Last September, we reported that VC firm Greylock Partners was planning on having a second Hackfest after the first one was a rousing success. The Greylock Hackfest will take place on July 27 at Airbnb’s office in San Francisco. The idea of this particular event is to bring a selected group of university students from around the world for a 24-hour hackathon. During the process, the… → Read More
“In The Studio” this week hosts a special guest who doesn’t typically go on camera that often. As a result, I decided to make this particular episode of the show longer to capture my entire discussion with Greylock’s David Sze. For anyone who follows the ins and outs of venture capital, Sze’s name looms large. By now, most everyone knows of Greylock’s impressive run over the last decade, a firm… → Read More
With the rise of massive online open course platforms (a.k.a. “MOOCs”) like Khan Academy and Coursera, a new model of online learning has emerged, promising quality, affordable education at scale. This new generation of educational platforms offer alternatives to expensive degrees programs and physical classrooms in the hopes of ushering in Education 2.0 by emphasizing interactive, personalized… → Read More
Zumper, the San Francisco-based startup that’s assisting apartment hunters find the most ideal abode, announced today that it closed a $1 million seed round. The announcement comes two weeks after launching into a public beta at SF Disrupt.
The round, which closed in May, included Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, CrunchFund, NEA, Dawn Capital, The Experiment Fund, and the… → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Simon Rothman of Greylock Partners. Rothman is particularly passionate about Marketplace technology (Etsy, Kickstarter, Airbnb, etc) and how to garner success in that category.
Marketplaces are endemic to the consumer web: Largely popularized by eBay, we’ve recently seen quite a few variations on the theme, like young guns Etsy, oDesk, Airbnb, and… → Read More
Greylock Partners announced tonight that it has added a new member to its team, with Mike Hanson joining the firm this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Hanson joins Greylock from Mozilla, where he has been a principal engineer at Mozilla Labs for the last three years, playing a central role in conceiving the company’s distributed identity verification system, also known as BrowserID, and… → Read More
Greylock Partners has been long focused on two distinct areas when it comes to venture investments—consumer and enterprise. The last consumer partner hire the firm made was former CEO of Mozilla, John Lilly. And today, the firm is deepening its experience in its enterprise practice with the addition of Dev Ittycheria as Venture Partner in Greylock’s Silicon Valley office.
At Greylock… → Read More
We first covered Game Closure this spring when it opened its private beta to the world to test out its new cross-platform HTML5 game engine and SDK. The startup has since gone on to work with multiple private and public partners to bring cross-platform, multiplayer HTML5 games to the App Store, Android Marketplace, Facebook, and beyond. According to Game Closure Co-founder and CEO Michael Carter… → Read More
SupersonicAds, a startup founded by former executives of social video site Metacafe in 2010, has landed $4.2 million in financing in its first institutional funding round, which was led by Greylock Israel. The company has raised over $6 million in total funding to date.
SupersonicAds will use the fresh cash to expand the international presence of its monetization solution for social games, … → Read More
Love photos but utterly bored by wave after wave of iPhone photo sharing apps? Lytro is the company for you. This is also the company for anyone who thinks Silicon Valley has fallen into a rut of innovation-less posing. And it’s the company for anyone who complains that the Valley is more about media and marketing than brass-knuckles, hardcore technology. This is the company that jaded, cranky… → Read More
TellApart, a startup that enables eCommerce companies to use customer data to offer more personalized display advertising to both their loyal and potential customers alike, today announced that it has closed a $13 million series B round of funding. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with contributions from Greylock and others. → Read More
In Silicon Valley the terms of venture capital deals, the prices of valuations and the real stories of ousters are routinely dished, whether they always show up in the press or not. Sure it’s all off the record or on background or whispered at a coffee shop, but people who live here love what they do and when companies and valuations grow this quickly, it’s hard to keep the juicy details under… → Read More
According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.
That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and… → Read More
Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.
A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted… → Read More
In the 1990s, peer-to-peer networks were a revelation. They allowed people to pool together tiny parts of their computers, and those pooled together parts could do far more together than the average computer or connection could do on its own. It enabled everything from swapping pirated music to making cheap transcontinental calls via Skype.
But what if you could do the same thing with tiny parts… → Read More
Last week, we invited big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly into the TechCrunch Studios to talk about Hoffman’s definition of “Web 3.0″– a torrent of innovation that’s going to be unleashed by all of this personal data being collected about us. In the first segment we talked about the scary implications of this wave of companies, and in the second segment we talked about the… → Read More
It’s time for the much-awaited part two of our sit down with Internet big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly. We invited the two in the studio last week to talk about what Hoffman has called “Web 3.0″– the use of an explosion of data being collected about our real lives online.
