Editor’s note: This post is a response to an ongoing educational debate over the efficacy of Peter Thiel’s fellowship, which encourages young entrepreneurs to “stop out” of school. The post addresses Vivek Wadhwa’s post “Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel” and Sarah Lacy’s “Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.”
This week, I invited Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital back to Ask a VC, because it’s been a while and there were a ton of questions we didn’t get to last time. Sabet is in the middle of some of the most interesting companies on the Web today including Tumblr, Twitter and Boxee. And as you can see from his last time on the show, he’s a great guest. Last time we talked about everything… → Read More
Ask a VC has been sporadic with my travel schedule, but we’re back this week. My guest is Izhar Armony of Charles River Ventures. He brings a different perspective to the show for a few reasons. For one thing, he’s from the East Coast. And as a former member of the Israeli army– aka the country’s entrepreneurial finishing school– and a former exec for Tel Aviv-based… → Read More
Mike Maples, my guest on Ask a VC this week, is known for backing some of the best Web 2.0 entrepreneurs early on and hunting down “Thunder Lizards” or the 15 truly disruptive companies that hatch each year. But some of his most celebrated investments have turned controversial. In this video he defends Digg’s honor against some tough reader questions and defends Chegg’s co-founder and chairman… → Read More
I’m leaving the country for a few weeks, so I’m trying to get a few episodes of Ask a VC in the can before I go. We have two exciting guests we’re taping this week: Mike Maples of Floodgate Fund and Peter Barris of NEA. Maples was early on both the super angel and Web 2.0 bandwagons, investing in companies like Digg, Twitter and Chegg. He’s noted as one of the guys who… → Read More
Ask a VC was on hiatus for a few weeks, but your Friday investor-talk fix is back. Our guest this week is Tony Conrad, partner at True Ventures and founder of About.Me, which recently sold to AOL along with TechCrunch.
There was a pent-up flood of questions this week, and Conrad addressed many of them. In case you want to skip around here they are in order:
-Why does True Ventures invest in… → Read More
This week’s Ask a VC has a different twist, since we had a different kind of VC on the show, John O’Farrell Andressen Horowitz’s guru on business development and deal-making.
The questions you asked O’Farrell are below. As usual, feel free to watch the whole show or use the links to skip ahead to your question.
“Have you ever invested in a single employee startup? Would this be a situation… → Read More
We had a last minute cancellation on Ask a VC this week, so filling in is Satish Dharmaraj who was our second ever guest on the show. For those who don’t remember, Dharmaraj is a relatively new partner at Redpoint Venture Partners, after selling Zimbra to Yahoo for $350 million and Onebox, which he sold for $850 million. Not bad.
Dharmaraj focuses on a lot of Redpoint’s consumer Web portfolio… → Read More
Who cares about enterprise software? Apparently you do. Even though I posted this solicitation for Ask a VC questions late on a Thursday, I woke up this morning to one of the better inboxes of questions since the show began.
Our guest in your virtual hot seat was Jason Green of Emergence Capital. Like a lot of things in tech, Green is a believer that the hype in software-as-a-service may have… → Read More
After a Holiday hiatus, Ask a VC is back and we’re kicking off the new year with Jason Green of Emergence Capital. Emergence was started to fund the software-as-a-service craze of the early 2000s. That wave has had mixed results, but Emergence had several of the big hits including Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. Green himself was also an investor in hits like DoubleClick, aQuantive and… → Read More
Habib Kairouz of Rho Ventures was my guest on Ask a VC this week, and as I mentioned earlier this week, he’s had a range of Web exits in the last ten years. He’s also seen tremendous changes in his home tech market of New York. It’s gone from silly Silicon Alley days to tumbleweeds and now to a thriving hub that’s stolen Boston’s East Coast venture thunder, at least when it comes to consumer… → Read More
My guest on Ask a VC this week was Dana Stalder of Matrix Partners, a newbie in the venture world, but a seasoned manager and entrepreneur in Valley Internet circles. Stalder answered a range of reader questions including basic advice for pitching Matrix and how Google failing to acquire Groupon impacted the social commerce space. (Matrix is an investor in the number three player BuyWithMe and… → Read More
Nic Brisbourne of DFJ Esprit is in town this week — along with seemingly every successful Brit– so we asked him to be our first in-studio guest ever on Ask a VC. Brisbourne is well positioned to answer any questions about the funding scene in Europe, which last I checked was one of the only markets in the world where investing activity was actually declining this year. Are things… → Read More
My guest on Ask A VC this week is Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures. He’s also a professional kiteboarder. You may ask: Why would a guy who has been a VC since 1991 need kiteboarding sponsors? That was my first question.
Generally in this video we talk about how the venture business has changed during the last 20 years and how kiteboarding has changed over the last 10 years. There are a lot of… → Read More
Welcome to part two of Ask a VC in Southeast Asia. This week, it’s Wilson Cuaca and Chandra Tjan of East Ventures. I shot this video in Singapore, but they invest primarily in Indonesia where East is one of the only traditional early stage VC firms.
Over delicious crab, we discuss the Web opportunities in Southeast Asia, whether startups should focus locally or globally, and perhaps the most… → Read More
Since I’m reporting in Southeast Asia the next few weeks, I decided to bring Ask a VC with me on the road. I’m asking your questions to two firms. (Hopefully one or both conversations will be over some delicious chili crab.) First up is James Chan of Neoteny Labs– best known as Joi Ito’s fund. Neotany is a $5 million Asian VC fund, and while Ito is based in Dubai, the… → Read More
This morning Jason Calacanis made a quip that Ron Conway is such a prolific angel investor that all presenting companies at TC50 were getting $50,000 just for walking on the same stage with him. Conway made a face, so Paul Carr and I grabbed him back stage and asked his thoughts on frequently being called a “Spray and Pray” investor. As evidence that he doesn’t invest in everything, Conway also… → Read More
The Traveling Geeks gathered together for a great turnout (despite the torrential downpours) at the Guardian’s Media Talk (live) podcast. Our agenda was to discuss journalism and it’s rapid change in the 21st Century. Listen here. While more and more newspapers lose their audience and their advertisers, print is quite quickly, becoming obsolete. In the video below you will see Sarah… → Read More
Over the next few weeks, you will see a new byline on TechCrunch. We are fortunate to have tech journalist and blogger Sarah Lacy filling in as a guest writer here over the next few weeks while Michael takes some much-deserved time off.
Sarah is the author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (available at Amazon), she is the co-host of … → Read More
At CES, Palm announced that the new iPhone/BlackBerry/Android KILLA would be out in the first half of this year. This much we know for certain, but rumors of its price and launch date have already been floating around for some time. And now Nicholas Deleon’s favorite person in the world, Sarah Lacy, Twittered earlier today that Sprint employees were already being trained on the Pre. → Read More
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