Connie Loizos

In today's Washington Post, columnist Tom Heath gives readers a glimpse into what a morning is like at Grotech Ventures, a decades-old firm whose biggest hits include Advertising.com's $435 million cash sale to AOL in 2004. Alhough I've always envied VCs for the sundry entrepreneurs they meet, I gather that the majority of pitch meetings are less than titillating -- for everyone involved. Heath sits in on one of those meetings and wrote about it. Grotech passed on the entrepreneur but maybe you'll see some merit in what he's trying to do. He's looking for $500,000. Here's the story.

On Friday night I had planned to head to the Crunchies -- the tech awards show cohosted this year by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOm -- but I didn't make it. Our toddler locked us out of our bedroom closet. (Why is there a lock inside the closet, you ask? Good question. Maybe our homebuilder saw "Panic Room" and it left an impression.) I hear that I missed out on a great show, though, one you can read about here if you missed it, too. If you just want to check out who won what, click here.

If you didn’t manage to raise a new fund last year, join the club. According to new data released this morning by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters, 2009 can officially go on record as the lousiest year since 1993 (in terms of number of funds raised) or 2003 (in terms of dollars committed). A mere 26 first-time funds and 93 follow-on funds managed to close last year. To give you some perspective, that’s about one-third the number of first-time funds that have closed in each of the previous four years and roughly half the number of follow-on funds that investors have been assembling in recent years.

Backed by nearly $11 million from investors that include Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus, and Benchmark Capital, San Francisco-based Grockit is teaching kids to study for standardized tests through social games online. It’s the kind of approach that some seasoned educators might sniff at. Yet the educational world is precisely where Farb Nivi, Grockit’s 32-year-old CEO, has spent most of his adult life. Indeed, he believes that schools across the nation are ready for some modernizing, via a “benevolent takeover.” (“Sounds better than a hostile takeover, right?” says Nivi.) Yesterday, Nivi and I talked about Grockit’s origins, how a teacher lands an all-star line-up of investors, and how long it takes to recuperate when you’re knocked from your Vespa by a minivan.

CEOs tend to get all the credit, but as many of them would likely admit, it’s countless invisible yet talented individuals who make up the vast amount of value in Silicon Valley. Beginning this week, we're hoping to shine a light on some of these unexposed stars through a regular new feature called Behind the Screens. Kicking off the series is 28-year-old Erik “Dutch” Vanbragt, the franchise lead of technology on Mafia Wars, an enormously popular multiplayer browser game from the social networking game company Zynga.

Last March, the New York Times profiled President Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, portraying the self-described “supernerd” as superharried. “At 6 in the morning, Peter R. Orszag is racing across wet pavement for a 35-minute run, into a shower and a suit…”the piece began. Yet Orszag has found time for love. While the New York Post reports tonight that Orszag and venture capitalist Claire Milonas welcomed a "love child" in November, the news isn't entirely happy for Orszag. Why not? The 41-year-old -- who also recently served as director of the Congressional Budget Office and was once among Bill Clinton's economic advisors -- announced his engagement a few weeks ago, and it wasn't to Milonas; he's instead planning to marry ABC News correspondent Bianna Golodryga.

By now, everyone knows that Apple recently agreed to plunk down $275 million for mobile ad startup Quattro Wireless. The deal comes less than two months after Google snatched up AdMob, a Quattro competitor that, like Quattro, was formed in late 2006 and, like Quattro, had once had acquisition discussions with Apple -- reportedly fairly involved ones at that. (Unsurprisingly, the $750 million in stock that Google put on the table was a little too rich for AdMob to resist.) What might interest followers of the mobile ad industry is that Quattro, which had raised just under $30 million over three rounds, was in the market for another $10 million to $15 million as recently as early November. The reason: while the mobile market opportunity is huge, Quattro was slated to see just $18 million in revenue in 2009, with a revenue target of $36 million in 2010. (This according to a trusted source who met with the company recently but, sadly, I didn't see until today.)

They aren’t exactly Ernst Stavro Blofelds, stroking white cats at their desks, but VCs are assiduously planning how best to capitalize on the Consumer Electronics Show coming up this weekend in Sin City. The investors’ strategies vary, though one thing is clear: a growing number of them seems prepared to kick software to the curb if the right hardware opportunity comes along. Here’s a snapshot: Howard Morgan, founding partner at First Round Capital "This will be my 28th year at CES, and this year in particular we’re looking for Web connectivity devices, along with any interesting software pieces to exploit that connectivity, such as Blu-ray allows between different things like TV sets and mobile devices.

Readers of this column know that I’ve written numerous times about CNet cofounder Halsey Minor, both here and in the now-defunct Conde Nast magazine Portfolio. It’s been hard not to watch Minor with some fascination. Minor was phenomenally successful at a young age. CNet went public just four years after its 1992 founding, netting him […]

First it was the rakish Winklevoss twins, suing Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg for purportedly making off with intellectual property from their startup, ConnectU. (Last year, after a protracted battle, the brothers squeezed a $65 million cash and stock settlement out of the social networking giant.) Now, an old business associate of the Winklevoss bros is coming after his own piece of their windfall settlement, reports CNet’s Caroline McCarthy. According to a December 21 court complaint, programming whiz Wayne Chang states that he retains a 15% stake in the Winklevoss’s now-defunct company, and he wants to see some money.