Tag Archive: Venture Capital

An open letter to Mr. Leo Laporte of TWIT.tv

Leo, I’m writing this open letter to you because i discovered your excellent, entertaining, but ultimately disconcerting TWIT.tv show today, due to all the unchallenged mis-statements coming out of Jason Crass-a-canis, CEO of Mahalo.com. I watched with a great degree of incredulousness, as you let Jason call myself, and 849 of my fellow Angel Investors [...]

Read the full article »

Startup Trek Television announces 20 City “Innovation in the Western USA” tour featuring tech entrepreneurs

Startup Trek Television, Inc. announces a Nov 10 > Dec 8, 2009 “Innovation in the Western USA” Tour:

We’ll video interview six to twelve startups in each city. Interviews will be published within 72 hours of being conducted, once we catch up with our backlog from the Portland-Seattle area.
Below is our finalized schedule for this tour.

Read the full article »

Keiretsu Forum member and spokesperson Dennis Erokan enters statement responding to Jason Calacanis “Twitter war”

Nine years of helping entrepreneurs equals $200 MM in fundings for 200+ companies. Our track record speaks for itself.
We are not VCs. The Keiretsu Forum is a professionally managed association for Angel Investors. Keiretsu Forum is not the venue for every entrepreneur. With more than 200 fundings, we know we are filling a market need. [...]

Read the full article »

Sequoia-backed blogger Jason Calacanis launches “terrorist Jihad” campaign against Keiretsu Forum

Unfortunately young entrepreneur, blogger, and self-proclaimed startup guru, and Sequoia Capital backed “Mahalo” CEO Jason Calacanis has chosen to launch what he calls a “Holy War to destroy the Keiretsu Forum”.  He is portraying himself as Bin Ladin and calls his rage-a-thon “Jason’s Jihad”.
This absurdity started last Friday with a very uncivil series of blog [...]

Read the full article »

Wall Street Journal article: “Where Twitter ranks in Venture Capital (VC) History”

Are Venture Capitalists going to lose their shirts on Twitter?
Some historical perspective on the immense bet Venture Capitalists have made on Twitter:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/09/30/where-twitter-ranks-in-vc-history/
This article shows how the odds are against Twitter returning funds to investors. Because Twitter falls into the zone of “VC insanity” Tulip-bulb style investing, circa the 1999 Nasdaq bubble.
We were big fans [...]

Read the full article »

Steve interviews Fusion IO cofounder, CEO at Networld + Interop Las Vegas

Fusion IO, of Salt Lake City has raised $48M in venture financing to develop next generation, Flash memory based “solid state server drive” io subsystems.
As a Fusion IO co-founder explains in this interview on the opening day of N+I Las Vegas (in Startup City), hard disk drive technology has not kept up with “Moore’s Law” [...]

Read the full article »

Steve teams with Cal Poly business school to launch tech startup partnership programs

It was my pleasure on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 to participate in presenting a cutting-edge collegiate, socially-enabled web 2.0 application to students in the Orfalea School of Business at California Polytechnic (“Cal Poly”) in San Luis Obispo.  Professor Jeffrey Danes of the Orfalea School of Business invited me speak to his entrepreneurial marketing class, the third [...]

Read the full article »

What type of tech startups get funded and why?

This SVASE panel discussion held Thu Aug 7 2008 at Wilson-Sonsini in Palo Alto, delved into the question of what types of startups are attracting funding, and why.
What types of startups are getting funded? Consumer? Technology? Social? Wireless? or what?
What are the most attractive markets; 5 million free members to the next Flickr, or [...]

Read the full article »

Apple, with a little help from KP, opens iPhone to developers

Today Apple went beyond opening up the iPhone to software developers with the expected software developer kit (SDK).
They also announced MS-Exchange Compatibility by licensing ActiveSync technology from Microsoft.
The third major component of this announcement was provided by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, who announced the establishment of a $100M “iFund”, dedicated to companies developing iPhone [...]

Read the full article »