“Entrepreneurship is what we pride ourselves on in this country,” said Mike Norman, himself a serial entrepreneur. “Though most people are too risk-averse to strike out on their own.”

Thus the premise of WeFunder, the most recent startup from Norman and co-founder Nick Tommarello. WeFunder aims to open up the process of raising money for startups outside of just the usual, traditional investors found in Silicon Valley, the East Coast and the like.

The platform, which launches on Tuesday to certain accredited investors (more on that in a minute), ostensibly allows anyone who sees promise in one of the startups featured on WeFunder’s platform to invest in it, pitching in a mandatory minimum amount of cash (currently $1000, but as little as $100 when the site rolls out to all). The idea, according to CEO Tommarello, is to “fill the funding gap between angel investors and that first major round of capital.”

The site will feature one new, carefully vetted startup per week, which outsiders can apply to fund. But they’ll have to make their case, as the startup can pick and choose exactly which investors can contribute money to their fund. The idea is, each small-time investor can bring their individual skill set to the startup in an advisory role, and can communicate via WeFunder’s dedicated social channels to share their experience with the founders.

As you’d imagine, all sorts of regulatory hangups have kept small businesses from raising money outside of the traditional private equity venues, including pursuing other options, like a site such as WeFunder. But Tommarello and Norman were instrumental in helping D.C. regulators draft, construct and ultimately pass the JOBS act, which allows small businesses to raise up to $1 million in crowdfunding backed by actual investors. So, instead of it working like a Kickstarter, where contributors pledge money to receive some sort of end product or service, WeFunder contributors actually receive a slice of equity in the company itself.

Which, Tommarello argues, is pretty cool for an armchair investor who doesn’t want to keep track of the Dow. “As an experience, living vicariously through an entrepreneur is pretty thrilling,” he said.

Now, one would think this would make traditional angel investment outfits upset. After all, part of the allure of being an angel investor is getting in on a startup’s ground floor before other, larger VC firms are able to put their money in. Not to mention the headache of having untold numbers of shareholders in a startup who could muddle up the advisory process.

WeFunder protects against this. Those who invest through the platform are limited in voting power, and can’t negotiate their contract. It’s a simple yes-or-no proposition when pitching in; accept the terms of the deal or move on. And all those numerous investors will actually just operate as one, as Norman, Tommarello and VP of engineering Greg Belote have registered a separate LLC for them all to reside under. It’s a lot of legalese, but it essentially acts as a way to keep other angels and future firms from getting freaked out by too many cooks in the kitchen.

Right now, WeFunder is only open to “accredited investors,” which means the majority of normal folks still can’t contribute. But since the JOBS act has already gotten through the House, Senate and the President’s desk, it shouldn’t be long before the platform opens up to all (it’s currently in the SEC waiting for approval, but is being held up due to new administration appointments).

For now, the accredited and the prospective small-timers can visit the site’s front door to see more new startups appear in the coming weeks.

Keith Rabois, the former Square COO who left the company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct, is weighing an offer to join Silicon Valley venture firm Khosla Ventures, according to sources close to the situation, and is currently leaning toward accepting the job there.

But, that could change. In an interesting twist, the longtime entrepreneur and investor has also been in discussions with Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky to become COO or president there.

Both the VC and the startup have been doing reference checks on Rabois, news of which has gotten out in the ever-chatty Silicon Valley scene. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that Rabois had been in talks with the San Francisco-based online housing rentals company.

But sources with knowledge of the situation said that Rabois — who has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square — seems “99 percent” ready to move into a more formal investing role.

Of course, there is still that one percent chance he might not, underscored by the eternal lure of the hot startup for serial entrepreneurs like Rabois. That said, he has also been an active angel investors for many years, with a wide-ranging portfolio, and is on many boards, including Yelp’s.

The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago, after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee.

Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.”

That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO.

“At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois at the time in an interview with me. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

Now that the tech investment buzz cycle has pivoted in an enterprise-friendly direction, I thought it was time to check in with Levine, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

I talked to him late last year on the heels of a busy summer. In July, he led AH’s stunning $100 million investment in GitHub, then followed it up with an $11.2 million investment in Meteor, and in October, an investment in Udacity, an education startup.

Perhaps hinting that 2013 will be as busy as 2012, last week he led a $30 million investment in Data Gravity and joined its board of directors.

We had a pretty long conversation. His fundamental argument about why smart enterprise-focused startups make for good investment opportunities comes down to one simple notion: Pretty much everything that’s been running in the corporate IT environment — things on which companies will spend more than $3 trillion this year according to some educated estimates — is ripe for a significant disruption that will make it less costly to own and operatee, more efficient, less prone to failure and simpler to use. That means a lot of large companies who have a lot of skin in the game maintaining the status quo are likely to have their worlds seriously rocked in the coming years.

Sound like fun? It’s exactly what AH hired him for two years ago.

Here are some highlights from the first half of our conversation. I’ll post the second half soon.

AllThingsD: Peter, the thing I keep hearing people say these days is there’s this feeling that the venture community is sort of “waking up” to the enterprise, or that it’s suddenly cool. You, on the other hand, have been all about the enterprise from the start. What do you think about that?

Levine: Yeah, it’s a really good time to be investing in the enterprise. We see so many interesting companies in the space right now. Just for context, it’s interesting that you comment on the idea that people are just waking up to the enterprise, and that’s exactly how I have felt for awhile, that there’s this renaissance in enterprise computing. There’s an awakening up and down the stack for new products that are going to service the enterprise.

Like what?

In my mind there are three categories that are all being disrupted at once. Cloud infrastructure: All the underpinnings of it all — storage, security networking and virtualization — would all fit there. At the next layer there’s software-as-a-service, though now there’s almost anything as a service. That’s transforming all the on-premise applications. At the highest level, mobile is transforming how people are consuming information and data and applications they are using. … In the cloud infrastructure you can see someone like a Cisco as the old guard, or even server vendors to some extent, and the new folks being VMWare, which totally upended the server world. For networking, you might see Nicira and other companies in the software-defined networking space as examples. It’s early days in that. There’s a big shift in software driving new network infrastructure rather than hardware and components driving the network infrastructure. In the same way, a VMWare can turn a server into an infinite number of servers. With SDN, the hardware component, it may even be a server in this case, with software basically creating a virtual network.

I get the point on Software-Defined Networking, though lately Cisco would argue, and not entirely without merit, that it has some of its own SDN chops. But I think your point is bigger about incumbent companies in the enterprise.

Exactly. The point isn’t whether Cisco has the technical chops to go do SDN, and it’s not whether they see this trend or don’t see it. They see it as well as everyone else. The problem is that from a business model standpoint, it’s really hard to go from one side of the pillar to the other. We’re talking about the commoditzation of components that very strongly eat into revenue streams and how revenue is recognized. That may sound like a minor accounting rule. But it is huge. With software, if I have to prorate my revenue for three years over the course of a sales engagement, rather than book it all up front as you do with a hardware sale, it dramatically shifts the sales model, the revenue model, the go-to-market model. It’s not only about the technology. For someone like a Cisco, they may very well have the technology chops, but there it’s about commoditizing the very revenue stream you rely on for your existence.

