VCs + Investors
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REVEALED: The Secret Hangouts Of Silicon Valley VCs
Boonsri Dickinson, Business Insider Silicon Valley feels a lot like a big high school. Venture capitalists are on the hunt for the next big idea, so they'll meet with you if you make your idea compelling enough. And if you know the right person who can "connect" you.
6 Practical Gadgets This VC Would Die Without
It's day six of our ten-day investor gift guide series. We've asked ten venture capitalists and angel investors for their favorite apps, technology and gadgets. We'll be featuring one VC's list per day; at the end of the series we'll compile a master list of the coolest gift ideas. We asked Ben Lerer of Lerer Ventures and Thrillist to kick off the series. We've featured David Tisch of Techstars , Nikhil Kalghatgi of Softbank Capital , Rob Go of NextView Ventures and Richard Kerby of IVP . My birthday this year actually falls on Cyber Monday so my buddy sent me this hideous calendar of cats on behalf of his newborn son.
Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough” | TechCrunch
Peter Thiel is a grump, but a special kind of grump. He is a dystopian utopian (if such a person can exist). The investor who wrote the first check for Facebook both believes in the power of technology to transform our lives, and is perennially disappointed by it. A lengthy profile in the November 28, 2011 edition of the New Yorker (summary here) states: “his main lament is that America—the country that invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer—has lost its belief in the future.” It is an argument he’s made before.Jack Dorsey in 140 Characters or Less - Forbes
If Jack Dorsey could be described in 140 characters or less, he might be summed up as: @Jack is the best kind of mutation in the evolution story of today’s #techonomy. This is the opinion of Shoshana Zuboff , a retired professor of Harvard Business School and co-author of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism . She spoke after Dorsey in an opening session of yesterday’s Techonomy conference titled “21 st Century Individuals vs. 20 th Century Organizations.”
Mamoon Hamid On Why He Left USVP For Social+Capital - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ
By Deborah Gage Details about Social+Capital Partnership , a new venture fund formed by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, have been trickling out since last month, when Palihapitiya said he nabbed two young partners from USVP , one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture firms. Mamoon Hamid says the new firm he has joined, Social+Capital Partnership, is well-positioned to take advantage of the next big opportunities.
Are Entrepreneurs Backing Themselves Into A Corner By Focusing On “Women Things”? | TheGrindstone
Earlier this week Mashable technology journalist Jolie O’Dell tweeted , “Women: Stop making start-ups about fashion, shopping & babies. At least for the next few years. You’re embarrassing me.” This created some commotion in the Tweetiverse amongst female entrepreneurs, some in agreement and some in absolute disagreement.
When Peter Thiel ventures outside for a run, typically in the early-early morning, when the fog drifts low and slow into the San Francisco Bay, he's often drawn to what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "the end of land and land of beginning." That means the San Francisco waterfront—especially the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of pathway hugging the marshy shoreline from Crissy Field to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. Aesthetically, the appeal is obvious—a postcard view of the bridge and the bay, the lapping tidal rhythm, that sort of thing—but for Thiel, a 43-year-old investor and entrepreneur whose knack for anticipating the next big thing has yielded him a $1.5 billion fortune and an iconic, even delphic status in Silicon Valley, there's a symbolic angle as well. This waterline is precisely where the Western frontier ended, where unlimited opportunity finally hit its limit. It's also where, if Thiel is betting correctly, the next—and most audacious—frontier begins.
The Billionaire King of Techtopia: Critical Eye : Details
Perspectives: A Conversation with Jason Calacanis | OpenView Labs
Jason Calacanis is an Internet entrepreneur and blogger, perhaps best known as the co-founder of WebLogs, Inc. , which was acquired by Time Warner/AOL in 2005. He began his entrepreneur career during the dot-com boom as the founder of Silicon Valley Reporter , a trade magazine covering New York’s Internet and new media industry. Jason is currently the CEO and Founder at Mahalo.com Inc. , a human-based search engine and knowledge exchange that launched in 2007. He is also an angel investor with Gowalla Incorporated and founder of ThisWeekIn.com . He recently worked to create the first LAUNCH Conference, an event aimed at generating funding for new startups, products and services. When building a company, how have you spent the bulk of your time?Justin Bieber Invests In Venture Capital | Mogulite
The next hot venture capital hotshot? Justin Bieber. Say whaaaat? Bieber’s been a mogul for some time, with a licensed perfume business to accompany his record career. Now, he’s apparently funding a web startup. What kind of startup?
Women in Venture Capital
Roundtable: What is Your Best Advice for CEOs and Founders?
We tracked down some of the brightest minds in venture capital to learn more about what makes great companies tick. In the first of this two-part series, Phin Barnes, Brad Feld, Rob Go and Alex Taussig share the advice they give most often to CEOs and founders in their portfolios. Recruit and hire a team you would be honored to work for, and create a culture of “no ego” where the best ideas win. A startup is a race against time in a world of extremely limited resources and imperfect information. I worry when founders take too long to make a decision and work to collect more information rather than trusting their instincts and being decisive about strategy, staffing, or fund-raising.
Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More
Lightbank Adds Former Playboy And NBC Exec Paul Lee As Partner
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Mercury News interview: Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner, Floodgate Fund in Palo Alto - San Jose Mercury News
Wong Sees Venture Capital Shift to Mobile Applications - The Washington Post
???initialComments:true! pubdate:07/08/2011 20:31 EDT!Venture Capitalist Reid Hoffman - WSJ.com
Photograph by Brigitte Sire THE CONNECTOR | Hoffman (pictured in his Silicon Valley office) is a newly minted billionaire, courtesy of his LinkedIn IPO. Reid Hoffman founded his first social site, called SocialNet, before Mark Zuckerberg had even started high school and has been in the vanguard of the social-media movement ever since.His venture capital firm, Foundry Group, has invested in companies like Zynga, StockTwits, and Admeld. Feld also cofounded TechStars in 2005 which has helped more than 60 startups launch and get funded nationwide. Brad Feld: I moved here in 1995 from Boston. I was investing in Boston, NYC, the Bay Area, and Seattle as an angel investor, and I was traveling across the country all the time. My wife is a writer.