Alexander Haislip

UPDATE: Due to popular demand, my bosses have generously agreed to make our story on adult toy startup JimmyJane free of charge. Enjoy: JimmyJane, a startup looking to become the Montblanc of vibrating sex toys, late last year raised a $1.1 million Series C financing from a group of investors that includes a limited liability company controlled by Tim […]

Ah opensource. Is there no sound sweeter to the ears of those feeding the coffers of enterprise software behemoths? It’s a sweet sound to VCs as well. They have made plenty of dough on exits such as JBoss’s $420 million sale to RedHat last summer. The most recent target for opensource toppling is WebEx Communications (Nasdaq: […]

Nearly four years after Apple Computer launched its iTunes Music Store (which has since sold more than 1 billion downloaded songs), startups are looking for their own iPod effect. Mog.com is certainly an example. The startup offers users social networking around the music they listen to and offers advertisers the chance to target an audience […]

Crosslink Capital has begun raising its fifth fund with the intention of splitting the $600 million investment vehicle equally between venture deals and hedge fund-like public market investments. The fund will be more than twice the size of the $280 million Crosslink Crossover Fund IV, raised in 2003. The San Francisco-based firm currently invests from […]

Nick Paumgarten of The New Yorker Magazine profiled Nat and Alex Wolff, the stars of The Naked Brothers Band movie and nephews of venture capitalist Tim Draper. Alex and Nat play pre-teen rockers in a movie written by Polly Draper, Tim’s Sister and former star of the TV show “Thirtysomething” where she played Ellyn Warren. […]

The rich are different than everyone else: They have better sex. At least that’s the findings of a new survey by Prince & Associates and wealth consultant Hannah Grove. They found that 70% of today’s multimillionaires said being wealthy gave them “better sex.” Read the WSJ’s story on it or see the study. I’m not sure […]

Call it the return of IPO optimism. I can’t find any other reason why Isilon Systems (Nasdaq: ISLN) popped 78% on its first day and is up nearly 100% since its IPO little more than a month ago. The distributed storage systems company is one of the few private companies losing money that has actually […]

RWI Ventures continues to corral support for its second fund. The 6-year-old firm has raised just $65 million toward its $100 million target, according to a regulatory filing. That’s just slightly more than the $52 million it had raised by the end of June. The firm did not return calls for comment. The fund was […]

Greycroft Partners, the venture firm founded by Alan Patricof, has upped its inaugural fund size to $75 million, according to a regulatory filing. The fund was set at nearly $55 million. But since then, Patricof has hired a partner in Los Angeles, Dana Settle (former veenture partner with Mayfield Fund) and Drew Lipsher (former head […]

Project Hi-Fi is working on a “social networking website” that could “literally affect half the people in the United States,” according to regulatory filings and its website. The site says it is addressing a $100 billion market.The startup is the brain-child of CEO Steven Carpenter, a former strategy director at RealNetworks, who began to raise […]