So I presume there are more examples like this in other parts of the stack?

Of course. There’s software-as-a-service on one side. There’s SAP, which has a long history of running big on-premise apps. And then you go to the other side. The whole transformation began with Salesforce.com. Ten years ago, Salesforce.com was an outlier. It was heresy to even think about putting precious customer data outside your firewall. I think that Salesforce really paved the way for the entire software-as-a-service category. And now every part of that stack — from business intelligence to analytics, to performance management to CIO tools — are all moving from the on-premise equivalent to off-premise, SaaS-based equivalents. Every major on-premise vendor has an equivalent off-premise counterpart.

And yet here you have the same thing as in your first example: SAP and Oracle are buying SaaS companies and talking about how they, too, are running in the cloud.

It’s true. They can acquire their way in. They have a lot of money. However, I’ve worked at large companies, and when you’re in there, you have this revenue base, and have a history defining how you’ve done things for the past 20 years, from sales to engineering to architecture. So even at the executive level, you can have every intention to transform the business and move into the new cloud architectures and so on, as the strategy trickles down through the organization it becomes difficult to implement because of the way people are managed and it becomes very hard to swallow some of these acquisitions and have them flourish. Basically the old guard suffocates the new innovation by not letting it flourish.

So we talked about software-defined networks, and there was last year a lot of attention on new companies there. Where’s the next area of attention?

Three years ago we invested in Nicira under the assumption that this was coming. There are still opportunities there, but the nature of this business is such that when a successful outcome like that happens, there’s a flurry of activity, where the venture community tends to pile on the next 40 companies doing similar things. But there’s other areas. Storage is a really interesting area right now. If you look at computing being commoditized by VMware, and now networking being commoditized by SDN, storage is the most expensive component at that layer. And it has been dominated by the same architecture and the same companies — EMC, NetApp, Hitachi, IBM — for at least 20 years. Same architecture, same companies. So I do believe there is an opportunity for companies in that layer to be disaggregated. Now, people have been talking about that for a long time. I was one of the very early employees at a compay called Veritas in the 1990s. So it’s a space that I have an affinity for. The interesting part of that market is that people have talked about the commoditization of storage since then. That said, it’s actually pretty interesting.

So what is startup vs. incumbent dynamic in storage?

In the past there was only the enterprise data center. And a startup would have to go head to head against an established startup in the data center. Whatever you’re selling, storage or networking or security, you’re going head to head with the incumbent players. And for a startup it is incredibly different. There’s questions about service and support and features, and there’s a CIO who says, well you never get fired for buying X or Y. So what’s happened now — and it just became clear when I talked with a friend about this recently — is that whole cloud architectures that are being set up in parallel to enterprise data centers, maybe inside or outside a company, or whether it’s Salesforce or Facebook, or Zynga or Amazon, those are the companies that are very sensitive to price, anti-incumbent, they’re adaptable to letting startups come in. So where a lot of new startups are starting to get traction is with these new cloud architectures, and it might be within a corporate infrastructure, and where there’s green field opportunity. What you find in these environments is a lot of commoditization at every part of the cloud infrastructure layer — whether it’s compute, networking, security or storage — they’ve all been greatly commoditized as compared to the traditional data center. That parallel universe has given startups the ability to make an inroad by gaining traction and relevance. And those companies are the lead users. The cloud infrastructure has dragged the crusty old data center to innovate in a new way.

So who are the companies you’re starting to see and invest in doing that disruptive work in storage?

We recently did an investment in a company called Convergent-io, which is building a storage networking switch that will leverage commodity disks at performance and reliability rates that are equal to if not better than current storage arrays. So that is the whole magic. You have to get equal or better performance and reliability. The whole idea of using flash is really interesting, but that’s essentially using the same architecture. What I’m sort of trying to leapfrog in the storage space, is to ask how storage can become commoditized on the back of commodity components.

You’re not a believer in the idea that flash can save the world, at least inside the data center?

Flash is expensive, but it’s still a storage array that sits there with a lot of expensive stuff around it. The flash stuff is linear and sequential versus the way storage array has tended to work in the past. My belief is that fundamentally there won’t be a storage array anymore. Now, that’s a big leap. But in the same way, things will change up where software will just define the storage layer. I’m talking commodity flash and disk as being the basis for the infrastructure.

So it was a particularly good day for Michael Pellini, CEO of Foundation Medicine Inc., when an unsolicited query from Bill Gates popped up in his inbox last September.

The co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and global-health philanthropist had heard about Foundation’s new cancer diagnostic test and wanted more information about the company. The email didn’t mention any interest in investing in Foundation, and Dr. Pellini wasn’t actually looking for money—the company was poised to announce it had closed on a new round of financing. But Dr. Pellini wasted no time in responding.
Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Today, AngelList announced that start-ups had raised $12 million on AngelList in the past 30 days. Actually, according to the brand-new tracking tool on the site’s homepage, the current number is $12.3 million.

So how does that relate to previous months? It’s not something that had been formally tracked before, but it’s likely on par, said AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant. In an average month, AngelList probably matches start-ups with at least $10 million in funding, and December is generally a bad month for fundraising.

Aggregate funding numbers are “hard to track and lumpy,” said Ravikant. Even when venture capitalists meet promising start-ups on AngelList, they tend to keep it quiet because “a lot of the VCs still cling to the idea of proprietary deal flow,” he said. Plus, funding found through AngelList is almost always accompanied by funding found elsewhere.

AngelList is going to try to better track these numbers through new self-reporting tools and its online investment tools, which launched last week to give start-ups free and standardized tools for raising money. The tools have already been used for $600,000 worth of investments.

Surprisingly, Ravikant said that these days, AngelList actually has a bigger impact on recruiting than fundraising — probably triple the volume and expected financial value, based on some very rough math.

In addition to introducing start-ups to investors, AngelList also matches entrepreneurs who try and fail to raise money on AngelList to companies that succeed in raising money. It makes more than 600 introductions per week on behalf of these candidates, resulting in 80 to 100 hires per month. People who try to start companies are excellent job candidates, Ravikant noted.

So why is AngelList suddenly more interested in talking up its role in these funding and hiring introductions, especially considering it doesn’t charge for them? Well, it’s known that the company is raising its first outside financing, at an expected valuation of $150 million or more, as TechCrunch first reported.

Ravikant said that he couldn’t elaborate on the fundraising process, but that he expects to “be in a position to talk about it more when the ban on general solicitation ends.”

What he means but cannot say is this: When the JOBS Act rules go into place early next year, AngelList will have more flexibility about disclosing that it is raising funding and making such a round available to a broad range of investors — as would be in keeping with the spirit of the site.

That changed a little bit last year when he disclosed in a television interview and in SEC filings that he had taken stakes in two technology bellwethers: IBM and Intel. Today, SEC filings show that he’s increased his already sizable stake in IBM but has sold off his Intel shares.

