Connie Loizos

If you’re a VC or a tech entrepreneur, you’re probably a gadget junkie. If you also happen to have young children, you might want to rethink where you’ve positioned your various towers of electronics as well as ensure that your flatscreens are fastened securely to your walls — and well out of the reach of your adventuresome offspring. According to a newly […]

Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes recently joined VC firm General Catalyst Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence, and today tells Xconomy a little more about what that one-week-a-month role entails. Interestingly, it's not just about what Hughes calls "typical EIR stuff, talking to a lot of smart people, asking questions, assimilating their ideas, learning, and so forth." He's also being sent to top colleges around the country to press the flesh -- and gather intel for General Catalyst. So far, Hughes has visited Columbia, Yale, and MIT in search of what he describes as “personal interactions with smart students who have good ideas.”

On Saturday, billionaire Google cofounder Larry Page addressed graduating students at the University of Michigan, where he nabbed his computer engineering degree before heading off to Stanford, then world domination. (Page’s entire family went to Michigan, in fact: brother, mother, and father. Page kids that his father received a “quantity discount” on tuition.) It was […]

It’s like its own (non-life threatening) epidemic, entrepreneurs creating new, early-stage venture capital firms as the overall industry contracts. In addition to the handful of new, Bay Area teams establishing new firms that I’ve mentioned in recent posts, including Freestyle Capital, Quest Venture Partners, and Step5 Ventures, I’ve just learned that a Pacific Northwest entrepreneur […]

Twitter, the microblogging phenom that even Oprah is avidly using these days, confirmed tonight that it was hacked for the second time this year, by someone in France who gained administrative access through an employee’s account “Personal information that may have been viewed on these 10 individual accounts includes email address, mobile phone number (if one […]

Last summer, the New York Times published an interesting piece about the challenges facing psychologists to the superrich. (Back then, at least, in July, there actually were specialists exclusively counseling the extremely wealthy.) One issue mentioned was the temptation of therapists to “sycophantically adopt [their clients] point of view,” such as the therapist whose client, an […]

Last summer, legendary entrepreneur Dave Duffield predicted that his newest startup, Workday, could become the second coming of PeopleSoft -- a company Duffield founded and grudgingly sold to Oracle in January 2005 for $10.3 billion. Whether or not that proves true, Workday -- an enterprise resource planning company that delivers its software online -- has been gaining traction fast. It now has 340 employees and roughly 80 customers, including numerous Fortune 500 companies like Chiquita Brands and Flextronics (workforces of 23,000 employees and 150,000 employees, respectively). More, investors have wholeheartedly bought into Duffield’s vision. In addition to several past, mostly undisclosed, rounds of funding totaling $75 million -- money from Greylock Ventures and Duffield himself -- the company has just raised an additional $75 million in a Series E round led by New Enterprise Associates, which chipped in just north of $45 million. Duffield and Greylock contributed the rest.

Earlier this month, I wrote a short post about the startup ReputationDefender, whose mission it is to obliterate damaging online information about its clients, who pay it on a month-to-month or yearly basis. (I reported that the company, which had raised a $2.6 million Series A last fall, has expanded that offering and is raising $5.3 million instead.) The unfortunately reality, however, is that the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup and its sundry competitive peers are powerless to do much more than contact offending Internet sites and ask that they play ball. The point gets underscored in a current Newsweek piece about the Catsouras family of Orange County. The Catsourases lost one of their four beautiful daughters to a gruesome car accident in 2006. The daughter, who’d become mentally unstable and taken cocaine the night before the accident, was nearly decapitated when she steered her father’s Porsche, stolen from the garage, into a concrete toll booth.

Just spotted at Facebook: A funny warning from venture capitalist Stewart Alsop to “all CEOs” that many will appreciate. “This [below] is how real venture capitalists add value in board meetings!”

These days, it's hard enough to hold on to a high-paying position, let alone find one. But at least you can make a lasting impression at your next networking gathering by handing out a card that's both biodegradable and edible. What am I talking about? Why, Meat Cards, a concept that pairs two unlikely elements: beef jerky and lasers (used for searing on your contact information). Sound crazy? Maybe even fantastical? Oh, meat cards are both, but as their creators point out, if you can get your hands on them, meat cards will retain their value even "after the econopocalypse."