Connie Loizos
If you watch the Fox show “24,” you know the extent to which it employs product placements. Over the years, the soon-to-disappear OQO handheld device has made a number of appearances in the hands of super agent Jack Bauer. The cameras often linger lovingly over the show’s various cell phones and their insignias, too. (It depends […]
In a letter published today by the Baltimore Sun, the general counsel for New Enterprise Associates tells Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon why the venture capital firm is abandoning its headquarters of nearly 30 years for the northern Baltimore suburb of Timonium. After reading the letter, I’m wondering how in the world the Baltimore-based partners of NEA — which also […]
It’s no secret that these days, down rounds are about as common as khaki pants in a startup boardroom — and that nearly as many startups are being wound down entirely. But VCs eager to get back 20 cents on the dollar should prepare themselves for something potentially more unpleasant than bad returns: litigation. “We’re […]
Citing an email that angel investor Ron Conway sent out to friends and associates, TechCrunch reported that over the next year-and-a-half, Conway is looking to back between 40 and 50 startups that center on making money off "real time data."
Although Conway's newly tight focus is interesting, even remarkable, given the pace he plans to pursue, I was almost more surprised by another part of his memo, saying that seed-stage San Francisco-based fund Baseline Ventures would no longer be taking the lead in managing his deal flow. Instead, it said, Conway was going to start doing it again directly himself -- with Brian Pokorny and David Lee, two of Baseline's three investing professionals, who've joined Conway fulltime.
Seemingly overnight, early-stage investor Josh Kopelman has become something of a business celebrity. The attention stems partly from the fact that his venture firm, First Round Capital, continues to actively back young companies despite the recession. Partly, it owes to the several successful exits First Round has already enjoyed since opening just five years ago.
Perhaps given Kopelman’s background as an entrepreneur -- he cofounded Infonautics Corp. (IPO in 1996), Half.com (bought by eBay for $312 million in stock in 2000) and TurnTide (sold for $28 million to Symantec six months after its founding) -- it’s no surprise that entrepreneurs uniformly speak highly of him, too.
I caught up with Kopelman yesterday, as he commuted from New York to Philadelphia, near First Round’s West Conshohocken headquarters. Among other things, we talked about how the market looks, six months into 2009; why he helped buy back StumbleUpon from eBay; and whether or not it makes sense for entrepreneurs with no VC experience -- many of whom are now starting microcap venture vehicles like First Round’s earliest funds -- to break into the business.
Most serial entrepreneurs more or less stick to their knitting. Not Whit Alexander, who cofounded the board game Cranium and, at 47, is hoping to reshape his career path entirely with Burro, a rechargeable battery company he recently launched in Ghana. Far from fun and games, the venture aims to do well by doing good, largely […]
Yikes. It’s hard to imagine the SEC being made to look worse than in the aftermath of the Bernie Madoff scandal, yet its case again Internet billionaire Mark Cuban -- and his newer countersuit against the SEC -- is starting to have that very effect.
According to Bloomberg, the SEC’s inspector general is now probing claims that the agency’s staff acted improperly while compiling its insider trading case against Cuban, who was accused last year of selling his shares of Mamma.com hours after a confidential conversation with the company's CEO about a PIPE transaction that Cuban disapproved of.
Though Cuban had a 6.3 percent stake in the company, his attorneys say the SEC hasn’t shown that Cuban was barred from selling his shares.
While Oprah’s famous Twitter episode may have given the microblogging company a major adoption boost, a new study out of Harvard Business School suggests that far from becoming a mainstream communications mode, just 10 percent of Twitter’s registered users account for 90 percent of all Tweets — and those users are largely men following other […]
Today, E Ink, an electronic paper display company in Cambridge, Mass., was acquired for $215 million by its longtime partner, Taipei-based Prime View International, whose technology drives the pixels in E Ink’s black-and-white displays. No doubt Prime View was encouraged by the growing popularity of Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and other e-book reading gadgets. More, […]
While a blog's comments section can be rife with snide remarks, there are often some gems to be found. Such is the case with a post that appeared last Friday at Inside Facebook, a Facebook-focused blog based in Palo Alto.
The post was titled “Why Isn’t the Republican Party More Interested in Facebook,” and quotes Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s manager of political and social change initiatives (and the CEO’s sister), who’d shared her perceptions about the 2008 presidential campaign with a entrepreneurial crowd on Thursday night.
During her address at the dinner, held in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg told the audience that the “Obama campaign was really run like a technology company. They were really quick to adopt a lot of things. They actually came to us with more ideas than we brought to them. We were really focused on building scalable tools for any politicians to use, local or national, and the Obama campaign had really tremendous ideas for how to leverage the viral spread of information.”