By Rohit Kulkarni, SharesPost Slack recently announced that it has filed confidential documents for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While the company’s prospects look strong, several big questions loom for the messaging and collaboration platform. When will the 10-year-old company reach profitability? Can Slack continue to innovate and thus remain the market […]
Corporate venture suffered a tarnished reputation in the wake of the dot-com crash, when dozens of programs exited the business and left portfolio companies short of follow-on capital. Whether a similar exodus, and stain, follows the next economic downturn is a hot question in the venture capital today. There are good reasons to believe the […]
You able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Not yet. But lifting a 250-pound crate in a warehouse? No problem. Innovations in robotic exoskeleton technology are enabling everyday people to perform superhuman feats of strength and could soon transform the way many of us work, play and live our lives. Already, exoskeletons are […]
Below is performance data for the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada‘s vintage 2004 to 2007 venture capital funds. The figures from the Nevada LP are current as of June 2018. An expanded spreadsheet with additional data is attached. To download the full version of the spreadsheet below with additional data, click here: Nevada PERS venture portfolio (2004 to 2007) […]
Last week, Unusual Partners, a venture firm focusing on early-stage startups, announced that it hired Andrew Johns, former president of Wealthfront, as a consumer technology-focused investment partner. The Menlo Park, California-based firm was started in early 2018 by John Vrionis, a former partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Jyoti Bansal, the founder of the Lightspeed-backed AppDynamics, […]
OMERS Ventures, the VC arm of the C$95 billion ($72 billion) Canadian pension fund OMERS, is accelerating an ambitious strategy to establish itself as a global platform. OV is eyeing vistas in the U.S. and Europe with the goal of getting “feet on the street” in key tech hubs, Head of Ventures Damien Steel told […]
In a tongue-in-cheek blog post just after the start of the new year, Founder Collective took an unusual one-two uppercut at vanity valuations and the hyper-growth mantra so popular in venture capital these days. The New York firm proposed issuing warning labels to founders with the caution: “Venture Capital Can Be Deadly: Burn Responsibly.” The […]
In the six years since it was founded in 2012, the Alchemist Accelerator has graduated 19 classes of emerging companies. What differentiates the accelerator is not just its enterprise focus, or its 20-company class size, but the length of its instruction. Each class lasts for six months, and some startups take as long as nine […]
Jeff Fluhr, who founded Spreecast and co-founded StubHub, quietly joined Craft Ventures late last year as a general partner. At the San Francisco firm, known for keeping a low profile, he becomes the third GP along with Co-Founders David Sacks and Bill Lee. Sacks is the former Yammer CEO and onetime COO and product visionary at […]
By Joshua Mitnick, VCJ Correspondent In 2010, Michal Geva and Peter Fitzgerald, Triventures co-managing partners, helped organize a Tel Aviv conference on healthcare-industry trends. A session on how IT and medical technology converge drew skepticism from some participants from big life-sciences companies. Investment in digital startups totaled about $1 billion. Smartphones were relatively new and […]