“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
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs. There are few people whose impact on entrepreneurs and business in general you hear about as frequently as Clayton Christensen. Clay’s body of work includes co-founding a publicly traded company, being… → Read More
Editor’s note: Zach Noorani is a former VC and current second-year MBA student at MIT Sloan.
Isn’t it fun to ponder the awesome disruptive power that equity crowdfunding might have over the venture capital industry? The very people who spend their days plotting the disruption of any industry touched by technology are themselves displaced by hordes of technology-enabled angel investors. How… → Read More
Jungle Ventures, a VC in Singapore, has added Alon Sobol as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR). Sobol was up till last year head of mobile partnerships for Facebook in Asia, and has been an advisor for Asian startups, Mobikon and Viki, in the past year. In Jungle Ventures, he will mentor the VC’s existing portfolio companies in its space, and work together with the company’s other partners to… → Read More
“In the Studio” welcomes a co-founder of a company which went public, a native Texan who studied engineering in Silicon Valley and business on the east coast, and who, upon returning to the Valley to begin investing, encountered a different path than he originally anticipated. → Read More
Editor’s note: Brad Garlinghouse is CEO of YouSendIt, the cloud file collaboration service. He is an avid angel investor in and advisor to several consumer and enterprise tech companies.
The news that electric car company Fisker Automotive could potentially be acquired by Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor for about $425 million reminded me of an article that’s been eating at me for some… → Read More
Editor’s note: Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures at research and technology development organization SRI International.
What have we learned over more than 65 years of invention and commercialization? There are several specific ways in which our venture processes stand in contrast to what is in vogue today. These are lessons that anyone in the business of innovation should… → Read More
At the DLD conference in Munich today, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz took the stage to discuss why he and his firm Andreessen Horowitz invests in a company and its founders. Last year, he said, Andreessen Horowitz found 2,355 companies that were potentially worth investing in that passed the company’s initial screen. In the end, Andreesen Horowitz only closed 24 deals (excluding seed deals). The… → Read More
“We could go public,” SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg says, “but the cost of going public — of running a public company — outweighs the benefits.” As the founder of LAUNCH Media, which he took public before selling to Yahoo! (where he stayed for six years), Goldberg is familiar with the IPO process and isn’t in any hurry to repeat it. → Read More
As CES 2013 gets underway, it finds the Quantified Self movement to be a far more crowded market than a year ago, but as Matt Burns pointed out recently, the market is still hungry for smarter devices and “plenty of room” remains for startups for startups to push the envelope with innovation and press beyond movement and weight.
With digital health data proliferating, wearable health-tracking… → Read More
Glyph is a new mobile application, now live in the iTunes App Store, that will tell you the best credit card to use in order to earn the most valuable rewards, whether that’s cash back, travel or hotel loyalty points, discounts, or any other type of credit card-activated reward. At launch, the company supports over 250 credit cards, including the top 18 credit issuers in the U.S., representing… → Read More
Editor’s note: Dr. Paul Judge is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He is Chief Research Officer at Barracuda Networks, co-founder and Chairman of Pindrop and Limitless Smart Shot, and previously led three companies to successful exits.
A few months ago Facebook’s initial public offering became the largest tech IPO in history, initially valuing the company at over $100 billion. Over 70… → Read More
Game startups have long struggled to find funding (especially in Europe) because of a tension between being perceived to be hit-driven (like movies) while actually needing to be funded like technology companies. However this year, crowdfunding has changed much about how we think of games and their fans, and hopefully will help us find a better way. → Read More
Editor’s note: Bernard Leong is co-founder of SGE, an online portal dedicated to entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia, and This Week in Asia, a podcast dedicated to tech news in Asia. Follow him at BernardLeong.com or on Twitter: @bleongcw.
A few months ago, I made a point that winter has landed in Southeast Asia with the fast and furious expansion of Rocket Internet, the Germany-based… → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 20-city event series hosted around the world to help educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. He’s an ex-Electronic Arts employee, as well as the founder of Commonred and Vaporware Labs.
Until a few weeks ago I’d never met Dave McClure. Like many of you I have read all about him, casually Twitter followed him… → Read More
FundersClub is going to change how companies get funded. Today it launches a website designed to let anyone with as little as $1000 make equity investments in startups and earn money if they succeed.
