Connie Loizos

Robert Day, founder of TCW Capital in Los Angeles, must be ruing the day he ever met celebrity pitchman Ed McMahon. McMahon, 85, fell during a dinner party that Day hosted at his Bel Air manse in March of last year, and McMahon has now decided to sue Day, saying that his resulting neck injury […]

Just off the phone Ram Srinivasan, a native Indian who moved to the U.S. 29 years ago, and has been on a well-worn path to becoming a Silicon Valley venture capitalist since. He logged years as an engineer and manager at HP and Sun, founded a company during the bubble (FireClick; it also sold for […]

For the last year or so, a wide number of digital media-focused venture firms have had one company in mind when backing applications makers: Facebook. The reason, of course, is that in May 2007, Facebook announced to the world that it was no longer merely a social networking company but a technology platform on which […]

eForce Media, a Santa Monica-based online lead generation startup, is closing a $4 million round of financing right now according to an SEC filing. Assuming the raise is successful, the company will have collected close to $18 million from Clearstone Venture Partners, the Edgewater Funds, and a long line of active L.A. angel investors, including […]

The Washington State Investment Board, a $63 billion pension, quietly released its first quarter report in late May and no one seems to have noticed. Little wonder; there’s not much that surprises in it. Returns on the private equity portion of its portfolio, which accounted for 21.8 percent of the whole enchilada as of March […]

The Israel Venture Capital Research Center has just released second quarter numbers, and it’s reporting that Israeli high-tech companies raised more in recent months than at any point since 2001. It also notes that first and seed investments are slowing. From the release: In the second quarter of 2008, 115 Israeli high-tech companies raised $465 […]

Eric Ly may be one of Silicon Valley’s most “linked in” entrepreneurs, though you’ve probably never heard of him. Ly founded Presdo, a months-old online scheduling company in Mountain View, California, that he has himself bootstrapped — for now. He also co-founded the business social networking company LinkedIn, where he was chief technology officer for […]

Strange post, I realize, but I’m in the middle of searching for something and just came across a 1997 BusinessWeek cover story titled “Silicon Valley: How it Really Works.” At the end of the piece, which talks in great length about the importance of proximity (how 1997!), it lists a time line detailing how the […]

Livescribe, a startup that’s trying to bring the pen into the digital age, just quietly raised a new, $6.4 million round of funding, including from VantagePoint Venture Partners, according to a regulatory filing. The capital brings the amount raised by the 20-month-old, Oakland, Calif.-based company to a stunning $34.5 million. The company is arranging for […]

Ben Kaufman, a beefy, bespectacled 21-year-old from Long Island, is nothing short of a genius when it comes to public relations, and he’s demonstrating just how far that kind of intelligence can take a budding entrepreneur. Kaufman’s business story began a few years ago, when he dropped out of college six weeks after enrolling so […]