Lawrence Aragon

The $350 million purchase of Green Mountain Energy Co. will produce a nice return for Green Mountain’s backers, but none of them is among the usual Silicon Valley cleantech VC suspects. Among Green Mountain’s backers is Connecticut Innovations, a venture fund based in Connecticut. It was the sole investor in a $2 million second round […]

VantagePoint Venture Partners has launched a new $100 million fund that will focus on financial services and cleantech investments in Tianjin, China, and the surrounding regions. The fund (take a deep breath) is called Tianjin VantagePoint Hi-tech China FIVCE Fund. It will be managed by VantagePoint, Tianjin Hi-Tech Holding Group and Tianjin Binhai Development Investment […]

What does it take to make it as a technology entrepreneur? A great idea and the skills of a “Ninja assassin,” according to some venture capitalists. The passion and focus associated with the Japanese discipline goes a long way in impressing would-be investors. “What I’m looking for is what I call a Ninja assassin — […]

Fast-growing Squarespace, a competitor to blogging platforms such as Wordpress and TypePad, tonight announced that it has taken its first institutional money—a $38.5 million growth investment led by Index Ventures and Accel Partners. The deal values the company between $80 million and $100 million, according to a knowledgeable source. The New York-based company landed on the Inc. 500 last year, coming in at No. 339. Inc. magazine reported that the eight-employee company had grown its revenue from just under $270,000 in 2005 to $2.2 million in 2008. If there were a website development tool for dummies, Squarespace would be it. Take a look at the demo on its website. Pretty slick stuff. The company says its hosted service is used by “tens of thousands of websites” worldwide and that its customer list includes fashion designer Marc Ecko, PR powerhouse Porter Novelli, TV journalist Bob Woodruff, ABC News Radio, actor Kevin Pollak and shock jock Don Imus.

We’ve written a fair amount about how stingy VCs have gotten over the past couple of years, but one area that they continue to invest into is the cloud. If you want the inside scoop on what VCs are looking for in cloud deals today, check out the video I've posted after the jump of a panel I moderated this week for GigaOm’s Structure event. Panelists were Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint Ventures, Promod Haque of Norwest Venture Partners, Ping Li of Accel Partners; Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners and Glenn Solomon of GGV Capital.

If you had to guess, what percentage of the investing partners at the 50 most active U.S. venture firms are female? 10%, 15%, 25%? It’s just 5%, according to research by Cynthia Padnos at Illuminate Ventures, one of the five female VCs Tom Stein writes about in this month’s cover story for Venture Capital Journal. (Subscribers can read the story here). Despite that shocking statistic, none of the women Stein spoke with complained about sexism. In fact, Theresia Gouw Ranzetta of Accel Partners says the venture business is actually a breath of fresh air compared to her first job as a design engineer at a large carmaker. She was just one of a handful of women in a building with about 1,000 engineers, and business lunches typically took place at a local strip club. “Nothing fazes me after that,” Ranzetta said.

Question for VCs: Have you noticed your limited partners demanding a lot more information about your portfolio—all the way down to how you arrived at the valuations for each company you’ve invested in? I was talking to a veteran VC recently who said he is dealing with way more LP questions than he used to, enough that he sees it eating into time that would be better spent scouting new deals or working with portfolio companies. He has sat down with LPs and gone over every company in the particular fund (or funds) that the LPs have invested in. And he’s been surprised by very specific questions about operational details of the companies in the fund(s).

UPDATED. Three of Bay Partners’ six partners all resigned on the same day last week, a knowledgeable source told Venture Capital Journal, peHUB’s sister publication. Eric Chin, Salil Deshpande and Sandesh Patnam quit the firm, leaving behind firm co-founder and managing general partner Neal Dempsey, managing general partner Atul Kapadia and general partner Neil Sadaranganey, […]

Two days before the highly anticipated launch of its iPad, Apple Computer issued a warning to consumers that they “should not iPad and drive at the same time.” The warning came after venture capitalists John Doerr and Steve Jurvetson were involved in an iPad-related fender bender earlier today. According to a Menlo Park police report, Doerr was driving his Segway to a meeting at Draper Fisher Jurvetson when he took his eyes off the road to read an incoming email on his iPad, which he had mounted atop his Segway. At the same time, Jurvetson was backing out his