Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is leading a new $5 million investment in Business Insider, the blog network founded by Henry Blodget that focuses on business, tech and other news. The investment was mentioned in an internal memo from Blodget to staff — published by BI itself. Other investors in this round include RRE Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners, notes Bloomberg. This… → Read More
Zynga, the social games company that is now expanding its business into real-money online gambling, is today announcing a new heavyweight on its board of directors: John Doerr, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. → Read More
Angel investing in Europe is getting another boost: DFJ Esprit, a UK-based member of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson network of VCs, is preparing to close its second EIS Angel Co-Investment fund, up to £10 million ($15 million) that will be used to help angels invest as syndicate partners alongside DFJ Esprit’s larger investments from its institutional funds, with the latest of these valued at £90… → Read More
Back in December, the sort-of-Series-A-crunch led VC analysis firm CB Insights to predict that more than 1,000 startups will be orphaned at the seed stage. But it seems there is silver-lining to the seed boom/cash crunch — at least for CB Insights itself, which is selling a list of “dying” startups. The price-tag for the list? Almost $5,000. → Read More
Brian Pokorny, who led photo-sharing service Daily Booth and Batch into a talent acquisition by Airbnb, is returning to SV Angel as a general partner. He has a long history with the firm. He’s been a strategic partner of SV Angel since 2009, before he left to be CEO of DailyBooth. He has also worked with Ron Conway on angel investing since 2006. Pokorny personally has stakes in companies… → Read More
Menlo Ventures said today that Karl Mehta, the tech entrepreneur perhaps best known for founding virtual goods monetization startup PlaySpan and leading it as CEO through its $190 million sale to Visa, has joined the Silicon Valley venture capital firm as a partner. → 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. As an Electronic Arts’ intern eight years ago, I asked Bing Gordon then the chief creative officer and the only remaining early founding team member, a question about vision. “How can I know where the… → Read More
While the number of seed financing deals has ballooned over the last few years as the cost of starting a company has fallen, the pace of Series A venture deals hasn’t kept up. Now it looks like the bottleneck between the seed stage and the Series A level has gotten even tighter, according to a survey from Fenwick & West, one of the best-known law firms for startups in Silicon Valley. In… → Read More
Sitting in Snobar, a cool bar shaded by fir trees in deepest Ramallah, George Khadder is practically thumping the table as he speaks. A Palestinian who has worked in Silicon Valley, he talks passionately about his desire for Palestinian entrepreneurs to control their own destiny. “I came back from Silicon Valley because I believed I could affect change,” he tells me. It’s a sentiment that has been… → Read More
“In the Studio” opens the spring of 2013 by welcoming one of the most well-known “super angels,” who arrived to Valley, by way of Boston, Philadelphia, and Istanbul, in the mid-1990s, held early product management stints at Silicon Graphics and a little startup called Google, which ultimately catapulted his career into what it is today. → Read More
Emergence Capital Partners, an enterprise-focused venture firm that has backed Salesforce.com, Yammer and Box, just took on a new operating partner with the hiring of Alison Berkley Wagonfeld. She comes from Harvard Business School’s California Research Center down in Menlo Park. Before that, she co-created QuickenLoans at Intuit, which eventually became one of the biggest online home loan… → Read More
Make way for one more big venture fund coming out of Europe, this one with some colorful backers. Oliver and Marc Samwer — founders of the Rocket Internet startup incubator among other things — have teamed up with Fabian Siegel, one of the people behind online food delivery company Delivery Hero, to launch Global Founders Capital, a new €150 million ($194 million) fund aimed at any and all… → 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” this week welcomes a Silicon Valley veteran with decades of operational and investing experience under his belt, an active board member to many successful companies, and who holds a wealth of experience around financial services and tools for both individuals and businesses.
Mark Goines, a Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, brings a true wealth of experience in financial products… → Read More
Intel Capital, the venture arm of Intel, boasts over 120 portfolio companies to have listed publicly on the NASDAQ alone. In celebration of that, President Arvind Sodhani rang yesterday’s closing bell, and we caught up with him to chat about the future of the Ultrabook platform, wearable computing, and advancements in voice and gesture technology.
