debbiegage

Cooley Godward’s second quarter report on private company financings shows a higher percentage of up rounds compared to the first quarter of 2009 and fewer transactions with pay-to-play provisions. However, 56 percent of deals were still flat or down rounds, and a significant number of deals include “more onerous terms.” These include greater than 1x […]

Last night I spoke on a panel in San Francisco for Girls in Tech, an organization that tries to help women advance their careers in technology. The topic was “Journalism 2.0” and one big takeaway, from my point of view, is that none of the young women in the audience said they wanted to write […]

Venerable San Francisco law firm Heller Ehrman voted to dissolve last September, ending a practice that was nearly 120 years old. Now we're starting to learn more details of why it collapsed. According to a document filed in bankruptcy court last week, what undid Heller Ehrman was an overambitious strategy to expand globally, including its 2003 acquisition of the Venture Law Group, a Silicon Valley law firm that specialized in high-tech startups. (Several of the VLG folks are now at Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto, which calls itself the number 2 firm in the nation for representing venture-backed companies in financings.)

Former Yahoo president Jeff Mallett kicked in part of a $300,000 investment in a Shanghai company that sells customized men’s suits online, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company, called Indochino, guarantees “100% perfect fit” and offers free delivery, within two weeks, to anywhere in the world. The Journal has Mallett showing off his […]

I’m honored to be filling in for Connie Loizos at peHUB and Venture Capital Journal. Some of you know me already because I covered venture capital for the San Francisco Chronicle, but I expect I’ll be meeting many more of you. One of the good things about getting laid off is that it opens new […]

Alpha venture capitalist Mike Moritz quizzed California Controller John Chiang this morning about the state’s massive fiscal problems at a Churchill Club breakfast hosted by Microsoft Silicon Valley. Although Moritz declined to discuss how these problems might affect Sequoia Capital -- or say anything at all about the event to peHUB -- he asked Chiang whether he thought California was “ungovernable,” and how he proposed to fix a budget deficit that is now running $26 billion, the largest in the state’s history. In addition, California’s cash deficit is in danger of rising to $25 billion by April of next year, Chiang said. “When many of us came to California 30 or so years ago, California had a reputation around the world as the place that knows how. Today California is known as the ghost of the future of the U.S.,” Moritz said to Chiang. “How acute do you think the dilemma is?”