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 raised in its first round. 500 Startups also named four new partners — Paul Singh, Christen O’Brien, Bedy Yang, and George Kellerman — who will help select and manage the more than 100 investments that the firm makes each year.
So we were very happy to have McClure as a guest today on TechCrunch TV. Because of regulatory limitations on what companies can say while they’re in the process of raising funding, his hands were tied on lots of topics on the details of the new fund — but we were still able to get some great details from him on the future direction of 500 Startups and the venture funding world in general. → 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 significant shifts has come from the increasingly common occurrence of late-stage funding rounds that are largely secondary stock purchasing situations.
In a panel discussion held last night by Wealthfront at the Rosewood Hotel, the longtime Silicon Valley dealmaking hotspot, VC heavyweights Sameer Gandhi of Accel Partners, Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, and Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital discussed the upsides and downsides of this seemingly unstoppable trend. → 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 basis.) So we talked to Chance Barnett, the founder and CEO of Crowdfunder.com, to get an idea of what this could really mean for startups, potential investors, and the technology community at large. → 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 TV. → 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
Last week at Le Web, Alexia interviewed Sean Parker and Shervin Pishevar onstage in what turned out to be one of the most-buzzed about sessions. Here is the full video for your weekend watching pleasure. It’s a great discussion that ranges across the state of startups, venture capital, music, and politics .
Parker bemoans the surplus of venture capital for its effect of diluting the talent in the tech industry, a point he’s made before. “It prevents the aggregation of talent around great ideas,” he says. He emphasizes the need for a great team from the get-go. “People are the greatest asset class,” Pishevar agrees. The conversation quickly turns to Gowalla, which recently was acquired by Facebook, and why it failed to take on Foursquare. “If you don’t fail, you haven’t tried hard enough,” says Pishevar. → Read More
The venture capital industry is going through a ton of disruptions lately. One of the better explanations I’ve heard recently of what is going on comes from Duncan Davidson, a managing partner at Bullpen Capital who gave a great talk on the subject at TechCrunch Tokyo last week. I interviewed him backstage on video, where he summarized his views.
Just as there are now legions of “lean startups” which require less capital to build a product, Davidson argues that a “lean finance model” is also needed → Read More
In Part III of my interview with Accel partner Jim Breyer, we get into the disruptions occurring in the venture capital industry itself with the abundance of angel money and the impact that is having on traditional VC firms. In the video interview above, I ask him whether he thinks there is a Series A Crunch. “I don’t think there is,” he states, echoing what Paul Lee has argued here before. Breyer counters that venture capital is not “uniformly distributed” and there are some markets, such as Brazil, where even seed stage capital is not plentiful enough.
“It is the best time over the last decade that I can think of to be an entrepreneur,” says Breyer. → Read More
In this video interview, I ask VC Jim Breyer what he thinks about the current IPO market and whether he agrees with Steve Case, who argues that we need more IPOs to create more jobs—“90% of job growth is after a company goes public.”
Breyer disagrees with Case that IPOs are the answer. At About the 2:35 mark, he says that the IPO process could be made a little bit easier, but ushering in a flood of IPOs could cause more problems than it solves. ” What I would never want to see is a repeat of when public companies were created twice a day and investors lost 80% of their money,” he cautions. → Read More
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