Connie Loizos

Despite few exits to date as either institutional or individual investors, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz expect to raise their second venture fund later this year, according to The New York Times. Since closing its $300 million debut fund last June, Andreessen Horowitz has backed 24 companies and committed two-thirds of its capital, including $50 million used to acquire less than 5 percent of Skype last fall. (Andreessen Horowitz was part of a consortium led by Silver Lake Partners that bought a controlling interest in the Internet call carrier from eBay.) At the time of the acquisition, Andreessen told peHUB, "One of the big pieces of input we got when raising the fund was to be responsible, but not conservative. We want to calibrate risks against big opportunities, and we think [Skype] is a very big opportunity."

Plenty of employees have been fired for publicly disparaging their bosses online. I'm not sure it has happened before to someone whose work involves dressing like a giant pierogi, however. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Andrew Kurtz, 24, of New Brighton, one of the 18 men who take turns posing as pierogies in a crowd-pleasing race after the fifth inning of every game at PNC Park [in Pittsburgh], was dismissed by the team Thursday because he posted disparaging remarks about the Pirates on his Facebook page...

For the July issue of Venture Capital Journal, I wound up interviewing a number of VCs on the issue of entrepreneur backgrounds. I wondered how many of them approached the less-than-straightward situations that periodically arise. What I learned is that seemingly few venture investors view a personal black mark in black and white terms, even when it's a doozy. Among those who were helpful with the story was David Cowan of Bessemer Ventures. Here's where he stands on the issue:

On Wednesday, I was on a call with Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla Motors and space exploration company SpaceX. The latter company was announcing what it’s hailing as the “largest single commercial launch deal ever” — a $492 million contract to carry into space the mobile telecommunications satellites of Iridium Communications, beginning in 2015. Though […]

Glassdoor, an increasingly popular employment site driven by user submissions, has added a very simple new feature that makes the site all the more compelling: pictures. Want to see the warehouse where Netflix processes all those returned DVDs? (I did. You can check it out here.) Interested to know if AT&T’s offices are as soulless as you might imagine? (Oh, man, they are.) How about learning where you'd be seated while waiting to interview at the real estate site Zillow? (Unfortunately, the rest of the office isn't quite as scenic.) There's even a photo posted from the men's room at CNet. I'm not linking to that one because you don't need to see the men's room at CNet and because the contributor's name is atop the photo. Given that Glassdoor promises visitors access to its rich data in return for their anonymous contributions, I'd guess this is an oversight. Oops.

Earlier this week, it was announced that TerraPower, a startup with a design for a next-generation nuclear reactor, had raised a $35 million round of funding from Charles River Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates and others, after raising what the company is calling a first round of (undisclosed) "tens of millions" of dollars in 2008. Its vision is ambitious to say the least. To power its reactor -- which will take another 10 years and billions more dollars to get built -- TerraPower expects to use the depleted uranium waste created when uranium is enriched to run in conventional power plants. Not only would doing so dampen the risk of nuclear proliferation, says the company, but there is already enough depleted uranium in the world for its reactor to power the whole planet for 100 years. Indeed, given the scope of TerraPower's plans, it isn't surprising that it's the first spin-off of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures, the 10-year-old company of Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's former chief technology officer. Brainstorming revolutionary ideas, patenting them, then spinning them off into standalone companies is half of Intellectual Ventures’ reason for being. The other half, of course, is buying up tens of thousands of patents that are then used to protect royalties-paying customers from being sued, including, reportedly, Cisco, Intuit, Verizon, Google and Apple. (Theoretically, Intellectual Ventures could also start creating infringement lawsuits. It hasn’t done so, but according the The Recorder, it has begun selling some of its unneeded patents to organizations that aren’t afraid to sue.)

In 1997, Margit Wennmachers co-founded OutCast Communications, quickly transforming it into one of tech’s top public relations firms. Its many social functions have been attended by nearly every tech entrepreneur, investor, reporter and startup executive in Silicon Valley. Its long client list includes Facebook and Bloom Energy, along with such public company heavyweights as Amazon, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com. Now, after helping Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launch their year-old venture capital firm, Wennmachers is leaving Outcast to become a partner alongside them. I caught up with her earlier today to ask more about her role, and the usual -- but not unprecedented -- transition she is making from public relations to venture capital.

Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief executive and now Republican candidate for governor of California, has repeatedly told Californians how tough she is. Apparently, at least once during her decade-long tenure at the auction powerhouse, she showed it, shoving an employee in an executive conference room at eBay’s headquarters. Brad Stone of the New York Times has the story this morning, writing:

This is a useful tool for putting into perspective just how enormous a disaster BP's oil spill really is. According to the site, the data used to create the image -- which is refreshed once daily -- comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The NOAA relies on a variety of sources, including satellite images and reports by trained observers who've flown above the spill in an ongoing effort to size it. That information is then entered into computer models by NOAA oceanographers, who add other details, including about wind-driven currents.

Earlier this week, Seattle entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack debuted his newest startup, a revenue-based financing company called Revenue Loan, which will lend startups money in return for a 3x-5x repayment whenever feasible. Sack isn’t the first person to try out the model. Rather, Boston-based entrepreneur-investor Arthur Fox says that he’s “kind of the godfather” of the methodology, and that he’s been applying it -- successfully -- for nearly 20 years. Fox co-founded several companies in the ‘80s -- Octek Computer Technology, Lexidata Corp. and Medicel -- before starting Royalty Capital Fund in 1992, whose “royalty-based” approach entailed buying the right to a percentage of a company’s receipts, and whose two funds' IRRs, says Fox, were both north of 50 percent. Now he's partnering with a Dallas-based group, Cypress Growth Capital, to create a new fund and preparing to raise another Boston-based vehicle, next year. We talked yesterday about his approach, and why more people haven't embraced it thus far. Q&A after the jump...