Alexander Haislip
I spotted Ron Conway at a charity event yesterday and asked him what his next investment would be in. “Internet Video.” I raised my eyebrows in shock. I wondered if he had heard of YouTube, but bit my tongue. Conway must have guessed what I was thinking though. He looked me up and down for […]
Shoot a 30-second spot with your mobile phone, upload it to the MyWaves Lounge and win a trip to Silicon Valley to pitch your idea in person to Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Redpoint and Menlo Ventures. The contest is hosted by MyWaves, a startup based in Sunnyvale, Calif. developing a service for sharing videos on your […]
Google’s Eric Schmidt told me back in June that he would not be launching a corporate VC program, but I should have asked him to clarify his position, seeing as how the company was already putting down venture-style investments. Google invested in Baidu’s $15 million Series C in June, 2004. It backed Fon Technologies, investing […]
There’s nothing more fun than watching investors acting silly. Brad Feld, inventor of the Tredputer, talks about crushing your competitors and illustrates his point by stamping on a bag of pretzels. The trick, he says, is to eat their bones afterwards. Then there’s Tim Draper. You can see him dancing at the DFJ Schmoozefest, or […]
“I went from basically being penniless to having more money than I knew what to do with,” house-selling Fred Wilson tells WallStrip about the $4.5 billion sale of Geocities to Yahoo in 1999. Fast forward to 2005 and Yahoo’s $30 million buy of del.icio.us and it’s easy to understand why a VC might want to […]
Business plan competitions demand a substantial investment of time and money from venture capitalists. But are they worth it? Venture Capital Journal weighs in this month. Behind the velvet rope, you’ll get to read the story of how New Enterprise Associates’ Patrick Chung plucked one of the hottest mobile application startups out of Stanford University […]
Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson put his 15,000 square foot village townhouse on the market with a $37.5 million price tag, according to The New York Observer. The mansion, built in 1847, once housed the Lady Christians with 30 bedrooms for women and had a library designed by Ernest Flagg populated with books donated […]
I called Stuart Peterson the day YouTube sold to Google and asked the manager of Artis Capital Management if he would be buying a new car or a new yacht with his winnings.> He wouldn’t say at the time how much he had made off his hedge fund’s investment in YouTube’s Series B (see the original […]
Internet stat collector Alexa is fighting back its critics today, comparing Sitemeter traffic stats to its own Alexa traffic history numbers on its corporate blog. Author Geoffrey Mack conducts a non-scientific study of two websites with actual traffic stats that look really close to the Alexa approximation. As though that will convince stat freaks of […]
Update: We have independently confirmed that BitTorrent has raised $25 million in new VC funding. Accel Partners led the deal, with Accel partner Ping Li expected to take a board seat. Existing backer DCM-Doll Capital Management also participated. There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about BitTorrent, and the possibility it has raised big bucks from Accel […]