Explaining that Big Blue “treats its stock with reverence,” Buffett last November spent $10.7 billion to buy 64 million IBM shares — amounting to about 5.5 percent of the shares outstanding — making him the company’s biggest shareholder, slightly ahead of State Street Investments. His holdings are now north of 66.6 million shares and worth more than $13 billion.

His holdings in Intel were much more modest: The same day he announced the IBM investment, Buffett disclosed a stake in Intel amounting to 9.3 million shares, which at the time was worth about $200 million. By the end of March, that investment had declined to about 7.8 million shares. Now the latest SEC filings show Berkshire Hathaway liquidated its Intel shares as of the end of June.

Last week, I finally got to see up close the new start-up that longtime tech entrepreneur Andy Rebele has been working on quietly of late.

And I do mean quiet — he’s now unveiling an effort to create a company called Pure Watercraft, which will make and sell electric boats.

There are several such companies out there, in the wake of the many similar ones related to electric automobiles. But Rebele is doing it with his own money and sweat, to grow what will doubtless become an eventually large market.

Rebele’s last outing was CityAuction, which he sold to IAC/InterActiveCorp for $54 million at the peak of the Web 1.0 action in 1999. He worked at Webvan, but has mostly been doing angel investing since.

It’s an interesting effort, with issues of batteries, cooling and more, as you will see from the video interview I did during a ride on the San Francisco Bay last week.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120806/electric-boat-start-up-pure-watercraft-aims-to-become-the-tesla-of-the-waves-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120628/tech-companies-rejoice-ivps-new-jumbo-fund-totals-1-billion/ http://allthingsd.com/20120628/tech-companies-rejoice-ivps-new-jumbo-fund-totals-1-billion/#comments Thu, 28 Jun 2012 11:00:49 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=225398 Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) could be considered an old-timer in the world of venture investing, especially by today’s youthful Silicon Valley standards.

At 32 years old, the venture firm has backed more than 300 companies and has witnessed 90 companies go public. Some of its better-known deals include comScore, Dropbox, HomeAway, Kayak, LivingSocial, Netflix, Twitter and Zynga.

Today, it is announcing that it will continue its legacy, having raised its 14th fund, totaling $1 billion. In total, it now has $4 billion under management.

In an interview, IVP’s General Partner Dennis Phelps said the fund is the firm’s largest to date, exceeding its current fund of $750 million.

Despite a larger fund this time, Phelps said it will be business as usual. The plan is to invest about $10 million to $100 million in 10 to 12 companies a year, or 25 to 30 companies over the fund’s 10-year life. The one thing that will change is the average deal size, which will get slightly larger.

“We’ve had the opportunity to make larger investments, but we didn’t have the fund size to support it,” Phelps said. “Companies are choosing to remain private longer, but it doesn’t change our investment model.”

In general, the company’s sweet spot is later-stage companies with roughly $20 million in annualized revenue in the Internet and digital media, enterprise technology, and mobile and communications sectors, he said. But he noted that they do not invest in life sciences or clean technology. Currently of IVP’s active portfolio companies, more than half have revenue of $50 million or more, and a third of them are profitable.

“We feel like our deal flow is as strong as it’s ever been,” he said. “We’ve had amazing momentum in the marketplace, and view us as a firm on the ascendancy.”

Other firms to recently pocket a lot of cash include Andreessen Horowitz’s monster $1.5 billion fund, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ $525 million fund for early-stage companies.

IVP has six general partners: Phelps, Todd Chaffee, Norm Fogelsong, Steve Harrick, Jules Maltz and Sandy Miller.

Here’s a visual snapshot of the firm’s history:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120628/tech-companies-rejoice-ivps-new-jumbo-fund-totals-1-billion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120618/ignitions-john-connors-on-nikes-fuelband-enterprise-software-and-investing-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120618/ignitions-john-connors-on-nikes-fuelband-enterprise-software-and-investing-video/#comments Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:00:56 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=220962 John Connors was Microsoft’s chief finance guy for five years, responsible for managing one of the largest tech company’s books.

For the past seven years, however, he’s been contributing his fiscal know-how and diversity of opinions to the venture business, joining Bellevue’s Ignition Partners in 2005.

As a member of Nike’s board, the FuelBand wearer explains how the Internet is disrupting the retail business. Strong distribution channels — think Amazon — are enabling new consumer brands to be created overnight with nothing but a hotshot clothing designer and access to cheap manufacturing. But, he says, services like the FuelBand have the opportunity to keep brands relevant to consumers on a daily basis.

He also points to “the next big cycle in the enterprise.”

Over the past few years, he says, not many interesting enterprise companies were created, but “in the past 24 months there’s been more interesting companies than I’ve seen in years. … By the end of this year, the general public will be talking about the next cycle for the enterprise.”

And yet, his latest investment has nothing to do with the enterprise.

Motif Investing, based in San Mateo, Calif., has raised $26 million, with Ignition Partners participating in the most recent round. The company could be described as Etrade meets Twitter’s trending topics.

For example, instead of investing in individual companies or mutual funds, the company identifies themes, or “motifs.”

The “Caffeine Fix” motif reasons that caffeine’s addictive qualities will continue to drive the popularity and success of Coca-Cola, Starbucks and energy drinks. The motif labeled “Drill, Baby, Drill!” is focused on the winners of domestic drilling. “Lots of Likes” focuses on the 20 most-“Liked” brands on Facebook.

As a Montana native, Connors prefers motifs about agriculture-based themes. See, we told you his interests were broad!

In an hour-long chat in the venture firm’s offices, which look like any other suburban cubicle farm, we covered a lot of subjects. Here are some of the highlights:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120618/ignitions-john-connors-on-nikes-fuelband-enterprise-software-and-investing-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120605/taking-the-guesswork-out-of-retirement-saving/ http://allthingsd.com/20120605/taking-the-guesswork-out-of-retirement-saving/#comments Tue, 05 Jun 2012 22:07:30 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=217005

How often do you tinker with your retirement savings? Many people think about this when starting a job or opening a 401(k), but sometimes not again until they are ready to retire. According to financial advisers, that’s too late.

This week, I forced myself to look at accounts I rarely monitor as I tested FutureAdvisor.com, a website founded by two former Microsoft engineers who are also a registered investment adviser and chartered financial analyst, respectively. They wanted to create an easy way for people to manage their retirement savings, primarily using index funds, and they based the site’s suggestions on what they consider to be the best practices in the industry and in academia.

FutureAdvisor, which has no ads, bills itself as a free alternative to paying a lot for financial advice from professionals, who often charge a 1% annual fee or work on commission. Many big investment firms offer retirement-savings services, but these generally don’t offer step-by-step advice for an investor’s complete portfolio. FutureAdvisor expects to make money when it introduces later this year an optional premium service, which will charge an annual fee of less than 0.25% of your assets to rebalance and maintain your portfolio, automatically. It says suggestions offered on the site are made solely on merit, with no kickbacks or commissions to FutureAdvisor.

