Connie Loizos

For anyone who’s had it with Wall Street, brothers Simon and Kemal Amarasingham have just created a new Facebook game called “Pissing Contest,” which “delicately balances the art of accurate urination, the motor skills of drinking and the moral judgment to know that investment bankers are not worth pissing on when on fire.” How is […]

Last week, investor Mark Suster wrote a widely read post, calling job hoppers “terrible” employees for a variety of reasons that you can read here. Suster added that someone whose resume included too many short stints wouldn’t make it past his recruiting filter, unless that person came recommended through Suster’s network. Today, entrepreneur Paul Dix writes a […]

For 20 years, San Francisco-based Steele Foundation has been in the business of providing protection to the uber-rich, and by numerous accounts, it’s the company to which Silicon Valley’s richest investors and entrepreneurs turn when they’re feeling vulnerable or need a security detail to pave their way to some far-flung destination. Indeed, asked various details about Steele’s regional clients, Steele CEO Kenn Kurtz says simply, “We own the tech sector.” While Steele protects much more than that -- the global company employs several thousand employees across 20 offices who work with governments, commercial clients, and “high-net-worth individuals,” including on intelligence-related work -- Kurtz and I talked exclusively about Steele’s security work with tech industry executives yesterday.

Former Wall Street analyst Lise Buyer helped take Google public in 2004, so it’s no surprise that many tech companies seek out the help of her IPO advisory firm, Class V Group, when the public market is in their sights. Unsurprisingly, last year was “a very quiet year for the business — very quiet,” says Buyer with a laugh. This year, Buyer, who works with just four companies a year, has had be selective. Indeed, one of the seven companies to list on both Nasdaq and the NYSE last Thursday was a client of hers. (Owing to SEC concerns, she asked that I keep which on background.) Earlier today, Buyer and I talked about the underwhelming performance of those new offerings, what she makes of what’s in the pipeline, and whether VCs should hold onto their companies — or elbow them out of their portfolios while the window is still open.

I’m intermittently watching the Future of Money and Technology Conference, taking place today in San Francisco. It's a good event, and one of the highlights I've caught so far was Aaron Patzer, the founder of the free personal finance service Mint, hinting that he doesn’t much get Blippy, a social networking site that publishes its users’ credit card transactions as they are made. Asked what he thought of the service, Patzer said something along the lines of, “I don't want people to know when I’m buying lingerie.” Pausing, he added, “There's no reason people should know what I’m wearing."

Earlier this week, I characterized the social networking application and site Spiffbox as a way for D-List celebrities to make pocket money. It is. But CEO and founder Chris Munnelly persuasively argues that its potential extends beyond the likes of Jose Canseco, one of Spiffbox’s charter members, to so-called expert advice. For those who missed […]

Controversial people review startup Unvarnished is ushering transparency into the workplace, but it may have trouble catching up to Glassdoor.com. The fast-growing user-generated site -- to which visitors anonymously cough up one piece of valuable information, like their salary, to access the site’s other data -- was launched just 21 months ago and already claims more than two million unique visitors each month. Glassdoor also says that more than one million contributions have been made about 80,000 organizations, including the U.S. Secret Service. The site includes, for example, 1,544 contributions from Google employees who’ve posted how much engineering positions at the search giant pay ($98K to $125K) to what product marketing

Mark Zuckerberg yesterday announced that Facebook wants developers to help it turn the Web into an overarching social graph, one in which people “like” sites outside of Facebook, log-on to most sites via their Facebook identity and use Facebook chat anytime, anywhere, via a plug-in “social bar" that it hopes to splash across the Internet. Like much of the world, popular media and news blogger, Jeff Jarvis -- who's also an angel investor, startup adviser and associate professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism -- is trying to make sense of those plans. He was nice enough to share with me the fact that Facebook's plan troubles him -- even while he's not entirely sure why yet. “I wrote a Google fanboy book last year [What Would Google Do?],” he said. “I’m not afraid of big companies. But Facebook’s direction right now makes me uncomfortable.”

Eleven years after swinging open its doors, San Francisco-based Blueprint Ventures is officially winding down. It will not make any new investments, although its partners will continue to manage existing portfolio companies (albeit as a part-time job). "The firm had a fantastic run,” says co-founder Bart Schachter. Pointing to broader trends at play, he adds that “early-stage venture, as an asset class, has suffered, and unfortunately many LPs no longer think about relative returns but absolute returns.” Blueprint, which focused on IP spinouts, is among dozens of other venture firms that raised their most recent funds during the dotcom days and failed to attract sufficient LP interest to assemble newer vehicles.

Today, the Pew Internet and American Life Project releases a new cell-phone usage study gathered by calling 800 teenagers age 12 to 17 between June and September of last year. Some of the data is mind-blowing — unless you’re the parent of a teenager. In such a case, the study will likely confirm what you […]