Mark Boslet

Pinnacle Engines emerged from stealth on Thursday with the news it raised $13.5 million from a pair of top VCs and an announcement that it will introduce a dramatically more efficient internal combustion engine by 2013. The San Carlos, Calif., company that had previously avoided public attention is one of a handful of ambitious startups hoping […]

The next big technology shift is right around the corner. We just don’t know what it is. Or better said, we don’t know its consequences. That’s what makes predicting the future difficult and why Ben Horowitz, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock Partners and executive chairman of LinkedIn, deserve credit […]

President Obama weighed in on the global energy debate again Thursday with a call that the United States reduced its use of imported oil by a third. This decade-long goal is a welcome and ambitious target. But it will likely meet resistance from global-warming Republican skeptics. In fact, even as Obama spoke, critics of climate […]

Deal terms and valuations shifted in favor of entrepreneurs last year as onerous term sheets became less common and money flowed more freely. These were the findings of a study by the law firm Cooley released this week. (The data come from transactions in which Cooley served as counsel.) The trend is hardly a surprise […]

A total of 89 European-focused venture capital funds are raising capital this year, well more than double the number of funds that closed on new money last year, according to a study. The news suggests an uptick of investment interest and perhaps confidence. It also foreshadows an improvement in fund formation. The 89 funds hope […]

VantagePoint Venture Partners is raising $1 billion to invest globally as cleantech companies seek to expand their operations on a commercial scale, peHUB has learned from a source with direct knowledge of the fund-raising effort. Greentech Media was the first to report on the fund, but it said the target was $1.5 billion. PeHUB's source says the target is, in fact, $1 billion. The firm in December filed an SEC document about the fund, called VantagePoint CleanTech Partners III LP, but that document did not disclose a target amount.

Bill Gurley doesn’t blog often. But when he does, his posts are often worth reading. This is the case with the Benchmark Capital general partner’s piece this week on the threat posed by Google’s Android software for cell phones and tablets, and the software’s key defensive role for the Internet titan. (Gurley’s last post was […]

I couldn’t help reposting the news from Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog that Russian investor Yuri Milner purchased a $70 million home in Silicon Valley. This isn’t because the news is surprising. It’s not a shock that Milner would want a base of operations in California’s venture heartland. This founder of the Moscow investment firm DST […]

Australian venture capital and private equity posted respectable returns over the one, three and five year time horizons, despite the turmoil in the financial markets. The returns report is the first from a partnership between the Australian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association and Cambridge Associates. It was released this week. The study shows that […]

The rule of thumb has been that venture capitalists stay as far away from Washington – and cumbersome federal regulatory oversight – as possible. Of course, this has been changing over the years. Witness recent efforts by GPs such as Brad Feld and John Doerr to influence cleantech and immigration policy. But now the Supreme […]