Connie Loizos

University of Massachusetts professor and former derivatives trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who in 2007 published the best-selling book"The Black Swan" -- a term for unpredictable happenings, like suddenly seeing a black swan when you're expecting to see white ones -- has just predicted on Bloomberg News that our current financial crisis will be much harder to resolve than that of the Great Depression. Let's hope Taleb proves less prescient than his last two books. (His first book, "Fooled by Randomness" was published in 2001, months after the Sept. 11 attack.) Here's the video.

A lot of people have been expressing their surprise and disappointment in the recent writings of Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who has, inarguably, become one of the nation’s most influential journalists over the past decade. As many readers know by now, Friedman recently wrote that the smartest way to spend $20 billion in […]

I spent Friday morning at the Sand Hill Road offices of Battery Ventures, where a dozen CEOs took up temporary residence to discuss what to do about sales cycles that have grown longer every month since September, why most no longer discuss sales leads with their VCs and some of the surprising differences between selling to a new customer versus getting an existing customer to renew. The group was gathered by Aaron Ross, who has been an Internet entrepreneur, a Salesforce.com executive and a venture capitalist, among other things, and who recently began organizing small, monthly meetings of chief executives looking to create predictable revenue during one of the worst recessions in our country's history.

You'd never expect the Seattle startup community to be scandal plagued, yet it's just been hit with its third embarrassment in just four months. First, executives at the CRM company Entellium were found in October to have cooked their books to attract venture capital (the company has since shut down). In December, Bellevue-based Count Me In, whose online registration tools are used by thousands of nonprofits and youth athletic programs, admitted that it owes millions of dollars to more than 200 sports programs across the country. Now, Techflash is reporting that the chief executive of retail kiosk startup MOD Systems, which raised $35 million in funding from NCR and Toshiba last summer, is being accused of “massive fraud,” by one of its own investors.

Jack Biddle, the co-founder of Novak Biddle Venture Partners in Bethesda, Md., knows a few things about how things work in Washington. His father was a lobbyist for the computer industry for 30 years, so he “grew up at the intersection of government and technology.” And like Valhalla Partners in Vienna, Va., Paladin Capital Group in Washington, and a number of other East Coast venture firms, Novak Biddle has also long called the government a customer of some of its portfolio companies -- a number of which have spun out of government research projects, as well as received federal funding. I talked with Biddle earlier today about President Obama’s stimulus bill, and how VCs can help their portfolio companies access some of the capital destined to flow into education, rural communications, clean energy, and other areas of interest to the industry. His message to his peers was very straightforward: If you don’t have ties to Washington already, you’d better procure some, fast.

On Tuesday, President Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus package. The question now is whether venture capital firms without existing ties to Washington are already too late to capitalize on its passage. Although the bill includes enormous pots of money that venture-backed startups can pursue -- including in the fields of education and clean tech, where “smart grid” investments and electric car battery R&D are in line to receive billions of dollars -- it’s “the VCs who haven’t traditionally seen government as a black box that will be able to get in and get a piece of the action very quickly,” says National Venture Capital Association president Mark Heesen. An astonishing 177 venture capitalists joined an NVCA-organized conference call on Tuesday, to discuss the package and the opportunities it may present their portfolio companies. Pretty impressive, considering that many firms were holding partnership meetings that day, due to the

Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a 16-year-old public-private partnership has been compiling key indicators on the health of Silicon Valley since 1995. It just released its 2009 report, and you can get many of the findings after the jump.

Rob Glaser, founder and CEO of digital entertainment company RealNetworks, has been living like an opulent god up in Seattle. This much we know thanks to TechFlash, which noticed that Glaser recently sold his almost scandalously cool 4,600-square-foot, glass-lined, three-bedroom penthouse for a bit of a discount to its advertised price of $12 million. (In a sign of the times, the buyer -- who is also getting grand views of Elliot Bay, a rooftop terrace, an infinity lap pool, and skylights galore -- paid $9.75 million.) You can check out the pad here, though be warned what you see may cause feelings of depression and inadequacy upon return to your comparatively unremarkable home later today.

The IVC Research Center, which tracks the Israeli venture capital scene, has just released a list of the most active investors in Israel in 2008, and it's a bit reminiscent of the most active U.S. investors in 2008. Greylock Israel, an affiliate of Greylock Partners, tops the list, having made nine new investments in Israel-based startups last year. Vertex, a venture capital firm that invests strictly in Israel, ranks second, with eight new investments in 2008. In third place with seven new investments apiece are DFJ Tamir Fishman -- a year-and-a-half year old

In late March, billionaire Charles Simonyi is heading to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket for the second time, making him the first space tourist to make two trips. That’s nice for Simonyi, who made his fortune as the head of Microsoft’s application software group, where he helped create several key Office […]