The site differs from budgeting sites like Mint.com that don’t specialize in retirement savings. Instead, Mint makes money through recommendations for users, like which credit cards carry lower fees.

FutureAdvisor accesses data from your existing retirement savings and shows recommended options according to conservative, moderate or aggressive plans. An overall analysis, pictured, illustrates how you’re progressing on the goal to retirement.

I’m not a financial expert; rather, I looked at FutureAdvisor through the lens of an average person who might want to use the site. Its investment philosophy may not be right for everybody.

FutureAdvisor is easy to use and walks users through a set of simple steps. There’s no asset minimum to use the site, though people who are already in retirement can’t use it. Pop-up explanations and options to submit questions to the site’s CEO and co-founder, a registered investment adviser, are available as you go.

For security purposes, FutureAdvisor uses bank-level, 128-bit SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption for all communications. It can’t move money or make transactions; instead, people do this by clicking on links that send them to their financial institutions where they may pay a fee for certain transactions. Login information is never stored on the website; rather, it’s handled by partner company Yodlee.

To get started with FutureAdvisor, I entered my email and a password to create an account and then answered questions about myself. These included birthday, current annual income, desired retirement age, desired retirement income, age when I started consistently saving for retirement, approximate value of my retirement investments and marital status. Thankfully, messages that say, “What is this?” appear beside each question, explaining why it’s asked.

Next, you enter the names of brokerage firms that handle your accounts, like Fidelity for a 401(k) or T. Rowe Price for a Roth IRA. If you don’t already have online accounts with each of these firms, you must set up accounts on their websites so you can return to FutureAdvisor, enter your username and password and access your data.

FutureAdvisor recognized a lot of different brokerage firms that I searched for, and this week it added Thrift Savings Plans, or TSPs, which are used by government employees, including military personnel. If a brokerage firm isn’t on the site, you can suggest it in a feedback box. I did this, and my requested firm was added within hours.

When personal questions are answered and brokerage-firm information is retrieved, FutureAdvisor asks you to choose a conservative, moderate or aggressive approach with explanations of each. I chose an aggressive option because of my relatively young age. Various charts filled the screen showing recommendations for my stock/bond split, equity style, diversification split and glide style. Terms like this may lose average users, but brief explanations beside them helped, and I read a References and Citations pop-up menu filled with sources from which the advice was generated.

The most helpful section of the site showed recommendations for my portfolio.

A checklist showed where my money was or wasn’t allocated, and how my portfolio stacked up to what FutureAdvisor recommended. Items included “Have the right exposure to U.S. domestic stock” and “Have the right exposure to REITs (real-estate investment trusts).”

In some cases, the recommendation was to not change anything. I could click on “Go to brokerage” to follow FutureAdvisor’s suggested steps on a brokerage firm’s website. FutureAdvisor says it uses a mathematical optimization algorithm to apply modern portfolio theory principles to each person’s portfolio.

If nothing else, FutureAdvisor provides options, so your retirement savings doesn’t seem untouchable. You may need to brush up on terms like REITs and domestic small cap, but the site is filled with study materials.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120605/taking-the-guesswork-out-of-retirement-saving/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120501/nope-still-no-bubble-here-says-marc-andreessen/ http://allthingsd.com/20120501/nope-still-no-bubble-here-says-marc-andreessen/#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 14:44:53 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=201909 It will be a man-bites-dog story when a prominent tech investor comes out and declares that we are in fact in a bubble, and that they’ve stopped investing in tech companies.

But for the record: Marc Andreessen, who is now perhaps Silicon Valley’s most prominent investor, does not think we’re in a bubble.

Andreessen has been saying this for some time — like a year ago, at All Things Digital’s D9 conference – and he repeated himself at Wired magazine’s business conference this morning.

The main thrust: This can’t possibly be a bubble, because leading technology firms like Apple are trading at relatively modest multiples. Meanwhile, most of the highly celebrated tech companies that have gone public in the last year, like Demand Media, Groupon and Pandora, have all seen their stock prices get hammered.

“If we’re in a bubble, it’s the weirdest bubble I’ve ever seen, where everybody hates everything,” Andreessen told Wired editor Chris Anderson.

But that’s the public market, Anderson pointed out. What about the private deals, where very young start-ups are frequently being valued at $1 billion or more?

Well, maybe there’s something off there, Andreessen conceded. A “strangeness in the way the market is behaving.” Some of that stems from the way that capital is flowing, because institutional investors are looking for places other than the stock market to park their cash. But that’s only relevant for a “small number” of companies and investors, so that can’t qualify as a bubble, either.

We will listen respectfully to Andreessen, because he has a big brain, and has been intimately involved in a bubble or two himself (that 1996 Time magazine cover featuring him marked the beginning of the Web 1.0 irrational exuberance phase). But for a commonsense, plain-English counterpoint to all of this, see BuzzFeed. (Really!)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120501/nope-still-no-bubble-here-says-marc-andreessen/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120416/welcome-to-atd-the-very-social-mike-isaac/ http://allthingsd.com/20120416/welcome-to-atd-the-very-social-mike-isaac/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:23:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=196625

As many readers know, we have been adding to our staff here at AllThingsD, most recently in our new reviews section, with the addition of Lauren Goode earlier this year.

Now Walt Mossberg and I are proud to announce that Mike Isaac is joining our team to cover the social Web and its biggest players, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

He comes to ATD most recently from a staff writer position at Wired, where, among many other things, he spent much of his time writing about Google’s mobile and social efforts.

From 2010 to 2012, his coverage at Wired included the decline and fall of Hewlett-Packard’s mobile empire, Google’s surprise acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and Facebook’s steady trudge toward IPO-hood.

Prior to that, he wrote about the business of tech for Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, with a particular emphasis on start-ups and social. His work has also appeared in Paste magazine, Performer magazine, DNR magazine and the Washington Examiner.

Isaac holds a degree in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and is a former Georgetown University journalism fellow.

He takes over the social beat from Liz Gannes, who will be stepping up our coverage of the many businesses of Google, innovation, venture investing and the start-up scene — especially its bigger companies, from Pinterest to Quora to Dropbox. Gannes, as everyone who follows her knows well, has become a key observer of Silicon Valley and its players, and her insights into the tech scene have become one of our most invaluable offerings.

We’re excited for both of them, and look forward to their stellar work on our site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120416/welcome-to-atd-the-very-social-mike-isaac/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120201/amazon-sees-no-reason-to-slow-its-spending/ http://allthingsd.com/20120201/amazon-sees-no-reason-to-slow-its-spending/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:40:15 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=170021 Amazon defended its free-spending habits yesterday in a call with analysts, arguing that it continues to see new opportunities and will invest accordingly.

The comments follow a less than stellar fourth-quarter performance in which the gigantic e-commerce provider spent nearly as much money as it brought in the door — even during its busiest quarter of the year.

Profits for the quarter fell 58 percent, while annual earnings were cut nearly in half.

