Connie Loizos

Marc Andreessen stopped by our offices last week to discuss his new fund, and I took the opportunity to throw out some off-topic questions about Twitter (he's an angel investor), LinkedIn (ditto) and Facebook (he's on the board): How does Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg remind you of your younger self and how is he different? The big difference is he really wants to be the CEO and has tremendously applied himself to doing that. I actually think he’s not that similar to me from that standpoint. He’s doing a really good job of running company and really wants to. That’s a big difference. Similarities? I don’t know. Young? [Laughs]. Young and hard working. He’s the real deal. He wants to buckle down. He wants to build a great company. He doesn’t want to sell it.

Serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and his longtime investing partner Ben Horowitz have closed on a $300 million venture fund that aims to invest in mostly seed-stage deals, mostly in Silicon valley, and that will be focused on “anything based on computers,” Andreessen told peHUB. The eponymously named Andreessen Horowitz fund, whose only GPs are Andreessen and Horowitz, will not invest in “cleantech, energy, biotech, life sciences, nanotech, rocket ships, electric cars or space elevators,” said Andreessen. Instead, he and Horowitz will be seeking out the most interesting opportunities in “consumer Internet or what we call business Internet: software as a service and related things [and] cloud computing.” Andreessen added that the pair

In recent weeks, I’ve heard a few VCs talk about the promise of “biocomputational” startups, biotechs that are more quickly than ever collecting, processing, and making use of genomic data. Gene Security Network, which produces a test used to screen chromosomes during the in-vitro fertilization process is one that’s raised $10 million in the last […]

Recently, New Enterprise Associates went ahead with plans to lease a stunning 25,000-square-foot office on Sand Hill Road for its 45 West Coast partners, associates, and administrative staffers.  It was a notable upgrade for NEA, which had been leasing roughly 13,000 square feet in two buildings across the street, where most of the venture firms in […]

Thanks in part to the roughly $92 billion dollars that clean tech startups are hoping to wring out of President Obama’s economic-stimulus bill of earlier this year, VC investment into so-called “green” technologies jumped meaningfully between the second and first quarters of the year, according to Greentech Media, which covers the industry exclusively. In a newly released report, […]

Robin Wolaner, the founder and CEO of two-year-old TeeBeeDee, a social network for 40-plus-year-olds, says the company has run out of steam. Or, more specifically, money. She published the following note to readers at the site yesterday: A Message I Didn’t Want to Send June 29, 2009 2:55 p.m. I regret to have to inform you that […]

Three-year-old genetics startup 23andMe launched a surprisingly unscientific ad campaign this past weekend: it plastered its name across a giant white blimp that makes regular trips around the San Francisco Bay. I’m sure I’m not the only tech observer who — watching from a local beach — rubbed her eyes at the site of the giant […]

San Francisco-based True Ventures emerged on the venture scene in 2005 and its way of doing business -- focusing on seed-stage startups that it can afford to back for the long haul -- quickly resonated with LPs. Not only did they give True $155 million back in 2006 but they came back for a second, $195 million, offering last fall. That True had already enjoyed two quick exits helped: In late 2006, it participated in the $850,000 seed round of Maya’s Mom, a social networking site for mothers that BabyCenter bought for an undisclosed amount less than a year later. True was also the first institutional money into blog search engine Sphere, which sold in April 2008 to America Online for $25 million after raising just $4.3 million. True's reputation among entrepreneurs is more notable, though. Whatever it's doing -- be it treating entrepreneurs like customers, as it likes to say, or operating out of a startup-like space (its open, sunny offices at the base of a pier feature little aside from cheap gray carpeting and an array of modest desks) -- has resonated with the digital media community, which seemingly now holds the firm in the same high regard as Union Square Ventures in New York, First Round Capital outside Philadelphia and prominent angel investors like Ron Conway. Yesterday, I visited the firm to find out what all the fuss is about; there, I talked with co-founder Jon Callaghan over the sound of squawking seagulls:

I recently grabbed coffee with Justin Fishner-Wolfson, a personable principal at Founders Fund in San Francisco. He had some interesting things to say about the new media scene in San Francisco (there may be up to 20 startups in the city’s South Park district alone, including Twitter), and why what’s piquing his partners' interest these days has less and less to do with that world. Most notably, Fishner-Wolfson told me that Founders Fund has pretty much made all of the bets it plans to make on consumer Web companies out of its current fund and that it turned its sights some time ago to other opportunities. “We still see every consumer deal out there. I’d be shocked if there was a deal we haven’t seen, or else know about, but the signal to noise ratio is much, much lower [than in past years]," he says. “We consider that we’ve made our investments. I’d be surprised if we made many more in the near future. I think we’d rather see how [our related portfolio companies] do at this point.”

In November 2007, Salman Ullah, Sean Dempsey, and Peter Hsing came together to form Merus Capital, a venture capital firm that wanted to raise $125 million for its first fund. Given the founders’ backgrounds, it didn’t seem overly ambitious. Ullah had been Google’s VP of corporate development, where he worked with Dempsey, and Hsing was coming from Microsoft, where he had been a general manager of corporate strategy. But like many firms trying to pool capital in today’s inhospitable fundraising environment, Merus is assembling a much smaller fund -- and at a much slower rate -- than expected. Indeed, according to a May SEC filing that I stumbled across tonight, the Palo Alto-based has raised just $36 million so far and has amended its filing so that it might continue its fundraising indefinitely.