Connie Loizos
Last year, self-made Israeli billionaire and media mogul Haim Saban quietly entered the business of venture capital, adding an early-stage digital media practice to his seven-year-old, Los Angeles-based investment company, Saban Capital Group.
Today, I caught up with the head of that practice, native New Zealander Craig Cooper, who’s also been a venture partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners and a founding partner with Softbank Capital. Cooper also co-founded Boost Mobile, a teen-focused wireless startup that sold to NexTel in 2003 for an undisclosed amount.
Among other things, we talked about what it’s been like working for Haim, whose net worth has reportedly dropped by a third in the last year, what Cooper makes of friend and former colleague Eric Hippeau becoming CEO of Huffington Post, and how the economy has impacted what a year ago was a vibrant venture scene in sunny Southern California. (Hint: it’s gotten bushwhacked.)
Billionaire Paul Allen hasn’t an easy month. Most notably, Allen, who famously invested upwards of $7 billion for a 52% stake in now-bankrupt Charter Communications, sold nearly all of his Class A common stock holdings in the company -- 28.5 million shares -- for a grand total of $996 last week, according to an SEC filing. (Analysts are still puzzling over why he bothered.)
No sense dwelling on that silly matter, though! That seems to be the message coming from Allen’s camp, which today released the news that Allen is both funding and has founded a Seattle email software startup called Xiant (which apparently began life as Allen’s personal email sorting system).
Xiant's software, which is available for free download here, enters a crowded field of startups that promise to make life easier for Outlook users. Just one example of another young company with a meaningful head start is Xobni, which began life as a Y Combinator startup and whose email plug-in has
In a piece today, our Reuters colleague Michael Szabo reports that a new “megafund” is predicting a “bloodbath” for the solar sector due to falling module prices and limited credit. Given the amount of capital that’s already flowed to the sector, the fund’s prediction isn’t earth-shattering. Both Greentech Media and CleantechGroup reported earlier this year […]
In Paris over the weekend, Bill Gates and his dad gave Fortune an enjoyable, nine-minute-long interview in which Gates speaks about how his upbringing may have helped him become a billionaire. I'm sure that giant brain deserves far more credit than his being frogmarched to softball practice, but hey, maybe it was a combination of the two. Video after the jump...
A reporter with the newspaper weighs in today with her own experience on Tagged, the social networking site we reported on a couple of times this past week. Surely, it's a piece that no one involved with the company is happy to see:
Every once in a while, a venture firm makes a head-scratching investment decision. Waltham, Mass.-based Polaris Ventures has just made a hair-calming one — for the second time. Today, the firm announced it has given Living Proof, a “technology-based” company in Cambridge that makes a line of six “frizz eliminating” sprays and creams under the […]
Earlier this week, I reported that Tagged, a social networking service that began life as a Facebook for teenagers, has reportedly evolved into a spam machine. I also noted that when I approached the company to chat about dubious recruiting processes, my press requests were handled very poorly. I concluded that, between the two, its high-profile investors had reason for concern.
Yesterday, TechCrunch published a related story, saying I’d been overly “harsh” and that I’d managed to draw a line “practically putting the company in the deadpool,” when the company is “actually humming along quite nicely.”
I finally caught up with Tagged’s CEO, Greg Tseng, this morning, and we chatted about the chatter, as well as what’s really going on at the four-year-old company.
Paul Holland, the general partner at Foundation Capital who leads the venture firm's clean tech practice, is attempting to build the "greenest custom-built home in America." It may also be the biggest.
Check out video of what will be his family's energy-independent Portola Valley, Calif., campus/house after the jump.
From two of our colleagues at Reuters: BOSTON, June 16 – A U.S. judge dismissed an 8-year-old lawsuit against Oracle Corp billionaire CEO Larry Ellison that alleged he made false claims that boosted the software maker’s stock before he sold millions of shares. Justice Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco issued the […]
iPhone users and those who gravitate toward the iPod touch are as different as, well, the young and middle aged, according to a survey released today by Web measuring service ComScore and by AdMob, which calls itself the world’s largest and fastest-growing mobile ad platform. Indeed, the survey’s biggest finding is that iPhone users tend to […]