Some analysts were hoping that the end of the year would be a low point for margins and that Amazon would start growing in 2012 as it benefited from the steep investments made the prior year.

But that’s not part of the plan.

“We’re incredibly optimistic about the opportunity that we have, and that’s why we have invested the way we have and why we’re continuing to invest in the business,” said Amazon’s CFO Tom Szkutak in a conference call with analysts.

For clarity, Piper Jaffray analyst Charles Munster asked again: “So, your outlook in terms of investment philosophy hasn’t changed versus last quarter going forward?”

“No, no,” Szkutak said. “We are continuing to look as we always do. We learn every week, month and quarter about customer adoption. We are looking at a lot of positive things across the business in terms of adoption, specifically Kindle growth from a device standpoint and content that’s following that.”

Other categories seeing growth, he said, include clothing, consumables, consumer electronics and Amazon Web Services.

“There’s a lot of interesting opportunities that we continue to invest in. So we are pleased with the performance in Q4 and what it means going forward for us.”

Over the past year, Amazon has invested heavily in infrastructure, including 17 fulfillment centers around the globe. At the end of the year, it had 56,200 employees, up 67 percent year over year, with most of the hiring coming in operations and customer service.

It has also invested heavily in the digital content business, including the Kindle.

It’s widely assumed that Amazon is breaking even or taking a slight loss on the sale of each Kindle Fire. It’s also securing expensive partnerships with content companies across music, video and books, and giving some of that content away as part of the $80 Prime membership, which also includes free two-day shipping.

All of those are bets that Amazon is hoping will reap profits over the long term, as customers continue to consume after they purchase an e-reader or tablet or sign up for Prime.

So far, it’s too early to see how the investment is faring, especially when it comes to new categories.

“It’s very, very early,” Szkutak said, “but so far, we like what we see, so that’s why we are continuing down the path of adding more content and making Prime better. … Because we are investing a lot, we are making sure we understand it very well.”

A lot of details, like Kindle sales numbers, are still being kept under wraps, but he promised Amazon will someday share more about how it is doing.

Unfortunately, the market isn’t as patient. In after-hours trading, the stock was down almost 10 percent at one point. During the session, it ended up down, 8.7 percent, or nearly $17 , to close at $177.50 a share.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120201/amazon-sees-no-reason-to-slow-its-spending/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111201/wealthfront-finally-lauches-aimed-at-silicon-valleys-newbie-richie-richs/ http://allthingsd.com/20111201/wealthfront-finally-lauches-aimed-at-silicon-valleys-newbie-richie-richs/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:30:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=149082

Wealthfront, the Silicon Valley start-up with more than $10 million in its own kitty, finally officially launched its long-planned Online Financial Advisor product today, with a focus on attracting techies interested in more easily managing their money.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which started off as a social investing site called kaChing, shifted over to the new plan just over a year ago. Its aim now is to try to solve the thorny problem of delivering actionable and easy-to-use tools for making investments online, for those who have some money but little time or expertise.

A lot of companies offer similar tools, of course, including big ones such as Fidelity and Schwab, as well as bigger money-management firms. But Wealthfront’s CEO Andy Rachleff and founder Dan Carroll are promising lower fees and more accurate determination of risk via all kinds of online bells and whistles (see below).

Wealthfront is not charging advisory fees on a customer’s first $25,000 under management, with a fee of 0.25% on assets exceeding that.

Wealthfront is backed by DAG Ventures and well-known investors, including Marc Andreessen and Jeff Jordan.

Here’s a video Wealthfront posted about the service, as well as its official press release:

Wealthfront Unveils Automated Online Financial Advisor Service for Silicon Valley and High-Tech Hubs

Highly Sophisticated Investing Advice Finally Made Available through Simple and Low Cost Web Service

PALO ALTO, Calif., December 1, 2011 – The ability for the savvy tech community to easily access high quality, affordable financial advice is now available with the launch of the Wealthfront Online Financial Advisor. Before Wealthfront, sophisticated investment advice was available only to the wealthy, by expensive financial advisors who often can’t relate to today’s tech-savvy generation who want sound financial advice, made easy and convenient. Wealthfront’s Online Financial Advisor appeals to investors from booming tech communities who favor doing everything online, and are looking for ways to have their new wealth managed for far lower fees.

At the core of Wealthfront’s web service is the industry-standard Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Until now, the widely adopted investing model has been kept out of consumers’ reach, and was only accessible via expensive financial advisors. Wealthfront automates the application of this intricate investment model, putting the power of MPT directly into the hands of investors online. Moreover, Wealthfront’s pricing structure trumps all traditional financial advisor models. The online service makes it possible to receive a sophisticated, meticulously managed investment plan at a price that is 75% lower than traditional financial advisors. There are no advisory fees on a customer’s first $25,000 under management, and only a fee of 0.25% on assets exceeding $25,000.

“This is exactly what most people in the technology industry need. It’s the kind of advice you’d get if you had Goldman Sachs manage your money and it does away with the hidden fees we in tech despise,” said Piaw Na, a long time, former employee of Google and popular blogger on the topic of investing. “What’s more, the recommendation on the investment mix is provided with a full explanation of what was picked and why, making the whole experience a massive and much needed shift that is especially appealing now.”

Wealthfront’s high quality investing advice is powered by its Precision-Investing Platform™, the breakthrough software behind the service. The Platform uniquely assesses a customer’s true risk tolerance, recommends an optimized portfolio of carefully selected Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) spanning six asset classes, and monitors and periodically rebalances the investment mix to maintain a customer’s desired risk tolerance.

Wealthfront is backed by Silicon Valley luminaries including DAG Ventures and individual investors including Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, former OpenTable CEO and President of PayPal now at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and partners from Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“The financial advisor world has long recognized that one day the Internet and software would pose a credible threat to their hold on the sub $5 million category of individual investors,” said Paul Pfleiderer, C.O.G. Miller Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Wealthfront advisor. “Wealthfront has made accessible what historically had been out of reach or prohibitively costly for a large class of investors. By using a simple, yet powerful engine for accurately assessing risk and return in the MPT context, Wealthfront has established a new standard for quality financial advisement on the web.”

“With the biggest names in venture capital and the brightest minds in software development, we’re ushering in a financial advisor service that’s capable of precisely managing a customer’s investments from $5,000 to tens of millions with a pricing approach unheard of in the financial services industry,” said Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront. “Wealthfront emerges at a time when many tech companies are enjoying record earnings, initial public offerings, and strong acquisitions. This creates masses of people in tech looking to invest for the first time and who want to manage their finances in the same manner they’ve organized every other aspect of their lives, online.”

“The promise of the Internet is to disrupt incumbent providers, enabling new companies to provide high quality services at substantial savings through the innovative use of software,” said Jeff Jordan, Wealthfront board member, former CEO OpenTable and President of PayPal and now General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Wealthfront embodies this promise, democratizing access to high quality financial advice. I believe this will appeal strongly to a generation that has grown up with the Net and use it to manage all facets of their life.”

