.

GVOX Inc., which develops and sells instructional music software and provides online programs for music teachers, furloughed half of its 40 employees yesterday. Dan Werther, GVOX's chief strategy officer, said the 10-year-old company, based in Philadelphia's Northern Liberties section, was making a transition from developing music technology products to selling and marketing those it already has created. As a result, he said GVOX had placed on furlough those employees whose jobs were not central to the company's new focus.

It's a good time to ask for money - if you're a big corporation that can afford to issue bonds at today's record-low interest rates, or a well-connected real estate firm looking to fund distressed projects at fat discounts, or a small company in one of the high-tech sweet spots that wealthy private investors love. It's an awful time to ask for money - if you're a small business trying to borrow from regional banks caught between fallen real estate values that have devalued loan portfolios and the newly tough Washington bank examiners, who want to make sure the easy-money years are really over and lenders aren't taking too many risks.