For now you have to be an accredited investor with a net worth over $1 million or yearly earnings over $200,000 to use FundersClub. But an industry source familiar with the Y Combinator startup… → Read More
August Capital, the 17-year-old Sand Hill venture capital firm, is raising a new $550 million investment fund, according to documents filed this morning with the SEC.
August Partner Howard Hartenbaum has since confirmed the firm’s raise, which is its sixth fund to date. It closed its previous, $650 million fund in March of 2009. The firm’s new raise consists of two funds, its core fund, which… → Read More
Sequoia Capital is indeed in the process of raising a total of some $1 billion for a series of several new venture funds, we’ve confirmed with sources close to the situation.
The new raise is currently underway, and its structure as of now underlines the storied Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm’s increasing focus on having a global footprint. Legendary venture capitalist Michael… → Read More
10gen, the company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB today announced that it has secured a new $42 million financing round let by New Enterprise Associates. This round also includes participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. 10gen says that it plans to use the financing to “invest in product development for… → Read More
Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. “Google hasn’t been interested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+” says Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures founder and former Twitter board member, in his fireside chat this morning with Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference. [Update: To clarify, I believe… → Read More
At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. Speaking to a crowd at the Grind work space in New York last week, Fred Wilson addressed this ongoing shift, saying, “there’s two times as much capital in the venture capital business today than we, the professional investors who make up the venture business, can actually put to work intelligently.” Bad for VCs, Wilson… → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Onswipe CEO Jason L. Baptiste’s new book The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital.
If you pay attention to the headlines about startups getting millions of dollars of funding from investors, venture capitalists, or partnerships, you might think the fund-raising process happens overnight. It all sounds so easy: Some… → Read More
Today was a pretty big day for 500 Startups, the Silicon Valley seed venture capital firm and startup accelerator founded by outspoken tech investment extraordinaire Dave McClure. The firm disclosed in a regulatory filing that it’s halfway finished raising a brand new $50 million round of funding, the second in its two-year history and a significant step up from the $29 million investment that it… → Read More
As a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Aileen Lee has been a part of one of the most well-respected and established venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. But after 13 years with the firm, Aileen Lee is shifting her focus in a very interesting way — she’s starting a new venture fund focused on smaller, “seed-stage” investments. This is the first time that a Kleiner partner has… → Read More
A lot of things have changed in Silicon Valley in recent years — apps have access to a plug-and-play social infrastructure provided by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the mobile boom has truly made the post-PC world a reality, services such as cloud computing allow startups to function at leaner levels than ever before, and so on. But for founders and investors, perhaps one of the most… → Read More
The Crowdfund Act, a bill to reduce restrictions on regular people investing in privately held companies, passed through the United States Senate today with flying colors in a 73-26 vote, after passing through the House of Representatives this past fall. But legislative matters are by definition quite complex (which is, of course, ostensibly why we elect people to deal with them on a full-time… → Read More
Don’t be fooled by Bing Gordon’s buttoned-up sounding job title as a partner at top tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers — he’s known as easily one of the most fun people to talk to in the tech industry. So when we saw him in Austin, Texas at the South By Southwest Interactive conference this weekend, we pulled him aside for an interview with TechCrunch… → Read More
Following in the tradition of “Shit Silicon Valley Says” and other Shit ______ Says memes, August Capital’s David Hornick has made “Shit VCs Say.”
There are some gems in here, including: → Read More
Andreessen Horowitz is definitely killing it these days. The unconventional VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz is less than three years old, but just raised its third fund. The amount raised: $1.5 billion. That puts Andreessen Horowitz in the rarified realm of only a handful of VC firms with funds of that size.
And how long did it take to raise all that money? “It took about 3… → Read More
The micro-VCs are growing up. Case in point: Jeff Clavier, who started out as an angel investor backing Web 2.0 companies and then transitioned his portfolio into a more formal venture firm, SoftTech VC. Clavier just finished raising a total of $55 million for SoftTech’s third fund. SoftTech’s main focus is on three areas: mobile, next-generation e-commerce, and cloud-based services. → Read More
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