Connie Loizos
There it was on Craigslist yesterday – an ad for “young, successful professionals living in America’s most emerging area, Silicon Valley,” ostensibly posted by a “major cable network” that’s looking to cast a Silicon Valley reality show. No wonder. While many Americans are suffering through an abysmal economy, Internet startups seem impervious to bad news of any kind. Valuations have […]
Matt McCall may not be among the world’s best-known VCs, but he has one of the sweetest gigs in the venture industry: investing in startups on behalf of the wealthy Pritzker family – owners, among many other things, of the Hyatt Hotels chain. McCall is a partner at Chicago-based New World Ventures, founded by billionaire […]
Plenty of new platforms are trying to marry LPs with direct stakes in privately held startups, including Xpert Financial. In fact, its CEO, Thomas Foley, told me last summer: “I think a lot of people have grown less comfortable paying another group 25% in fees” given other alternatives to emerge. At least one pension fund […]
Not long ago, the daily deals giant Groupon was the toast of Chicago, a press darling that received the blessing of Oprah Winfrey, was commended by Forbes as the “fastest growing company ever,” and even reportedly spurned a multibillion-dollar buyout offer from Google. A Chicago Tribune headline from last December summed up its place in […]
Groupon’s troubles are bad — and they’re likely to get worse, says Sam Hamadeh, founder of the New York-based financial analysis firm PrivCo. Since Groupon released its third and most recent amended S-1 document — excluding what it pays out to merchants, and revising its reported 2010 revenue of $713 million down to $313 million as a […]
Does the world need yet another healthcare-focused portal? Does it need another portal site, period? Entrepreneur Nora Iluri seems to thinks so. In April, Iluri — an entrepreneur turned McKinsey consultant turned entrepreneur again — began building Clarimed, a site with big ambitions to do two things. First, it aims to provide consumers with greater […]
In an age where seemingly everyone in the startup community now blogs, tweets and leaks his or her news, stretching the truth has become de rigueur. But I'd argue that it's creating distrust; it's also distorting the way that founders, the real engine of Silicon Valley, see the world.
What can be done about it, if anything? Earlier today, I asked neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris, whose new Kindle essay, “Lying,” explores our fundamental inclination to lie and self-promote. Our conversation has been edited for length.
Q: In your essay, you say your interest in lying was piqued as a Stanford freshman in a popular ethics course. What was so life-changing about it?
A: The course is surprisingly simple in its format and content. Basically, 10 people sit around giving [professor] Ron Howard -- a pioneer in management science -- examples of lies they think worth telling, and he just ...
Two days ago, Marc Andreessen announced that Ning, the social networking platform company he cofounded in 2004 and that went on to raise nearly $120 million, had “agreed to merge” with the lifestyle blog network Glam Media. Yet few believe it will be a marriage of equals. “Merger” was almost uniformly put in wink-wink quotations […]
Aging, poor-performing venture funds seldom have attractive options, but a new “innovation” by Shareholder Representative Services can quickly shift some money onto the balance sheets of their LPs, assuming a number of things come together first. First, some background: SRS manages the final steps of M&A transactions for dozens of clients, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia […]
Recently, New York magazine featured Feross Aboukhadijeh in a piece titled “Bubble Boys.” Aboukhadijeh is a Sacramento-born, 20-year-old computer science student at Stanford who has been characterized as among the school’s most heavily recruited students by a course adviser. The piece suggested he may ultimately be among those geeks to succeed the Mark Zuckerbergs of the […]