Connie Loizos

Self-made Israeli billionaire and media mogul Haim Saban quietly entered the business of venture capital a few months ago, adding an early-stage digital media practice to his seven-year-old, L.A.-based investment company, Saban Capital Group. For the uninitiated, Saban is a former television producer whose Saban Entertainment company gave the world, for better or worse, “Mighty […]

Unlike investor Mike Maples, who believes the Web 2.0 party is ending, Michael Downing, a serial entrepreneur who most recently founded the search-engine-turned-video-site GoFish, is counting on things just getting warmed up. Downing is three weeks into raising a new digital media, seed-stage venture fund that he’s calling Transmedia Capital. If he’s successful in pulling […]

Business reporter Sarah Lacy received rough treatment in today’s New York Times, which ran a review of her new book on modern entrepreneurism in Silicon Valley, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good. Though scoring a review in Sunday’s Times can be like landing beachfront property in Southampton, the real estate given Lacy may do more […]

Renowned individual investor Mike Maples, an early proponent of consumer Web 2.0 startups and an active investor in the space, believes the party may be winding down, and he’s already grabbed his coat and hat. In a phone conversation a little earlier this afternoon, he said he has switched his primary focus to business software […]

VCs aren’t the only ones whose nostalgia for the go-go ’90s grows as the IPO drought stretches on. Frank Quattrone misses them, too, and in fact, yesterday, he publicly argued that a little deregulation might let everyone relive the experience. Speaking at a conference at Stanford University, Quattrone blamed the dearth of IPOs today to […]

It’s hard to imagine, but 32-year-old Marissa Mayer, Google’s 20th employee and today its vice president of search products and user experience, is still not a billionaire. Not according to Forbes, which just released its list of the world’s seven billionaire women under age 40. Six of the seven women on its list inherited their […]

Jason Holloway will be among the thousands of developers gathered today at Facebook’s second annual developers’ conference, and like many others, he’s counting on some much-needed encouragement from the social networking behemoth. Holloway is the 38-year-old cofounder and CEO of Face it!, a bootstrapped, 20-person startup in Palo Alto that makes Facebook applications for corporate […]

Score one for Battery Ventures, which just landed a big exit from Insitu, a 16-year-old company that other venture firms might have overlooked, and which Battery first backed less than two years ago. Insitu makes 10’x 8′ unmanned aerial vehicles from its sprawling headquarters in Bingen, Washington. The company started out doing offshore weather reconnaissance, […]

VCs love China. So suggests newly released data from Zero2IPO Research Center, a financial advisory services company with several offices in China and, it’s worth noting, an affiliated venture capital arm. According to the firm, venture investment in China reached historic highs in the second quarter — both in the number of new funds to […]

Anyone who has lived in Silicon Valley for some time knows entrepreneurial attorney Craig Johnson. Once a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, Johnson left in 1993 with 13 of the firm’s attorneys to found Venture Law Group, a firm that successfully catered to high-tech companies like Hotmail, Yahoo, and Red […]