Connie Loizos
Most people think of Uber as a high-priced car service that hipsters summon through an iPhone app. But co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick has something else in mind: he wants to transform the San Francisco company into the next Kozmo.com, the notorious dot.com delivery business that went bust by offering free delivery within an hour […]
Vinod Khosla is on stage right now at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, shamelessly working to appeal to the entrepreneurs who are either in attendance or watching a live stream of his “fireside chat,” with TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld. To distance himself from the pack, he’s just said that “I object to being […]
Today, longtime venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital sat down with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, and he was about as vibrant as his socks. That is to say, Leone — whose modish, striped socks were a point of discussion both backstage and onstage at the show […]
Right now, the future of TechCrunch seems a calamitous sideshow for Silicon Valley watchers. But the powerhouse blog isn’t the first to lose its dear leader in a lucrative sale to a major media company. Before TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, there was Rafat Ali, the inimitable founder of PaidContent, a powerful digital media blog in […]
Yesterday, after two years as CEO of the ever-shrinking Internet giant Yahoo, Carol Bartz emailed employees, letting them know that she’d just been fired over the phone.
That call should have sent shivers down the spine of AOL’s CEO of two years, Tim Armstrong. According to some industry observers, he’s next.
There are, of course, many comparisons between the two beleaguered executives. Both Bartz and Armstrong were well-regarded in their previous jobs. Bartz was the pragmatic, tough-talking head of Autodesk, while Armstrong was the charismatic and highly effective ...
Two year ago, Sharespost founder Greg Brogger began publicly sharing plans to build a private placement marketplace to directly connect startups with investors. The fruit of that effort began to pay off today, when Sharepost, which since June 2009 has been helping qualified buyers and sellers trade shares in fast-growing, not-yet-public startups like Facebook, closed […]
While Groupon’s Andrew Mason takes a drubbing, another CEO is apparently having a very good week. According to a document obtained by Bloomberg last week, the social games juggernaut Zynga has amended its stock structure to give its savvy founder and CEO Mark Pincus a stunning 70 times more voting power than people who buy the company’s shares in its eventual IPO.
Bloomberg says Zynga’s board has already approved the new structure, which also gives the company’s current shareholders and pre-IPO investors seven votes per share. (Usually, if a company is going to establish separate voting rights, it is via a dual-stock structure that gives superior shares 10 votes per share, while inferior votes have one vote for share.)
The company just needs the rest of its shareholders to agree to the new stock structure by tomorrow...
Groupon is having a lousy August. In one of the nicer reports to be published about the daily deals company in recent weeks, Benchmark Co. analyst Fred Moran told Reuters that he considers the company’s oft-cited valuation of $25 billion “very high.” This morning Henry Blodget of Business Insider jumped into the fray, defending Groupon […]
Joanna Rees has been riding buses and knocking on doors to drum up support for her campaign to become the next mayor of San Francisco, and she’s been doing it in her Chanel pumps, according to at least two newspaper accounts. It’s easy to laugh at the image, but the onetime venture capitalist, who reportedly […]
Genevieve Thiers is not a household name in Silicon Valley, but many Chicagoans know her as the founder of Chicago-based Sittercity, a 10-year-old online subscription-service that marries families to caregivers around the country for help with their children, pets, and aging parents. Thiers is also among a small but growing number of second-time entrepreneurs beginning […]