For more information on Wealthfront Online Financial Advisor, or to create a free account, visit www.wealthfront.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111201/wealthfront-finally-lauches-aimed-at-silicon-valleys-newbie-richie-richs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111121/former-color-co-founder-peter-pham-heads-to-former-myspace-ceos-l-a-tech-studio/ http://allthingsd.com/20111121/former-color-co-founder-peter-pham-heads-to-former-myspace-ceos-l-a-tech-studio/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:00:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=146141

Well-known tech entrepreneur Peter Pham will be joining the Los Angeles-based start-ups lab that was just launched by former Myspace CEO Mike Jones.

Pham, who was recently helming the high-profile and controversial Color photo-sharing start-up in Silicon Valley, will be moving south again to join Jones at the Santa Monica, Calif.-based “technology studio,” called Science.

As Liz Gannes reported last week, the goal — with $10 million in funding and private equity partners at the ready for more — is to “incubate ideas in-house, invest in other people’s start-ups, advise Silicon Valley companies on breaking into Hollywood, and maybe even look into reworking later-stage Internet companies like Yahoo.”

Pham and Jones will aim at three verticals: The intersection of content and commerce, social systems, and mobile and location.

That’s an area that Pham knows well, with stints at both BillShrink and Photobucket (also a former News Corp. property, as was MySpace), as well as active angel investing.

In an interview yesterday, Pham said he hopes to bridge the Silicon Valley-L.A. delta more, since there is an increasing amount of promising tech taking place there, too.

“There is a lot going on in L.A., and a lot of tech talent that still sometimes get less attention up in Silicon Valley,” said Pham. “I hope to be part of bringing the communities a little closer together.”

In addition, he said that the focus of Science would not necessarily be on online entertainment start-ups, as might be expected, given the proximity to Hollywood.

“We really want to shine a light on the innovation taking place in Los Angeles beyond the obvious,” said Pham.

It’s a good idea, given how navel-gazing Northern California geeks can be.

Also in the L.A. start-up scene of late is a new accelerator called Start Engine, which debuted recently with a focus on mentorship on 120 start-ups per year.

You can see Pham featured in this video that Gannes did about Color:

And here’s the official press release about Pham joining Science:

Peter Pham press release.FINAL11-21-11

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111121/former-color-co-founder-peter-pham-heads-to-former-myspace-ceos-l-a-tech-studio/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111114/warren-buffett-now-owns-some-intel-shares-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20111114/warren-buffett-now-owns-some-intel-shares-too/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:08:15 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=143972 Warren Buffett seems to have gotten over his longtime reticence to invest in technology companies.

First today, he disclosed in an extended interview with CNBC that he had just become IBM’s largest shareholder. Now, according to new filings from his company, Berkshire Hathaway, he’s also just acquired a stake in the chipmaker Intel.

The 13-F filing, which hit the SEC Web site just a few minutes ago, shows that Berkshire has acquired 9.3 million shares in Intel, worth about $200 million. It’s not a sizable stake, amounting to about one-fifth of one percent of the 5.1 billion shares that Intel has outstanding.

At that figure, Buffett’s firm would have paid an average price per share of $21.34. With Intel shares currently trading at $24.63 a share, the stake is now worth about $230 million.

While his IBM stake, which amounts to about 5.5 percent of the shares outstanding, appears to eclipse that of State Street, the investment house, Buffett’s position in Intel doesn’t even come close to that of the company’s institutional investors. State Street is again the biggest Intel shareholder of record, holding about 4 percent of the company’s outstanding shares, followed by Vanguard and Blackrock. But Buffett has more skin in the game than does Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who as of the end of October had 397,000 shares worth an estimated $9.8 million.

I talked about Buffett’s investment in IBM today on The Wall Street Journal’s daily afternoon tech show, Digits. It’s below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111114/warren-buffett-now-owns-some-intel-shares-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111013/exclusive-vp-engineering-mike-abbott-departs/ http://allthingsd.com/20111013/exclusive-vp-engineering-mike-abbott-departs/#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:49:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=132237

According to sources close to the situation, Twitter VP of Engineering Mike Abbott has left the company.

He is apparently interested in doing more investing.

[UPDATE: Twitter confirmed the departure in a statement, noting that Abbott was joining Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton is on the Twitter board.

“We can confirm that Mike Abbott is no longer with Twitter. Mike will be available to assist the company in his new role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. We thank Mike for his leadership in growing an outstanding team of engineers from 100 to 400 that have successfully taken on the unique challenge of making Twitter reliable and stable. While Mike led the engineering team, Twitter grew from handling 55 million tweets a day to 230 million. Twitter is focused on aggressively moving forward to fulfill the profound opportunities that are in front of us.”

Said Fenton:

“What Mike Abbott accomplished at Twitter is nothing short of heroic, when Benchmark introduced him to the company we felt he had the courage and entrepreneurial drive to build a strong engineering foundation. Today we applaud him for that extraordinary accomplishment. As we continue to work closely with the team at Twitter, we’re delighted to welcome Mike to Benchmark as an entrepreneur in residence. Mike will not only continue to lend his considerable talents to supporting the team at Twitter, but as a true entrepreneur at heart, will undoubtedly be an incredible asset to our entrepreneurs and our portfolio overall.”]

The move feels sudden, but sources said it has been brewing for a while and happened several days ago.

Abbott was a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS platform.

He was brought in to bring a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which was plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

In large part, Abbott has done that, as Twitter has grown significantly. It now has 230 million tweets per day, he said in a recent interview.

Twitter does not have a replacement as yet, sources said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111013/exclusive-vp-engineering-mike-abbott-departs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111004/final-asiad-speakers-apples-phil-schiller-and-former-vp-al-gore/ http://allthingsd.com/20111004/final-asiad-speakers-apples-phil-schiller-and-former-vp-al-gore/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:15:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=128535

And then there was Schiller and Gore.

That would be Apple’s SVP of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller and former Vice President Al Gore, who round out the stellar list of speakers at our upcoming AsiaD conference.

Taking place from Oct. 19 to 21 in Hong Kong, the lineup is already impressive, with a mix of speakers from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, as well as Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

The previously announced speakers include: Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; Asus Chairman Jonney Shih; Sony president and second-in-command Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai; Google+ guru Bradley Horowitz; Hollywood big shot Peter Chernin; Huawei’s North American R&D head John Roese; Microsoft’s Windows Phone head Andy Lees; and a panel of Silicon Valley start-up stars — Joyus’ Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, SurveyMonkey’s Dave Goldberg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Asia head Rose Tsou; LivingSocial’s Tim O’Shaughnessy, along with founders of two of its Asian units, Daniel Shin and Paul Srivorakul; Samsung mobile head Dr. Won-Pyo Hong; HTC CEO Peter Chou, who replaces Chairwoman Cher Wang.

Schiller, who reports to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook (and before that, Steve Jobs) is a member of the executive team of the tech icon, where he has worked for 17 years. He is responsible for a swath of Apple’s outward-facing businesses, including product marketing, developer relations and business marketing.