Last week, we talked about the undeniably scary aspects of Web 3.0– data and privacy and how we can trust… → Read More
U.S. venture capital firms raised more money last quarter than in any period since 2001. The total raised for new funds was $7.7 billion, according to Dow Jones LP Source. The capital going into VC funds was up 97 percent from a year ago, when they raised $3.9 billion. (Venture capital funds benefited from an overall influx of money into U.S. private equity funds overall, which attracted a… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is part two in an in-depth series exploring the ramifications of the explosion of late stage capital being raised by the Valley’s elite venture firms. For part one, go here.
In the mid-2000s when nearly every top venture capital firm was expanding to India and China, Benchmark Capital did not share its peers’ worldly ambitions. In fact, while the firm retained its Israel fund… → Read More
In Silicon Valley it’s not just who you invest in that matters– it’s also when you invest in them. The earlier the investment, the riskier the bet. But the more jawdropping the returns if the company hits it big. It’s so lopsided, that typically just 5% of those unsure early bets create some 95% of the entire venture industry’s returns. Miss one of them, and it haunts you for years. Snag it, and… → Read More
Earlier today, we posted an interview with Matt Heist, CEO of HighGear Media, an auto blog that hit four million uniques last month. That may not sound too jaw-dropping but gearheads are a surprisingly neglected online audience, and HighGear has proven a haven for car enthusiasts and the journalists that love to write for them.
Two of the Valley’s top venture funds certainly believe HighGear has… → Read More
A while ago I wrote about how neglected the sports vertical was online, given the largest properties are mostly the same portals or online versions of old media sites that were launched in the late 1990s. It turns out another macho-content vertical is even more neglected– cars.
Quietly, a company called HighGear Media is building a pretty impressive business. It’s raised $12 million from top… → Read More
Silicon Valley venture firm Greylock Partners is adding a seasoned executive to its enterprise team today with the addition of Frank Slootman as partner. Slootman was formerly the CEO of Data Domain, which was acquired by EMC in 2009 for $2.4 billion (Greylock was one of the two founding investors of Data Domain). Slootman says he will continue on at EMC as an advisor.
At EMC, Slootman served as… → Read More
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Greylock Partners VCs Reid Hoffman and James Slavet. Reid Hoffman is Co-Founder and Chairman at LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman. James Slavet is a partner at Greylock. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/jamesslavet. → Read More
Back in August we reported that Elevation Partners had signed a letter of intent to buy secondary shares in Pandora, the long-suffering, now-hot online radio station. I wondered what ever happened to that deal, so I started digging. As it turned out, shares were sold but Elevation didn’t get them.
Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together, from several sources on different sides of the… → Read More
In the venture business being ahead of your time can be almost as bad as being late to a market. But the other great thing about the venture business is there are exceptions to every rule. Craig Donato is hoping that Oodle is the exception to that one. He’s spent more than ten years building a social classified company, powering the marketplaces for Oodle.com, MySpace and Facebook and growing to… → Read More
Reid Hoffman was my guest on Ask a VC this week, although he still considers himself more of an entrepreneur than a VC and did the call from LinkedIn, not Greylock. Oh well at least the question asking and answering was as advertised.
Among the questions he answered were who Facebook’s biggest competitive threat would be, why Google has failed in two attempts to build a social platform and… → Read More
Stealth startup Proferi closed a $6.3 million Series A funding today. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, PeopleSoft and Workday founder Dave Duffield, and Greylock Partners, who led the round. Aneel Bhusri, a Greylock partner and co-founder of Workday, will join the board, along with Duffield and Ben Horowitz.
Proferi was founded by Romanian entrepreneur Christian Gheorghe. Proferi is… → Read More
According to an SEC filing, DNS service provider OpenDNS has raised more capital, $4.5 million to be specific. We’ve confirmed the additional financing with the company and learned that this was an inside round handled by Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners (they took a stake in the company in July 2009).
Chief executive David Ulevitch (see this SFGate profile for more about the man) tells me… → Read More
Today, during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mike Arrington and Erick Schonfeld sat down with LinkedIn founder (and investor) Reid Hoffman and Greylock’s David Sze to talk a bit about investing. The big news was that Greylock was giving Hoffman a new $20 million seed fund. But the duo had some other interesting things to say.
When Mike asked how both Sze and Hoffman missed… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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