Connie Loizos

Most professionals would likely agree that 99 percent of meetings are hopeless time sucks. The last meeting I joined took more than an hour and involved 30 people, and what do I remember? The moment when an East Coast colleague asked if his group was moving closer to the office cafeteria. To help my managers and yours, earlier today, I called Boston-based communications consultant Nick Morgan -- author of “Running Meetings: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges” -- for constructive ways on how to structure a meeting, as well as how to politely escape one.

In 2001, the New York Times characterized Ron Conway as “just another dot-com also-ran,” owing to the then-poor performance of two Internet index funds that Conway ran for rich contacts who wanted a piece of his early-stage action. The uber angel was restored to his place at the center of the digital revolution when Google — […]

The Draper family has enjoyed an improbable amount of success. Paterfamilias Bill Draper was one of Skype’s first backers. Son Tim, who largely pioneered the idea of venture firm affiliates, has had numerous hits of his own, including Hotmail and, through those affiliates, Skype and Baidu. Tim’s sister Polly Draper hasn’t done too badly herself, […]

In the March issue of Vanity Fair, writer Michael Wolff smartly assembles a “Next Big Thing for Dummies” list, a tongue-in-cheek service to readers wanting to profit from “what’s going on this year” or else simply to “hold [their] own at a cocktail party.” Below are some of the highlights of the piece, with a little added […]

There’s a lot of talk about tech IPO candidates lately. Conspicuously missing from those lists is longtime media darling Digg. Reportedly courted by Google in 2008, the five-year-old news aggregator has been elbowed out of the spotlight -- and traffic rankings -- by six-year-old Facebook and three-year-old Twitter. In other words, Digg has a MySpace problem. Unlike MySpace, however, Digg has no plans to passively watch its audience go elsewhere. It may have lost some of its first-mover mojo, but the San Francisco-based company -- which has 40 million registered users -- is actively working to get it back. For starters, Digg is planning to launch a spate of new Digg sites centered around niche content. To continue broadening away from its original base of men ages 18 to 34, Digg is “extending beyond our one-size-fits-all home page and atomizing content,” says Digg's chief stategy officer, Mike Maser. If you’re interested in rock climbing or knitting, Digg aims to have in-depth news for you to vote up or down on a separate home page.

Admit it, you didn't want to be rude to your friends or colleagues, so when they sent you invitations to yet another stupid-sounding social networking a few years ago, you acquiesced. You'd already joined Facebook, LinkedIn and likely Plaxo; you didn't necessarily see the harm in reposting the same publicly available information at yet another spot. Then the seemingly endless stream of related emails started showing up in your inbox, asking you to invite another friend to join, recommend a colleague for something, or view someone's bar mitzvah photos. Now a blessed little service called DeleteYourAccount can help you make it all go away by showing you how to deactivate your profile at a long number of sites and services. According to the service, the networks most people are permanently disconnecting from are

TheFunded, where entrepreneurs are invited to rate venture firms and individual VCs, has just published a list of top-ranked VCs. Smart move, given the vacuum left by Forbes' decision to kill its Midas List. TheFunded's effort is entirely subjective, of course, but that's the whole point. No matter their performance as investors, this is a list of the people most respected by startup CEOs, which can mean just to future performance as a stellar track record. The following is culled from the 17,834 VCs that TheFunded lists, and the 13,287 CEOs or founding members who have taken the time to write up 22,049 ratings and reviews, here are the 50 most popular VCs, in descending order of top ranking:

Advisory firm BDO Seidman recently surveyed 100 investment bankers who gave pretty detailed feedback about what they think will drive or crush a company's IPO dreams. Below are some snippets. You can find more information from the survey here. *On average bankers think businesses will need to offer 38 percent ownership in order to achieve a successful IP0 this year. When asked what type of offering attributes the investment community will value the most in the coming year, more than a third of respondents (38%) cited long-term growth potential. Other attributes that will be valued in 2010 are profitability (28%) and stable cash-flow (25%).

Venture capitalists are notorious cheapskates. Take me to any firm in the Bay Area and I will show you one issue of February’s Venture Capital Journal in the lobby-- and six photocopied versions of it in various partners’ offices. Here’s the good news, though. For firms determined to avoid debacles like Canopy Financial and Entellium, it’s now possible to hire top-notch expertise in the field of “deception detection.” As Politico reports, at least one Boston-based firm, Business Intelligence Advisors, has sent former CIA operatives into the business operations of both Goldman Sachs and the hedge fund SAC Capital in order to help them detect BS when they hear and see it. Here's how it works:

I first met Alex Rampell in early 2007, six months after he’d launched TrialPay, a payments and promotions platform that had already recognized the lucrative potential of getting online users to try one product in order to get another one for free. At the time, Rampell was 25 years old and TrialPay employed just 13 people who worked out of a couple of small, windowless conference rooms in Mountain View. Roger Lee of Battery Ventures, who was with me on my visit, had said that he’d courted Rampell aggressively, including presenting Rampell with a preemptive offer at a nearby bistro and, when that didn’t work, introducing him to potential customers. At the time, I was baffled by Lee's obligingness; now it's easy to understand.