Connie Loizos
Silicon Valley Editor
The Latest from Connie Loizos
Deal terms, fatality rates and the drawbacks of credit lines; a view from today’s most active VC firm
Yesterday, we had the chance to catch up with Fabrice Grinda, a French, New York-based serial entrepreneur who co-founded the free classifieds site OLX — now owned by Prosus — and who has
Frustration and anger after SPV platform Assure dumps users at the curb ahead of holidays
Over the last decade or so, the once-clubby world of startup investing has been cracked wide open by a number of innovations, including special purpose vehicles (SPVs), which are essentially pop-up ve
Is ChatGPT a ‘virus that has been released into the wild’?
More than three years ago, this editor sat down with Sam Altman for a small event in San Francisco soon after he’d left his role as the president of Y Combinator to become CEO of the AI company
A healthcare brand for women begins to take shape
Until last year, healthcare funding continued to shatter previous records. But there remains at least one very big hole in the industry. No one has yet created a broad, leading women’s healthcar
A data-driven duo just raised roughly $350M to fund seed-stage startups with metrics
Nnamdi Okike and Aaron Holiday trust data over the kind of pattern matching that most VCs swear by. It’s not surprising, given their backgrounds. Before launching their venture firm, 645 Venture
This secondary markets expert says we haven’t hit bottom yet
Earlier today, we talked with Phil Haslett, the co-founder and now chief strategy officer of EquityZen, a 10-year-old, New York-based secondary marketplace that connects accredited buyers with private
Was Sam Bankman-Fried’s appearance a performance?
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried talked from an undisclosed location in the Bahamas today with reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin for a DealBook event, a discussion that his legal team “very much” d
VCs and red flags
Earlier today, renowned VC Bill Gurley put together a list of the many “red flags” that VCs should have paid closer attention to when funding FTX, suggesting in a tweet that this summary o
Hacker George Hotz, long a frenemy of Elon Musk, signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter
A lot has been made of Twitter’s shrinking workforce, which is reportedly at 2,300 people, down from the 7,500 employed by the company when new owner Elon Musk took control. While we posited tha
Drive Capital’s investors reach a fork in the road
Drive Capital was founded by two former Sequoia Capital Partners looking to start anew in the Midwest. But investors in the Columbus, Ohio-based firm have had a bumpy ride of late, and according to ou
The exodus at Twitter may have been the plan all along, maybe?
When Peter Clowes last updated his LinkedIn profile, he listed his role as “Layoff Survivor” at Twitter. Yet Clowes, a senior software engineer who joined the company in the spring of 2020
Jack Selby of Thiel Capital is using a new VC fund to invest in Arizona startups
Jack Selby, a former PayPal exec and the longtime managing director of Thiel Capital who attracted some attention years back for his low-key largesse, has a new, $110 million venture fund that he inte
BoomPop gains traction by designing high-end off-sites for a remote-first world
There’s nothing sexy about corporate retreats. But BoomPop, a 26-person, San Francisco-based outfit that the startup studio Atomic launched in 2020, is managing to infuse some pizazz into the lo
Bling Capital has $212M to invest across two new funds — and two coasts
Ben Ling, a prolific angel investor turned venture capitalist, has never put a lot of stock in the need for a new, decentralized internet. It’s why the firm he founded almost exactly four years
MadKudu lands $18M led by Felicis for its lead scoring platform
It’s hard to get ahead when you’re just trying to stay afloat. But startups weathering the downturn with fewer employees and a smaller budget are finding ways to survive and move forward b
Crypto VC David Pakman on FTX: An ‘entirely avoidable tragedy’
If you want to better understand exactly how big a deal it is that the cryptocurrency exchange FTX just imploded, you could do worse than talk with David Pakman, an entrepreneur turned venture capital
Outgoing YC President Geoff Ralston: The market is changing; YC’s terms are not
Last week at Web Summit, we were asked to interview outgoing Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston about the past, present and future of the popular accelerator program. We covered a lot of ground duri
Formula 1’s Toto Wolff, accused of running his team remotely, leans into software even more
Toto Wolff, the 50-year-old Austrian chief executive, team principal and part-owner of the Mercedes Formula 1 team who was recently described by The New Yorker as someone who might breeze “past
‘CZ’ Zhao on why Binance bet big on Twitter despite Musk’s machinations
It’s hard to imagine committing to invest $500 million in someone’s vision for a company only to watch that individual almost immediately try to distance himself from it. But Changpeng