Connie Loizos

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a young blogger-entrepreneur named Neil Patel, and I have to admit to becoming immediately smitten with him and his story. From the February 2008 issue of Venture Capital Journal: Neil Patel is a 22-year-old who has yet to graduate from Cal State Fullerton. He still lives with his […]

First, Apple goes all "Minority Report" on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen. Now Apple has made America's sweetheart, Ellen DeGeneres, apologize for a 20-second commercial spoof about the iPhone. Steve, seriously, c'mon.

Reid Hoffman, founder and chairman of LinkedIn, thinks VCs need to get with the social media program -- as users. “We live in a networked world now, whether or not we like it,” he told a crowd of VCs earlier today at the annual National Venture Capital Association conference, where Hoffman -- who also became a general partner at Greylock Partners last November -- was welcomed as a peer for the first time. Recounting various conversations he’s had with investors, Hoffman told the audience, “Some VCs say, ‘I don’t use it; it’s for job seekers.” Others have told Hoffman that they use it, but he’s later discovered that they use it to accept invitations and little else. “Maybe going into the system to do that is entertaining, but it doesn’t help you get your job done,” he said. Managing not to sound like an advertorial for LinkedIn, Hoffman encouraged VCs to use the service for what it’s designed to be, including one of most efficient diligence tools available. “You can find which companies are like each other, get references -- find senior people who’ve left a company and go talk with them. Maybe you won’t get anything useful; maybe you’ll find something critical.”

Google Ventures came out of semi-stealth mode this week, revealing its entire investment team for the first time. It also today hosted a roundtable for journalists, from which I kept sending Dan email and text message reports. He assembled them below (thanks, Dan). – Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Google Ventures is an effort to diversify […]

Last night, serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Manu Kumar let us know he has closed his first seed-stage fund, a $6.25 million pool to be invested over the next three to four years, in slugs of $100,000 to $250,000 per company, with some reserved capital to participate in follow-on rounds. The money comes from individual investors, including folks […]

VC-backed tech companies have a long history of going public on the Nasdaq, but more and more are beginning to choose the once-stodgy NYSE. Examples from the past month include Calix and Max Linear. “For a long time the NYSE basically ignored Silicon Valley," says Doug Chu, the fresh-faced head of the NYSE’s Silicon Valley office (and the rest of the Western half of the country). "Most tech companies weren’t even financially able to qualify. Today, that doesn’t fit in the business model.” That Chu, 42, has the job he does is a telling indicator about how important tech has suddenly become to the NYSE. Before joining the company in 2008, Chu spent 12 years as a tech investment banker, including under Frank Quattrone at both Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse. Among the companies he helped take public were Amazon, Tumbleweed Communications and Beyond.com. A few years ago, he says, "[the NYSE] had zero tech bankers on its IPO team. They were all capital market folks."

The nonprofit Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF) and Grant Thornton, the tax advisory company, issued a report earlier this week on the fundraising environment. I’m discovering it’s chockfull of useful information. Much of the analyses derives from a 14-question online survey distributed late last year and that more than 250 finance pros, i-bankers, merchant bankers, and […]

Duuuude. Another person gets apprehended through social networking stupidity. This time, it’s 21-year-old, Redwood City, Calif., resident Brian Hogan, who found Apple’s next-generation iPhone prototype at a local beer garden roughly two weeks ago, then sold it to the Gawker site Gizmodo for $5,000. According to Hogan’s attorney, Jeffrey Bornstein, Hogan was told by Gizmodo that […]

The biggest piece of financial legislation facing Congress right now is Chris Dodd's sweeping reform bill. But the best is probably the Startup Visa Act, which would provide visas to foreign entrepreneurs who have at least $1 million in committed capital to launch a business -- and create at least ten jobs -- in the U.S. Proponents say the greatest impediment to passage is inertia, rather than anti-immigrant sentiment, which means that they must get their message heard. To that end, a new series of videos have been produced about a recent trip to Washington D.C. to meet with legislators. The first features Shervin Pishevar, a native Iranian best-known as the founder and former CEO of Social Gaming Network (one of the top gaming publishers on the iPhone) and the founding president and former COO of Webs (formerly FreeWebs). He has also helped back startups GoWalla, Space Pencil, and Fotomoto, among others. Get it after the jump...

I don’t know the answer to that question, but entrepreneur Geoff Lewis of  Topguest — a two-month-old travel service that’s exiting private alpha soon — explains the two reasons he doesn’t think so in a post just published on Business Insider.  Lewis, who worked briefly at Peter Thiel’s Clarium Capital Management, argues that a startup no longer needs one […]