Today, in fact, he was onstage at Apple’s iPhone event, outlining some of its new product offerings. In addition, Apple just opened its first retail store in Hong Kong.

Gore, who had a memorable interview at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006, needs little introduction. The former VP and Nobel Peace Prize winner is now chairman of Current TV and also continues as a prominent environmental activist.

Gore is on the board of Apple, while also being a senior adviser to Google, which is a neat trick. At the same time, he is a partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, and co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a partnership that is focused on sustainable investing.

And, as most people know, he knows a thing or two about the Internet.

Walt Mossberg and I could not think of two better people to add to the lineup we have for AsiaD, which has very few seats left.

See you in China in two weeks!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111004/final-asiad-speakers-apples-phil-schiller-and-former-vp-al-gore/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110809/more-asiad-speakers-sony-google-microsoft-hollywood-huawei-and-hot-sv-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20110809/more-asiad-speakers-sony-google-microsoft-hollywood-huawei-and-hot-sv-start-ups/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=107055

After our grand tour of Asia last week — with stops in Korea and Japan — it seems like a perfect time to update the speaker list for our upcoming AsiaD conference in Hong Kong in October.

As Walt Mossberg and I said, we are trying to mix both U.S.-based speakers with a pan-Asian selection of speakers from across the region, and the new additions are just that.

For the international confab — this one will be held Oct. 19-21 — we’ve already announced a great lineup, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; and Asus Chairman Jonny Shih.

Now, to add to that terrific lineup:

Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai is widely considered the second in command at the consumer electronics giant Sony, in charge of its key computer entertainment division, as well as now serving as executive deputy president of the whole company. In that role, the dynamic exec is at the nexus of the Japanese company’s efforts around tablets, smartphones, gaming and more. As Sony struggles to reassert its dominance over the arena, Hirai will be a key player in that effort.

Bradley Horowitz — as head of product management for Google+, the search giant’s aggressive effort to break Facebook’s hammerlock on social networking — has a perfect perspective to talk about the fast-growing area and where it is going globally. With locally-based social companies springing up all over Asia, can Google establish one the whole world will use? It’s an important question and Horowitz’s job No. 1.

At Microsoft, Andy Lees is leading one of the software giant’s most important initiatives, as president of its Windows Phone division. His come-from-behind job includes mobile software and hardware, as well as its key partnership with Nokia. With Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android far in the lead, Lees will need to win in markets globally, especially in Asia.

Peter Chernin is one of Hollywood’s top players and execs. The former top News Corp. exec is now a movie producer — his first effort, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” is a big hit. But he’s also been increasingly active in media investing in Asia of late, and has a lot to say about the global nature of entertainment in the digital age.

John Roese heads the North American R&D team for Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant making everything from heavy-duty gear for networks to mobile phones and tablets. The former CTO of Nortel, he’s heading up global development of Huawei’s cloud services for both businesses and consumers. Roese will also talk about the phenomenon of a Chinese-owned company emerging on the world technology stage.

Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there is no denying that it has been a golden time for Silicon Valley start-ups, which have enjoyed unprecedented growth and funding in the Web 2.0 era. But as they seek to expand beyond the U.S., a critical move for them all, we’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs to discuss it, including:

Brian Chesky is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, the popular online vacation rental site that recently got a huge dose of funding and an equally large amount of controversy. How Airbnb can take the company to the next level, including across the world, while dealing with the kinds of challenges the small management team has to face, will be an interesting topic for discussion.

After stints as president of Asia Pacific and Latin America operations at Google and co-founder of the online personal finance company Yodlee, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is trying her hand at a small start-up again. She’ll talk about how the recently funded Joyus, a new premium video commerce site trying to pioneer a new way to shop online, plans to expand globally.

Finally, longtime tech exec David Goldberg is now running one of tech’s most successful start-ups at SurveyMonkey, the dominant online survey company. With stints as founder of music site Launch Media, which was bought by Yahoo, and as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Benchmark Capital, he is the perfect person to explain what it’s like being an entrepreneur today in Silicon Valley.

We have even more speakers for AsiaD we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, so get ready for what’s next.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110809/more-asiad-speakers-sony-google-microsoft-hollywood-huawei-and-hot-sv-start-ups/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110624/foursquare-gets-50m-to-make-the-world-easier-to-use/ http://allthingsd.com/20110624/foursquare-gets-50m-to-make-the-world-easier-to-use/#comments Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:51:26 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=90963 Foursquare has raised $50 million, mostly from its existing investors, the company announced today.

The round was expected, and comes in a week when Foursquare hit a significant milestone of 10 million registered users.

It was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures as well as new investor Spark Capital (the picture here is from Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet’s blog).

TechCrunch reports the valuation as $600 million.

Foursquare is often maligned for not being a serious company, so for the occasion of the funding founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Seldurai wrote on their blog a sort of long-form mission statement about their future:

Foursquare is not just about the check-in, or recommendations, or points, or badges. It’s about making the world easier to use. It’s about discovering new places, connecting with friends, and forging new relationships with the places you visit. It’s finding new ways to layer technology on the real world. All of our employees believe strongly in this vision, and we’re incredibly lucky to have investors and a board that feel the same way.

Foursquare had raised a $20 million round about a year ago and angel funding in the fall of 2009.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110624/foursquare-gets-50m-to-make-the-world-easier-to-use/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110609/exclusive-myspace-in-advanced-deal-talks-with-investor-group-possibly-including-activisions-kotick/ http://allthingsd.com/20110609/exclusive-myspace-in-advanced-deal-talks-with-investor-group-possibly-including-activisions-kotick/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:35:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=84960 And then there was one?

According to sources close to the situation, News Corp. is down to one possible investing group in its quest to make lemonade out of the lemon that its Myspace social entertainment hub has become.

In the lastest of many scenarios considered, several sources said its owner, News Corp., will continue to own about 20 percent of Myspace. The main bidder is a dark horse bidding group, which includes Activision Chairman and CEO Bobby Kotick as one of the potential investors.

The deal, cautioned sources, is not final and could easily fall apart.

Interestingly, if such a deal is struck, he would apparently be involved as an individual and not for the giant gaming company, and would play no management role in the company.

Kotick would presumably need permission from Activision for such a high-profile investment, even if he played a smaller role.

Kotick’s possible involvement has not been mentioned in previous reports.

Sources said the other possible bidders — including music video service Vevo, a group including Myspace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe, an internal effort by current CEO Mike Jones, several private equity firms and even myYearbook — mentioned in past reports have not worked out for various reasons.

Vevo had seemed the likeliest winner, but its bid appears to have foundered for now, due to the complex nature of its music label ownership.

It is not clear what the price will be for Myspace, which was once the leading social networking site before the world dis-Liked it for Facebook.

One thing is certain: It is nowhere near the $100 million that News Corp. reportedly sought.

The site — even after an overhaul to focus on entertainment — has recently been losing money and traffic, although it is still a large destination on the Web.

