Connie Loizos

When Intel Capital broke the news this morning that Ken Elefant (pictured) has joined as an investment director, it likely surprised industry observers. Elefant was a founding general partner with Opus Capital on Sand Hill Road, a role that one doesn’t relinquish easily. It isn’t clear if the move is related to Opus falling short of […]

You may have been as surprised as me when reading through the list of investors on Zynga’s recently released S-1. Let’s see: there’s Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Digital Sky Technologies…and Avalon Ventures? In many ways, 28-year-old Avalon is the antithesis of big-name venture investors like Digital Sky Technologies that burst onto the scene two […]

Google is in talks to buy the popular online video service Hulu, according to the L.A. Times. Google is among several companies that have been kicking Hulu’s tires, with Microsoft and Yahoo also showing interest in Hulu and the major brand advertising that it would bring, says the report. Hulu’s advisors are Morgan Stanley and […]

When entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz burst onto the venture scene two short years ago, they planned to be a different kind of venture firm, one that would have a very small number of GPs, and pour the “majority” of its capital into seed-stage companies along with “two to three late-stage deals, or something like that,” Andreessen told me at the time. Even the best laid plans change. Andresseen Horowitz suddenly has four five GPs, a venture partner, and a very special, special advisor: former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Meanwhile, it has sunk enormous chunks of its capital into Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Kno, Aliph, Skype, RockMelt, Zynga, Fusion-io. It’s no big deal, except that Andreessen Horowitz is beginning to less like a pioneer and more like Kleiner Perkins with its own numerous GPs, part-time partners, and love of late-stage deals. Certainly, there are worse firms to emulate. And Andreessen no doubt learned much at the knee of John Doerr, who long sat on the board of Netscape. (In 1994, KP scored 25 percent of the company for $4 million, profiting handsomely when it went public the following year.) Still, the growing similarities are striking, even a little comical -- or so we think in our current, overtired state. (No one has ever accused us of having the world’s greatest sense of humor.) Herewith, a slideshow to make our case:

Airbnb is on a tear. Three years after the San Francisco-based company began inviting real people to list for rent their homes and apartments, castles and houseboats, users have booked 1.9 million nights in more than 184 countries; bookings are growing an astonishing 40 percent month over month; and roughly 1,000 new properties are entered […]

Kleiner Perkins has never fallen from its perch as a so-called top tier firm. Few venture firms can fundraise as quickly, collect so much, or be as selective about the investors for which they’ll work. But there’s no question that Kleiner was losing its footing, and that it’s about to be saved by Zynga and […]

Cardinal Growth, a Chicago-based venture capital firm that raised nearly $51 million from the U.S. Small Business Administration for two funds, is on the verge of being shuttered, according to the Chicago Sun Times. The paper is reporting that the fund owes Uncle Sam $21.4 million, and that the SBA is “seeking to liquidate Cardinal […]

Felix Investments, a New York-based investment firm that began investing in Facebook employee shares in 2009 via two funds – Facie Libre 1 and Facie Libre II – has filed a lawsuit against SecondMarket in New York State Supreme Court. The suit alleges that Felix struck a deal in January 2010 to buy 75,000 shares […]

Entrepreneur Peter Yared doesn’t mince words. In April, after TechCrunch misreported some of the circumstances around a Facebook employee’s termination, Yared wrote a widely read post titled “Why TechCrunch is Over” in which he called its founder, Michael Arrington, “insane,” adding that it “must be hard to live amidst a rapidly declining site.” In more […]

In the wake of numerous high-profile attacks by the notorious hacker groups LulzSec and Anonymous, Britain's top policeman yesterday called the “challenges created by cybercrime extraordinarily significant and deeply worrying." Steve Blank thinks that’s putting it mildly. “LulzSec and Anonymous are little more than disorganized gangs that can shoot straight, but they’ve exposed how weak our systems are,” says Blank, a renowned entrepreneur who now lectures on entrepreneurship at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Columbia University. “Imagine that instead of using a ballistic missile or expensive planes, you have 1,000 people who are financed by a nation and whose only job, 24/7, is to take out another country’s infrastructure” through hacking.