Connie Loizos

Wall Street may be down, but it has managed to cough up a substantial amount of cash for tonight's inaugural festivities. According to DealBook, folks in the finance, real estate, and insurance industries have contributed at least $7.1 million to help fund the numerous parties taking place around Washington D.C. later today. George Soros and four of his family members are among those who’ve given the maximum allowed of $50,000 per person, while Microsoftees Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have also contributed $50,000 a piece.

DeepDyve — a Menlo Park, Calif., search startup — is $3.9 million closer to a $4.2 million round of financing, says a regulatory filing that states the money is coming from 25 investors. The two-year-old company began life as Infovell, a startup for research scientists that focused on biology, drug, and patent information. Last last […]

Last year, we reported that Pierre Lamond is quietly segueing out of Sequoia Capital. Turns out that Mark Stevens, a partner at the firm since 1989, is also transitioning slowly out of the firm, he told me earlier today. “I’m still on the boards of a handful of companies. I still have an office at […]

It’s no longer a remote fear. For the first time in the industry of venture capital, investors are finding themselves hamstrung by cash-crunched LPs. The evidence is stacking up. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve learned of three fund “adjustments” — vintage 2007 and 2008 funds that closed yet are now being forced to […]

Steve Boom, formerly the senior VP of Yahoo! Inc.’s Connected Life division, has joined the Burlingame, Calif.-based global mobile community mig33 as CEO. Mig33 makes a downloadable mobile social networking application with a long list of built-in utilities, including instant messaging, text messaging, VoIP calls, email, profiles and photo sharing. The three-year-old startup has so far […]

Kudos to my colleagues at Venture Capital Journal for an illuminating breakfast discussion this morning on how big cleantech projects might get financed in this abysmal economic environment. (Big props especially to Alex Haislip, who organized and moderated the event.) Held at Quadrus, a glass-lined conference center that sits amid a sea of venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, the breakfast featured three speakers: John Buehler, the managing director of Energy Investors Fund, a project finance company that invests in a range of power-related projects; Ben Kortlang, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who focuses on growth-stage green-tech investing; and Rohan Singh, a senior VP at the commercial bank HSH Nordbank. Singh structures debt and equity transactions for renewable energy projects. Herewith, to the best of my note-taking, is some of the conversation that took place:

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in June, feeling as do many entrepreneurs whose companies have been acquired and then stranded by Yahoo that he was “sidelined” by management’s decision-making. At the time, he told TechCrunch that his was an abrupt but certain decision, and that he was looking forward to joining the ranks of the “gloriously unemployed.” Evidently, after seven months or so or total freedom, Schachter has decided he’d rather contribute again to the Web world again -- this time in the employ of Google. Schachter has just accepted a job with the search giant, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which cites a Twitter message about the move that was just sent by First Round Capital Josh Kopelman (an early investor in Delicious and recent subject of a peHUB Q&A). Schachter, as many followers already know, began his career as a Wall Street banking analyst who wrote a popular blog in his spare time.

Earlier this week, former VC Bill Stensrud published a piece at his blog about why venture capital as we know it is doomed. His argument has nothing to do with “the economy of other transitory exogenous factors” to which other doomsayers often point. Stensrud says the problem is much more fundamental. Specifically, he argues that that last truly life-changing innovation was the invention of the transistor in the 1950s (it was “the meteor hitting the earth”), and that pretty much everything else that has followed since -- the integrated circuit, the PC, wireless telephony and the Internet -- have been opportunities born of that invention. Big deal, right? Except Stensrud believes major innovation happens not in gradual, continuous streams but in rapid periods followed by long, stagnant periods -- and that we saw the end of a 50-year-period of “rapid” innovation in 2000. Because it’s an extreme view, and because Stensrud is no longer in the industry (the La Jolla, Calif., firm where he spent 10 years, Enterprise Partners, raised its last fund in 2001), I asked Stensrud to elucidate. The conversation was more interesting than I’d expected.

Does anyone else think this upcoming course at the New York Academy of Sciences should be renamed?

The prospects for Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas just got lousier. The Orange County Register — which has been covering Nicholas like a cheap suit in his ongoing criminal case — reports tonight that a seven-year-old email from Nicholas to his then-wife Stacey, one in which he stated that a drug binge left him “not fully functioning” […]