Connie Loizos

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about the Experience Project, a social networking startup launched by 28-year-old Armen Berjikly last year when his friend — let’s call him Dave — was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Understandably, the last thing Dave wanted was to advertise the development online to his former classmates and colleagues. At the […]

As VentureBeat was first to report this morning, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has hired yet another Sun Microsystems cofounder. This time it’s John Gage, who just left his post as chief researcher at Sun to become a partner at KPCB. Hard to imagine that the news will blow anyone’s socks off. No offense meant […]

The other day, I asked Ron Conway what his favorite new investment might be. He has so many, it’s never an easy question for him to answer; still, he said that off the top of his head, Foomojo was one startup about which he was excited. In fact, Ron and numerous other Valley angels have […]

Vanity Fair’s July issue is about to hit newsstands, and it includes a retrospective on some of the Internet’s pioneering figures. It’s already online, so you can read it here. Y, it includes Al Gore. Also: Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; PayPal cofounder Elon Musk; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; MySpace cofounders Chris […]

It’s become clear that if you want to learn more about the brain “fitness” space, you want your first call to be to Alvaro Fernandez, chief executive officer of SharpBrains, a San Francisco-based research and advisory firm “dedicated to the emerging brain fitness” field. (Fernandez, who once worked as a McKinsey & Co. consultant, wanted […]

Fidelity Equity Partners, a mid-market buyout shop that raised $500 million for its first fund last year, just hired Ian Blasco from Bain Capital as the partner to lead its tech, communications, and business services investments. Blasco will be trolling for companies valued at between $50 million and $150 million that are enjoying growth of […]

When Charles River Ventures first launched its Quickstart seed funding program in the fall of 2006, and attracted national attention to it, many in Silicon Valley rolled their eyes. The program offers loans of up to $250,000 to entrepreneurs with nascent startups, loans that turn into equity if and when the startup closes its next […]

I recently asked Bob Long, the CEO of publicly traded fund-of-funds Conversus Capital, a few venture-related questions. For those who aren’t familiar with Conversus, it was born out of one of the largest secondary transactions in history, when it acquired its initial portfolio of 168 funds for approximately $1.9 billion from Bank of America. Today, […]

There’s a lot of talk about “brain fitness” recently, but a broader sector seems to be emerging: consumer-driven health, or preventative health, or even Health 2.0, as it’s being called. Physic Ventures, a firm about which I wrote last week, is specializing in the area; a number of other firms like Mohr Davidow and Technology […]

Venture investors around the globe have similar impressions about which countries are the most technologically innovative. They also share the sense that the rest of the world is catching up to the U.S., according a March NVCA/Deloitte survey of 398 VCs whose findings were released today. While the U.S. was seen by respondents as the […]