Alastair Goldfisher
You can excuse Scott Maxwell, senior managing director of OpenView Venture Partners, for feeling a little pessimistic over the last two years. His firm’s second fund, a $125 million effort to invest in growth stage companies, closed in the fall 2008. Yup, it closed the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, said Maxwell, a former managing director […]
And yet another cloud-related startup has scored a boatload of money. Zetta Inc. plans to announce on Tuesday that it has raised $11.5 million in a Series B round from existing investors Foundation Capital and Sigma Partners. That is on top of a nearly $11 million Series A round that Zetta closed in August 2008 […]
A16Z Wraps Up Second Fund The largest fund raised in the final quarter of 2010, so far, was apparently also one of the easiest to raise. Andreessen Horowitz, known as A16Z, raised $650 million for its second fund, and the firm said it only took three weeks to close. Alexi Oreskovic of Thomson Reuters has […]
DCM and Sequoia China are betting that they can take a successful model and adopt it and apply it in China. The two firms have invested $20 million in a Series A round of funding in Vipshop, an online flash retailer in China, similar to the U.S.-based Gilt Groupe or the European Vente Privee. Both […]
Kevin Fong, the former chairman of data storage company 3PAR Inc., likes to talk about poker, often uses poker analogies and says he studies the card game. He even has a home in Las Vegas. But you won’t find him spending time in casinos, playing Texas Hold ‘em and flipping chips. He says he doesn’t […]
There’s some been some notable news in the past few weeks concerning consumer-oriented VCs. First of all, Christine Herron announced last week that she has left First Round Capital after a two-year stint at the early stage firm to join the consumer Internet team at Intel Capital. From 2005 and 2007, Herron worked at Omidyar […]
In case you haven’t heard, word-of-mouth advertising is huge. That was one of the takeaways today at the Accel Stanford Symposium. Speaking on a panel about the future of social and viral marketing, ModCloth co-founder Susan Gregg Koger said her company’s initial growth was due in large part to her network of friends telling other […]
If failure is a badge of honor for entrepreneurs, then the FailCon 2010 conference is an awards show to honor those who try and try again. More than 400 entrepreneurs and investors came to FailCon yesterday at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco to hear various entrepreneurs and other panel speakers—many of whom who have […]
Eyeballs are nice, but eyeballs don’t pay your bills when you’re a retailer with an online presence. I thought about that yesterday when I was interviewing Rob Fuggetta, founder & CEO of Zuberance, and his newest venture backer, Deepak Kamra, general partner of Canaan Partners. San Carlos, Calif.-based Zuberance, which provides a word-of-mouth marketing platform, […]
If it was all about who you know when it comes to launching a startup, Dan Greenberg would certainly be at the head of the class. Greenberg, founder and CEO of Sharethrough, is announcing today that his startup, a provider of social video advertising services, has closed a $5 million Series A round led by […]