Connie Loizos

Reporting by our colleagues at Reuters, David Lawsky and Anupreeta Das: NEW YORK (Reuters) – Noted venture capitalist Tim Draper is teaming up with investors to fund a private exchange for institutional investors to trade shares of start-up companies, calling it a “springboard” to an IPO. Despite signs of life in the frozen public market, with Open […]

Four venture-backed companies have made it out so far this quarter, but if you’re wondering whether an M&A pick-up could be far behind, the answer may depress you. “Four [venture-backed] deals [in Q2] don’t constitute a thawing of the IPO market,” says Paul Deninger, vice chairman of the investment bank Jefferies & Co, who believes we […]

Web startups, perhaps the vast majority of them, have ridiculous, often similar-sounding names. Think Google, Kaboodle, Oodle. Despite the sameness, it isn’t uncommon for CEOs to take issue when another startup’s name comes uncomfortably close to infringing on his or her trademark — especially if the younger startup is clearly trying to create an association that […]

Earlier this week, before heading off to a business dinner, Peter Thiel gave me a call. It’s not the first time we’ve talked, but Thiel doesn’t typically rush to return phone messages, either; he doesn’t have the time. As most know, the 41-year-old, who made his first fortune as a PayPal cofounder, oversees a New York-based hedge fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, and he sits on several boards, including Facebook’s. Still, Thiel isn’t too busy to notice that in the blogosphere, he’s been getting dumped on, big time. The gossip site Valleywag, in particular, has been having a heyday with Thiel, suggesting that he isn’t “as rich as he’d like you to think” and, last month, publishing a widely read piece, calling Thiel a “loopy libertarian” bent on denying women the right to vote. Though responding to those assertions wasn’t the point of our conversation, Thiel clearly wanted to set the record straight after keeping quiet these many months. I ran part of our conversation on Monday. The rest follows here:

It’s the center of the entertainment industry, but that doesn’t mean that Wall Street’s collapse didn’t send tremors down Sunset Boulevard, too. So suggests the annual “wealthiest Angelenos” report just published by the Los Angeles Business Journal. In fact, the paper reports that, gasp, L.A. is home to just 29 billionaires at the moment, the smallest […]

There’s a new, bootstrapped site on the scene, and it’s become an overnight sensation for good reason. Some of its content is uproariously funny. The site, Awkward Family Photos, is just what it sounds like: a pooling place for gawky shots of families  — with commentary that makes the photos funnier yet. Created by LA-based writer Doug Chernack and […]

Jim Buckmaster, CEO of the popular online classifieds service Craigslist, has published a smart, scathing rebuke to South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, whose office says it is moving forward with a criminal investigation and a potential prosecution of the company over its “erotic services” policy — despite that that Craigslist agreed to change that […]

In a look at the impressive growth of Ancestry.com, a genealogy Web site that lets users construct family trees and scour digital family history documents that many of its hundreds of employees have scanned — Forbes reporter Rebecca Buckman turns up at least ten bizarre family connections between celebrities and, in some cases, politicians. Turns out, […]

In January 2005, BusinessWeek wrote about the ouster of Carl Vogel, who had been CEO of cable TV provider Charter Communications. At the time, Vogel had just been pushed out the door by billionaire Paul Allen in an attempt to keep Allen’s controlling stake in Charter from falling further in value. Lance Conn, a member of Allen’s holding company Vulcan Capital, as well as a Charter board member, told investors immediately afterward that “the company's performance hasn't met your expectations or ours.” Fast-forward four years and Conn, who became Vulcan Capital’s president, is also losing his position of power within Allen's world.