Connie Loizos

Kelly Porter, a managing director at Woodside Capital Fund in Palo Alto, may not have a brand name in the venture industry, but he may own one of the nicest houses -- at least, until he manages to sell it. Porter, who focuses on media, consumer software and enterprise software startups, bought his 30,000-square-foot Tudor mansion -- nestled on nearly eight acres in Los Altos Hills -- back in 1999 for $5 million. Now, as the LA Times reports, he’s trying to sell it for $38 million, down from its summer listing price of $45 million. (He and his ex-wife apparently poured tens of millions of dollars into the estate’s renovation.) He’s not lowering the listing price again, either, says his agent, though Porter is willing to “consider less,” she says.

NYT DealBook is reporting on a juicy one: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the storied Silicon Valley law firm, may be kept from defending a client owing to alleged conflicts of interest, including an ownership position in that client. At the heart of the clash is Yehoshua Segal, a former executive at the New York-based, venture-backed data management startup Varonis Systems, which Segal began suing for $10 million late last year. Segal says he was wrongly terminated after he blew the whistle on a number of compliance issues at Varonis, including securities violations -- a claim Varonis denies.

Speaking of VCs interested in political office: Scott Murphy, a managing director at venture fund network Advantage Capital, has just won a hotly contested Congressional election in upstate New York. In a recount, Murphy beat the Republican candidate, state Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco, by a hair, reports the New York Times. As of 4 […]

Milk made with the seeds of hemp plants may not sound immediately appetizing. After all, hemp has long been associated with products like clothing, and paper and, oh yes, cannibas sativa, also known as marijuana. Nevertheless, in recent years, hemp milk, oil, powder and other edible concoctions have been flying off the shelves at high-end […]

Joanna Rees -- whose San Francisco-based firm, VSP Capital, famously imploded several years ago -- was never a shrinking violet, and apparently, she still craves the spotlight. After what she considered unfair treatment by the media as VSP was crumbling -- she invited her married boyfriend into the firm as a partner without disclosing the relationship to VSP's other partners; three of VSP's general partners subsequently resigned; and the firm's LPs voted to pull the plug on its third and last fund -- she tells VentureBeat's Matt Marshall that she now has her eye on the SF mayor’s office. If Rees is serious about running for mayor of San Francisco, I say: good luck. But my suspicion is that Rees's sit-down with Marshall, who remarks that Rees's career "shows remarkable persistence and grit," is largely a publicity stunt intended to clear her name in Silicon Valley.

Okay, so it’s an overwrought headline, but the fact is that while venture firms across Silicon Valley continue to quietly implode, the number of ambitious entrepreneurs trying to create new venture capital firms continues to grow. I’ve already reported on a handful of new outfits in recent months, including Freestyle Capital, K9 Ventures, and Quest Venture […]

Zango just went kaput, 10 years after launching to provide users with free downloads of games, music and other content in exchange for the ability to serve them ads when they surfed the Web. In an emotional blog post, Ken Smith, who cofounded Bellevue, Wash.-based Zango with his brother and two of their friends, characterized the shut-down as a “fire sale" of its assets to the search startup Blinkx. Perhaps the flameout is a fitting end, considering the company's somewhat checkered history. Critics long argued that the startup’s software was both hard to remove and sneaky, tricking users into installing it when they downloaded other free software. In fact, the company, originally called 180Solutions (in 2006, it merged with fellow spyware startup Hotbar, another spyware startup) wound up settling at least two lawsuits, one brought by

Pretty much since its 2007 founding, event-sharing site Socializr has been at war with 11-year-old Evite, which remains popular with users despite few upgrades since the being acquired by IAC in 2001. For example, just months after Socializr was launched by Jonathan Abrams -- also the creator of social-networking site Friendster -- Evite sent the San Francisco-based startup a letter threatening to sue it for copyright infringement. Not only was letter was ''completely absurd,'' as Abrams told me at the time, but soon after, he wrote a scathing 2,500 diatribe against Evite explicating why -- an attack that was picked up by numerous media outlets and that is still available here.

Sometimes, I long for the days when Lou Dobbs was busily occupied with Space.com, the “premiere space multimedia company” that he cofounded in 1999 and left in 2001, after the tech bubble burst. I’m not often bothered by Dobbs, mostly because I don’t watch his show or read his books. But I did happen to catch […]

While Broadcom’s founders wait — and wait — for their backdating trials to begin, another stock-options case got underway today in New York, that of former president and COO of Monster Worldwide, Jim Treacy. Treacy was accused along with Monster’s founder, Andrew McKelvey, of pocketing many millions of dollars in an alleged scheme centering on intentionally mispriced […]