Connie Loizos

First, I greatly appreciate those of you who were in touch this week with your feedback and tips and general observations. I love hearing about what you’re seeing, so please, keep writing! I received the most emails on my posting, born of a conversation with Steve Westly, about who the nicest VC in the business […]

Yesterday, Saints Capital, a San Francisco-based secondary investor, announced that it’s paying cash-strapped medical device maker Boston Scientific Corp. about $100 million for stakes in 54 private holdings. Saints announced a similar-size transaction last month, when it agreed to pay a little more than $100 million for the stakes in five companies that Safeguard Scientifics, […]

Matt Cohler, one of Facebook’s earliest employees and a close pal of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is hightailing it to Benchmark Capital this fall. Everyone is speculating as to why, but it makes perfect sense to me. Cohler, Facebook’s longtime VP of product management, is a smart guy. He’s been at Facebook for nearly four years, […]

Dell Larcen knows more about what’s going on in Silicon Valley than most people. The Los Altos, Calif.-based specialist has been catering to the emotional lives of venture capitalists and their portfolio companies for years. At venture firms, Larcen is often brought in to help with leadership transitions, or communication breakdowns, or to work out […]

While Steve Westly and I were chatting the other day, we talked a bit about his mentors. Unsurprisingly, he mentioned Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, Ray Lane, and Brook Byers. Westly has a very close affiliation with KPCB. When he decided to become a full-time venture investor last year, they gave him Vinod Khosla’s sunny back […]

Last night, the news broke that the social network for the business set, LinkedIn, just raised a $53 million Series C round from investors at a stunning $1 billion valuation. More interesting to me (considering rumors of the valuation surfaced months ago), is the YouTube video that LinkedIn’s investors created to accompany the news. In […]

Steve Westly has already enjoyed several careers in his lifetime. A onetime Carter Administration energy department staffer, he went on to make a fortune as VP of marketing in eBay’s earlier days, serve a four-year term as California’s controller, and run for the state’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination. (He was defeated by then-state-Treasurer Phil Angelides, who […]

I was just on the phone with Brad Young, the U.S. head of London-based investment advisory firm Altius Associates. Young also spearheads the venture capital efforts of the firm, whose clients include some enormous pension funds, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the Employees Retirement System of Texas, […]

At the end of a long day of financing meetings, do you yearn to sit at your lathe for hours and sculpt? If so, you’ll fit right into the “Art of an Asset Class” exhibition taking place on September 10 at Mall Galleries in London.The show is being organized by London-based Altius Associates — an […]

I just received a very funny press release about a new angel investment group founded by entrepreneur Rob Afshar, who in 1999 co-founded LeadClick Media, a San Francisco startup that generated online sales leads. Afshar is a Berkeley graduate with a law degree from the University of San Francisco, but he’s not much of a […]