Intel Capital has actually invested in two of… → 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
Jared Fliesler, who oversaw growth and user acquisition at Square, is crossing over to the venture side from the startup world and joining Matrix Partners as a general partner. A firm that has been around for more than 30 years, Matrix does Series A rounds in the enterprise and consumer space. It’s bi-coastal with offices in both Boston and Palo Alto. They are in companies like ZestFinance… → Read More
As consumers and businesses continue to move to a multi-screen world where they expect services like payments, and their e-commerce back-end systems, to work the same wherever they are, e-commerce companies that are rising to the challenge are seeing just rewards. In the latest development, today Hybris Software, a specialist in multi-channel commerce solutions, announced that it has raised a $30… → Read More
Update: And in true old media fashion, the investment has now been formally announced by Conde Nast itself, some 15 hours after the news broke. The investment will be used for Farfetch to enter into new markets (geographical and otherwise). José Neves, founder and CEO of Farfetch notes: “This investment will fuel our entry to new markets while assisting our growth in existing ones. Our goal to… → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred and is ex-Electronic Arts.
I met Ryan Smith about nine years ago in a college apartment in Provo Utah. We were both attending school, and after asking him what he was working on he replied, “I’m building… → Read More
Keith Rabois is going to be a full-time investor after more than a decade in operating roles. And fittingly, he’ll be doing that as a partner at Khosla Ventures — a high-powered firm as feisty, contrarian, and entrepreneur-focused as he is. Rather than being put off, Silicon Valley had jumped at the chance to hire him after he left his COO role at Square over an employee’s sexual… → Read More
Fortumo — a specialist in mobile carrier billing, which lets users to pay for apps and goods in apps without coughing up credit card numbers — is today raising its game a bit against competitors like Bango (partner to Facebook, Amazon and more), Boku and PayPal’s Zong — the Estonian-hatched startup has announced a new growth round — which TechCrunch understands to be in the region of $10… → Read More
You’re a new startup on the tech scene in Europe, perhaps you’re a brand new entrepreneur. One day you get an email saying you’ve been shortlisted as a finalist for a “prestigious” award, putting you in the “Top 200″ in Europe, out of “hundreds of applications”. Of course, hungry for exposure, you jump at the chance only to be told that you’ll be charged $3,820 (€2,900) to pitch to investors… → Read More
The #1 request I hear when talking to founders in San Francisco is: “We are hiring engineers. Know any?” We all know this is a big issue that’s only getting worse, and so do most of the investors. But, I’m now starting to hear this so often, I’m beginning to worry that all the conventional tactics simply won’t work. Early-stage startups that don’t start experimenting with new ideas to source… → Read More
“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a successful founder, entrepreneur, and angel investor, who happened to amass a truly eclectic set of experiences in the Valley, from running a venture-backed company to an acquisition, from investing in some of the most iconic and bold consumer-technology companies in the past decade, and going back to the well again to run his current startup… → Read More
Israeli early stage high-tech startup VC fund Magma Venture Partners, whose current portfolio includes online video-editing software developer Magisto, mobile analytics company Onavo, and navigation app maker Waze to name three, has completed fundraising on its third fund — Magma III — exceeding its target of $100 million. Magma said it manages more than $300 million to-date. → Read More
“In the Studio” opens up February by hosting a former Wall Street derivatives trader turned early-stage venture investor in San Francisco. Renee DiResta, an Associate with O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), is relatively new to the West Coast startup scene. After finishing a CS degree in college, she worked in the fast-paced world of trading derivatives on Wall Street. During that time, DiResta… → Read More
Earlier today, CNNMoney broke the news that well-known Googler/YouTuber Hunter Walk and former Googler Satya Patel would be starting a new VC firm called Homebrew. What wasn’t known was whether Walk would be leaving Google to pursue Homebrew full time, but he has confirmed that to be the case. The last time we spoke with Walk, he was passionately explaining all of the things he gets to work… → Read More
Samsung continues to make good on its commitment to investing in more startups that will help it build out its portfolio of services beyond hardware. Today the company announced that it has taken a strategic investment in Cloudant — a specialist in cloud-based mobile enterprise solutions, specifically around the area of NoSQL and database-as-a-service technology. By way of an investment from… → Read More
“In The Studio” rolls on this week by welcoming an experienced international venture capitalist who has spent time within the storied firms of Wall Street while also participating on a three-time national tennis championship team in college before helping guide his current firm into some of the best growth-stage deals in the Valley and guiding many companies as they expand into China. → Read More
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