Connie Loizos

At a Y Combinator event in October, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told an audience of young entrepreneurs, “We’ve not once bought a company to get a company. We buy companies to get excellent people.” Indeed, Facebook has grown notorious for small, talent-driven acquisitions, like its $10 million purchase last year of Hot Potato, a year-old social collaboration […]

Frank Slootman wasn’t looking for a job in the venture industry, but he landed a plum one at Silicon Valley venture firm Greylock Partners, where he begins work next month as a partner focused on enterprise investments. Slootman was invited to join after a thoroughly impressive run at the head of the storage company Data […]

Steve Schimmel was born into poverty in suburban Chicago, yet by age 32, he was able to retire, having been made unfathomably rich by the initial public offering of Google, where he was employee no. 13. (An analyst by training, Schimmel didn’t have a specific job description at Google but says he instead got to be a “business development renaissance man.”) Last week, Schimmel wrote of his compelling rags-to-riches story in a widely read blog post. Last night, I asked him if we could talk more about his experience of become suddenly wealthy and what advice he could share with the tens, if not hundreds, of Facebook employees who will surely enjoy the same life-altering event, likely next year. Schimmel, who is currently writing a novel and “working on a business plan to change the way Hollywood does business,” shared some thoughts with me just now.

Earlier today, TechCrunch was handed a release that Groupon is publishing widely later today. In it, the group-buying behemoth is announcing that it’s completed a $950 million round from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Venture, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group, Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures. The megaround is no longer a huge surprise, given that details about it began surfacing last month, right after Groupon’s almost-done-deal with Google wholly unraveled. What is a surprise is who isn’t mentioned in the release: Accel Partners and New Enterprise Associates

People familiar with the venture industry know of Oak Investment Partners’ reputation as a gunslinger that likes making outsize bets. Still, on Monday, when New York-based AdKeeper announced a $35 million round of funding led by Oak, jaws around venture firms everywhere dropped – or at least they should have.  AdKeeper is just 10 months old. […]

In 1996, Scott Kurnit founded the company that would become About.com and managed it into one of the most popular Internet startups in the U.S., before staging an IPO in the spring of 1999. More impressively, Kurnit sold the company to the publisher Primedia for $690 million in late 2000, as the dot.com bubble was […]

From its origins as a social network for Harvard students to the privileged backgrounds of its founders to the condescending way that it has at times engaged with both developers and users, Facebook has often seemed a little superior. Facebook’s pact with Goldman – which has committed $450 million to the company at a $50 […]

In 2009, as students at 2-year-old Singularity University in Sunnyvale, Calif., budding entrepreneurs Jessica Scorpio (pictured) and Sam Zaid had 10 weeks to produce the kind of idea that could potentially impact a billion people in 10 years’ time. It didn’t take long before they struck on a concept they’ve been developing ever since: a […]

Were you sniffing about the economy last year? You must have been among the seemingly select few who didn't sell their startup in 2010. According to new exit data published by peHUB parent Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association, last year saw more venture-backed M&A exits since people began recording this kind of thing in 1985. According to their findings, 420 deals were sewn up last year, roughly 18 percent of them IT-based. A notoriously slow period of deal-making, even 2010's fourth quarter was pretty good for M&A, with 88 venture-backed M&A deals reported as of December 31. Combined, the average disclosed deal value in the fourth quarter was $157.7 million, with HealthSpring's acquisition of Bravo Health winning biggest venture-backed deal in the quarter. (It was apparently a win for investors, too. Bravo Health sold for $545 million. Backers including New Enterprise Associates and DLJ Merchant Banking Partners had sunk $157 million into the healthcare services company since its 1996 founding.)

The other night, at a startup holiday party I attended in San Francisco, a board member gave a funny toast in which he imagined the CEO quizzing the board on what the startup actually did. As we all laughed over some imaginary acronyms, I imagined what I might ask the board members of some of this […]