Connie Loizos

FreedomPay, a 9-year-old cashless payments startup in Wayne, Pennsylvania, has raised a small new round of funding from backers Goldman Sachs, Core Capital Partners, BlueRun Ventures, and Clarium Capital Management. The company, which has gathered $31 million in venture backing previously, just added another $2.16 million, according to a regulatory filing. A couple of interesting […]

Recently, at the Keiretsu Forum holiday party, Nat Goldhaber, a venture capitalist with Oakland-based Claremont Creek Ventures, shared some of his 2009 predictions. As you’ll see in this video, a lot of them center on the Obama Administration (clearly, Goldhaber’s no Democrat). More specific to the industry, Goldhaber predicts the demise of the "Series B" round. As he tells interviewer Reena Jadhav, CEO of a free resume site called NuResume: “There will be A rounds and there will be C rounds, but there will be no B rounds." He goes on to say that in 2009, startups with technologies ready to be “taken to the next stage” are in deep doo-doo if they aren’t sitting on a stockpile of cash. “Give up your first born, give up 90% of the company, whatever you have to do to raise enough in the A round to carry it to the C round,” says Goldhaber to the HBS-educated entrepreneur, who very politely says of his soul-crushing counsel, "I think that's brilliant advice." Does anyone agree/disagree that the B round is a goner in the short-term? See this video on Vator.tv »

From a release that the pension just put out: The California Public Employees’ Retirement System’s (CalPERS) Board of Administration announced today that is has appointed Anne Stausboll as the pension fund’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Stausboll, 52, is currently the Interim Chief Investment Officer (CIO) for CalPERS.  As CEO, she will oversee the System’s […]

Often, around the holidays, investors like to send out a little something to colleagues and other acquaintances. For example, Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly known as IDG Boston), each year gives out a non-business book to its portfolio CEOs. This year, they’ll receive Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, which looks at the importance of teamwork in overcoming difficult situations. Accel Partners also sends out books -- or used to. I haven’t received anything from the firm since its 2005 move into China, when I was sent Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler. Perhaps I forgot to say thank you (it really is a great book).

I was flipping through the October/November issue of Dealmaker magazine, a glossy that has managed to become a staple in the offices of private equity, hedge fund, investment bank and venture capital firms over the past couple of years. I’ve read a number of great pieces in the publication, including a 2007 profile of PayPal […]

The National Venture Capital Association this morning released its third-annual “Predictions Survey,” and the VCs polled aren’t anticipating their best year ever. Among the survey’s findings: * 92 percent of VCs predict a slowdown of investments. * 61 percent think the decline will be more than 10 percent, and that capital committed will fall below $27 billion in 2009. * 53 percent say they’ll invest in the same or more companies next year, though they’ll invest less money across the board. * 48 percent of VCs polled said they thought the clean tech sector would see the most growth in 2009.

Last week, the venture firm @Ventures put together a presentation critical of the clean tech venture industry. In the slideshow, which has been making the rounds, @Ventures suggests there are a number of unsustainable trends in the sector right now, including a glut of late-stage funds putting excessive amounts of capital to work in companies with no exit opportunities on the horizon. (A full 80 percent of the “herd” is moving to late-stage and “balanced” investing, says @Ventures.) I thought it made sense to ask David Lincoln what he made of the presentation. Lincoln has been on the scene a lot longer than many of his peers in the industry, having cofounded EnerTech Capital in Wayne, Pa., in 1996 and before that, a private equity firm called Deven Resources that developed and acquired energy properties.

Silicon Alley Insider has just taken its best shot at estimating who of the tech titans has, in this crummy economic climate, lost the most of their personal net worth. The biggest losers, according to SAI's calculations? Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who've seen their net worth reduced by half this year; they're down a stunning $12.1 billion. So sad. Former CEOs Meg Whitman and Jerry Yang aren't doing so well, either. You can see for yourself here.

DubMeNow, a Vienna, Virginia, startup that makes contact management software, has raised roughly one million from 11 accredited investors and is hoping to attract a million more dollars, according to a regulatory filing. Its pitch? That by downloading its application onto your smart phone (right now, your Blackberry or GPhone), and inviting your contacts to […]

Four-year-old BitTorrent -- whose free, open-source file-sharing applications are used by millions of people to distribute large software and media files -- looks to be in some pretty grave trouble. TechCrunch reported this morning that the company recently returned $17 million in funding that it had received last spring from Accel, DCM, and DAG Ventures. In a letter to shareholders, BitTorrent said that the move was made because it was “not gaining sufficient traction.” BitTorrent isn’t the first company to agree to unwind a funding, but it’s certainly not common, either. Foundry Group partner Jason Mendelson, a trained attorney who worked at Cooley Godward Kronish and then as general counsel for Mobius Venture Capital, tells me he’s only seen a “handful” of deals get undone in his career, saying that such dust-ups typically indicate that “this dog doesn’t hunt.” I chatted with Mendelson earlier today about how protected VCs are from companies that don't "gain sufficient traction." Read our conversation after the jump.