Connie Loizos

Peer-to-peer content delivery system BitTorrent has raised a whopping $17 million more in a third round from its venture backers on Sand Hill Road, DCM and Accel Partners, according to a new regulatory filing. The money brings the 7-year-old’s total funding to $46.4 million. DAG Ventures, a firm known for marking up the later-stage deals of influential firms like Kleiner Perkins and Accel, is also an investor in BitTorrent’s Series C. (DAG has teamed up with Kleiner on at least 51 rounds for 30 companies, according to Thomson Reuters data; it has teamed up with Accel on at least 30 rounds for 15 companies.) I hope it's not a case of good money chasing bad. Though BitTorrent today signed up two game developers that will use its technology to stream their massively multiplayer online games to customers (Aeria and IAHGames), the company is still struggling to shed its reputation as a way for people to illegally share music and video over the Web. Though it wants to be a legitimate technology through which media companies can stream videos over the Internet, its ideal business partners

Here is a great artifact: an interview with Google's founders from 1999 by Ubergizmo writer Karsten Lemm. (Thanks to ValleyWag for first pointing readers to the piece.) It's really fascinating to look back. One of the first things to jump out at me is 1999 Brin saying that, "Everybody who we talked to wanted to invest. No exceptions. Now, we get probably 5 to 10 e-mails every day [from potential investors]. We collect their names. We’ll have to decide [at some point] what we want to do." Popular Valley lore gives Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital a lot of credit

Yesterday, Stacy Pena, co-founder of Rainmaker Communications in Mountain View, commented on a post of mine. It was about a TechCrunch panel discussion on Tuesday that I thought have been much better. Stacy asked what questions I would have asked, so I came up with a few. To my surprise, I just received my list of questions, answered by Carl Showalter, […]

The government’s Small Business Innovation Research program is up for retooling this month when authorization for the program in its current form ends. VCs have been pushing for a makeover so that more of their companies can receive SBIR grants, which can total more $750,000 annually. (In 2002, the SBIR stopped issuing the grants to […]

Not everyone wants to be a VC. Include in that company Caterina Fake, co-founder of the popular photo sharing service FlickR, which Yahoo acquired in 2005. Jon Holman, a San Francisco-based recruiter who has hired 35 general partners in his career, says he tried to reel her into the industry this summer, when she finally left […]

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the SBIR program, which stopped giving grants to companies majority owned by venture capitalists back in 2002. The program is set to expire at the end of the month, and the NVCA and numerous VC firms have been trying desperately to convince the powers that be to […]

During a recent interview organized by the Churchill Club, serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen told Portfolio writer Kevin Maney that his Netscape co-founder and old pal Jim Clark has been living off the grid. Said Andreessen: “I could tell you a lot of stories about his life, but I won’t. He’s dating a 26-year-old Australian swimsuit […]

The DFJ Story is one that someone publishes at least once a year. (I took my turn in 2005.) Still, if you care anything about the firm, this piece is worth a read.

Reacting to Forbes’ magazine’s August teardown of Advanced Equities Financial Corp., its founders, Dwight Badger and Keith Daubenspeck, take off the gloves and…submit a restrained letter to the editor. “Your article presents a one-sided view of Advanced Equities Inc. and its two founders. We would like to set the record straight. We founded AEI in 1999 […]

Earlier today, I was looking forward to a panel discussion dubbed “20 Tough Questions for VCs” at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. It should have been called “20 Questions Rehashed from 20 Other VC Panels.” I’m not sure who came up with the questions — TechCrunch readers or TechCrunch’s staff — but they […]