News Corp. declined comment, as did Kotick.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110609/exclusive-myspace-in-advanced-deal-talks-with-investor-group-possibly-including-activisions-kotick/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110601/marc-andreessen-says-theres-no-bubble-but-hes-happy-if-you-think-there-is/ http://allthingsd.com/20110601/marc-andreessen-says-theres-no-bubble-but-hes-happy-if-you-think-there-is/#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 04:03:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=81789 Marc Andreessen doesn’t buy the bubble talk. Which is fortunate, since he’s in the business of investing in the kind of companies that tend to generate some of the bubble talk.

But even if you think Andreessen’s just talking his book, it’s certainly worth listening to him talk. Here’s the case he laid out at D9 Wednesday night:

It can’t be a bubble, because everyone thinks it’s a bubble. “A key characteristic of a bubble is that no one thinks its a bubble,” he says, noting that in 1999, people were euphoric. “If everybody’s upset, it’s a good sign…I hope there are lots of bubble stories.”

It can’t be a bubble because the stock market isn’t acting like it’s a bubble. Here Andreessen rattles off a list of price-to-earnings ratios for big successful tech companies: Apple is trading at a p/e of 12, Microsoft at 7, Cisco at 6, etc. Investors are disdainful of technology, he says, because “the public market is tremendously scarred by what happened 10 years ago.”

OK, but what about LinkedIn? It has a stratospheric p/e, after all.

Andreessen, who happens to be a LinkedIn angel investor, has a series of answers for this one: It just went public. It has a thin float. Equity in the public market is starved for growth, and has nowhere else to go. It’s a genuinely exciting company. And even if you wanted to short it, you couldn’t because you can’t find shares to borrow, etc.

And even if LNKD is tremendously overvalued, he says, that would mean that “for the first time in equity history, we have a bubble that’s affecting one stock.”

So what about the secondary markets? By some standards, companies like Facebook, Zynga, etc., are trading at very high multiples, right?

Hard to say, he says, because it’s hard to figure out what’s really going on in the secondary markets (where Andreessen himself has been a buyer).

There’s very little supply, and actually not even that much demand–because most institutions can’t invest in these kind of companies. Recall that just a few weeks ago, the secondary markets valued LinkedIn at much, much lower valuations, Andreessen notes.

The nice thing is, we’ll get to test this one out sooner than later, as a raft of big private companies head toward IPOs of their own. Some of them Andreessen happens to know well. Like Groupon, which Kara Swisher says will go public soon.

“No comment,” Andreessen says, then tries an Andrew Mason death stare. It’s not nearly as effective.

Note: Andreessen speaks very, very quickly, which means you’ll want to hear him for yourself in the video below. There’s also a less frenzied version of this argument, via his business partner Ben Horowitz.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/marc-andreessen-says-theres-no-bubble-but-hes-happy-if-you-think-there-is/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110428/liveblogging-microsoft-3q-earnings-office-tastic-and-kinect-able/ http://allthingsd.com/20110428/liveblogging-microsoft-3q-earnings-office-tastic-and-kinect-able/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:48:13 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43296

You’d think there would be a party in Redmond, Wash., today, as software giant Microsoft soundly beat Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings released earlier today.

Microsoft said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2011, which was up 13 percent from a year ago. Net income was $5.23 billion, or 61 cents per share, a rise of 31 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

The surge was led by sales of Office, Kinect and Xbox and a stronger economy.

But there are shadows, too, as results were dragged down by weaker revenues for its flagship Windows unit.

The report comes as Microsoft’s stock continues to lag, declining 14 percent for the year.

Buzz kill!

BoomTown livedblogged the call for Wall Street analysts:

2:30 pm PT: Peter Klein, Microsoft’s CFO, who sounds super peppy, outlined the strong quarter, especially for its Office products.

He also mentioned some glitches, such as Microsoft’s still-struggling efforts to increase revenue per search (RPS) in its longtime search and online advertising partnership with Yahoo and the slower growth of the PC sector upon which the software giant’s Windows relies.

PC should stand for “possibly crappy,” but good-boy Klein did not say so.

Investor relations dude Bill Koefoed also read through the news, sounding at times like a sports announcer on a cable television network.

“Quuuuaaadrupled…,” he intoned about one part of Microsoft’s business.

This all went on for a while, since Microsoft has a lot of divisions. Servers & Tools. Online Services. Entertainment and Devices. Fashion & Cute Tops.

Okay, not that one, but a girl can dream.

It was all fun and games until Koefoed got to the Yahoo problem, which Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had used as a cudgel in her earnings report recently.

Yes, it is a bummer. But soon it was back to the happy land of Xbox!

Klein said he was pleased with the results in a jaunty manner, which made me desperately wish Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer led the call.

Because he’s always one obnoxious query away from a volcanic popping off.

Which is why I love those Yahoo calls and Bartz.

Buzz kill!

2:54 pm PT: That was fast–the call was quickly into questions.

The first is about COGS–cost of goods sold–and how it impacts gross margins.

Klein said the expenses were volume driven. I’d explain, but then I would fall asleep.

The next question was about stock buybacks.

That might get the stock up. Yeah, said Klein, they’ll keep doing that–not that it has helped much on the share price front.

More and more questions, about the PC market, the issues at Yahoo (let’s get that RPS up!), the Windows Phone 7 business.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit bored and started reading a riveting Business Insider interview with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on his myriad conflicts of interest related to his tech investing while also blogging as a news guy.

Whatever you think about him, that dude is good copy.

Wait, back to growth rates for Office!

It’s going great, said Klein (hey, maybe Arrington will invest!).

The call wraps up on news of an upcoming investor conference, being held near Disney World.

Oooh, party time!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110428/liveblogging-microsoft-3q-earnings-office-tastic-and-kinect-able/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/alan-patricofs-greycroft-shuffles-staff/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/alan-patricofs-greycroft-shuffles-staff/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:00:38 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32127 Greycroft, the early-stage fund run by legendary investor Alan Patricof, is overhauling its org chart. The firm has added Paul Bricault and Kirill Sheynkman as venture partners, and Alan Gould as an executive in residence. Meanwhile, former general partner Drew Lipsher has left to head up corporate development at Clear Channel Media. Last year, after much effort, Greycroft raised a second, $130 million fund.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/alan-patricofs-greycroft-shuffles-staff/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110419/like-the-blog-buy-the-e-book-chris-dixon-for-sale-via-kindle/ http://allthingsd.com/20110419/like-the-blog-buy-the-e-book-chris-dixon-for-sale-via-kindle/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:31:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31932 Here’s a clever idea from Chris Dixon: The investor and entrepreneur has turned his well-read blog into an e-book. Dixon, who runs Hunch and helps steer Founder Collective‘s bets when he’s not blogging, has taken a couple years’ worth of posts and compiled them into “Startups;” Dixon’s proceeds from the $2.99 mini-book will go to non-profit hackNY.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110419/like-the-blog-buy-the-e-book-chris-dixon-for-sale-via-kindle/feed/ 0