Connie Loizos

Though Barack Obama led the social media charge during the last presidential election — aided by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, no less – a newly-released Pew study suggests that Republican voters and supporters of the “Tea Party” movement have caught up to Democrats in their use of social media. Based on a sample of 2,257 […]

This week, the CEO of SecondMarket, the secondary market for illiquid assets, traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where SecondMarket was given a “technology pioneer” award. The distinction didn’t come as a surprise to anyone in Silicon Valley. In the process of fueling the celebrity of companies like Facebook and Zynga, whose secondary […]

Assuming that Facebook’s public offering will happen next spring, one unlikely but real concern for its soon-to-be multimillionaire employees will be where they live afterwards. The issue? The high-end residential market in and around Palo Alto, where the company is headquartered, is “totally dry, totally dry,” says real estate agent Heidi Maierhofer, a Bay Area […]

Fresh off a year filled with sizable exits, Sequoia Capital has processed a new regulatory filing with the SEC, revealing it has raised more than $1.35 billion for its newest fund, Sequoia Capital 2010, which the firm began raising in 2009. The news was first reported by Fortune. UPDATE: A source at Sequoia who asked not to be named played down the report about the fund, saying it was old news. The fund was raised "quite some time ago," and the only reason it hit the press was because Sequoia was required to file a statement about the fund with the SEC, the source said. -Ed.

Earlier today, the New York Post reported that according to CNN insiders, Eric Schmidt is interested in becoming a television personality. The Post further reported that Schmidt — who announced last week that he’s stepping down from his CEO post and becoming Google’s executive chairman — has already filmed a pilot with CNN television producer […]

Late last month, having received the blessing of the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the highly anticipated startup Xpert Financial emerged from stealth mode capable of automating the business of providing liquidity to startups. The question now for the San Mateo-based alternative trading platform is: who cares? In addition to having to compete with supercharged competitors like SecondMarket and SharesPost, skepticism over its mission abounds, including from one prominent San Francisco-based investment banker, who privately observed to me last week: "Each process is highly customized and securities issues are unique, making it very difficult to execute these processes on a uniform basis. If it were easy, people would do it on eBay."

The state of California has no shortage of financial woes, but returns for its two biggest public pension systems are back to levels not seen since the 2008 economic implosion. Indeed, in quick succession earlier today, the $146.4 billion California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) and the $225.7 billion California Public Employees’ Retirement System reported […]

Recently, Goldman Sachs tried to get cute with a nearly 50-year-old law that requires private companies with more than 499 shareholders to publicly report their financial results. (As Goldman was publishing a 63-page document about amending its business practices, it tried to make the argument that its syndicate of U.S. investors should only count as one shareholder because only Goldman would be managing the investment bloc.) Goldman’s hubris has called attention to the need for federal regulation of the private markets. And that may not be such a bad thing.

Tim Ferriss seems to lead a charmed life. The whip-smart 33-year-old has founded and sold a company, won a Chinese kick-boxing championship, nabbed a Guinness record for tango dancing, and is the best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) and now The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming […]

Benchmark Capital, the Sand Hill Road firm that has enjoyed a succession of exits since its 1995 founding — including eBay, Juniper Networks, Red Hat, and, more recently, OpenTable — has closed on $425 million for its seventh fund, according to a source familiar with the fund. (UPDATE: General Partners Bob Kagle, who led Benchmark’s […]