Connie Loizos
Charles “Junior” Johnson, who founded the now-defunct b2b ecommerce company PurchasePro, received a nine-year sentence yesterday for defrauding investors. Reacting to pressure from Wall Street, he inflated the company’s revenues during the first three months of 2001 in a scheme that involved falsified and backdated contracts, as well as undisclosed side deals with AOL, which had a […]
Late yesterday, at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, I interviewed six digital media VCs about the future of online video — and how cash-seeking entrepreneurs in the space might capture their attention. I’m frankly not a good moderator (nerves), and the panel was a little big — it featured Richard Wolpert of Mail Room […]
Seattle-based Jobster is shedding more than one third of its staff today, or 15 employees, according to John Cook of TechFlash. The company, which once employed roughly 150 people, will be left with just 25 demoralized souls. Jobster has raised a boatload of money since openings its doors in January 2004. In April, the company […]
Entrepreneurs sometimes complain that VCs don’t like to get their hands dirty. If so, a three-year-old startup in Green Bay, Wisconsin — one that’s looking for $2 million to $5 million — is tailor-made for the venture industry. The company, PureCart, is focusing on two major public health concerns: germs in supermarkets and in hospitals. […]
General partner Danny Cohen of Gemini Israel Funds was born in Haifa, spent most of his adult life in Tel Aviv, but now lives in Menlo Park where he manages the firm’s U.S. office. As you might imagine, he has a strong understanding of how the U.S. meltdown is impacting life elsewhere, particularly in Israel. […]
As we chatted about one of his portfolio companies late last week, I asked a few other questions of Khosla Ventures’ partner David Weiden, who joined uber investor Vinod Khosla in 2006 after careers at an impressive array of companies, including McCaw Cellular, Netscape, AOL, and TellMe Networks. Weiden was enjoying some family time with his four-year-old […]
According to Page Six, Warner Music Group CEO Edward Bronfman Jr. just sold the three-acre Amagansett, New York, property that he purchased in 2005. Unfortunately for Bronfman, its selling price of $12.67 million is a sliver more than the $12.5 million he paid for it. “Taking into account taxes and commission,” a local broker told the gossip […]
When Wired.com recently reported that Digg “cofounder” Kevin Rose was dropping his consumption of all offline media and going “all Internet/Netflix,” it was taken to task by Digg’s public relations team. Rose, said a company spokesperson, is Digg’s sole founder. Canadian developer Owen Byrne has a different story, however. He says he not just some […]
Angel investor Dave McClure has a talent for gathering budding entrepreneurs, technologists and venture capitalists for a positive exchange of ideas and experiences. One need only attend a Startup2Startup meeting in Palo Alto -- a monthly dinner that acts as a kind of night school for first-time founders -- for proof.
Last week, I chatted briefly with McClure about how the evenings come together, and why he introduced them earlier this year.
What do you most try to emphasize at your dinners?
It’s mostly about helping the next generation of entrepreneurs learn the ropes, which, given the downturn, is more important than ever. People are interested in the lessons learned by people who’ve been there before. A lot of the inspiration for the dinners came from Round Zero, a similar style event that used to take place from ’98 to 2002 and focused on new startups and first-timers.
As the economy has soured, fresh funding has moved out of the reach of many startups. Not so for four-year-old HomeAway, an Austin-based group of vacation-rental Web sites that just announced a stunning $250 million in new funding led by Technology Crossover Ventures, with participation from existing investors Institutional Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. That’s $250 million smackeroos – […]