News Byte
Peter Kafka in Commerce on April 16 at 7:15 am PT
Google’s Marissa Mayer is about to get a board seat with the world’s biggest retailer. Mayer, Google’s vice president of local and maps, has been nominated to join Walmart’s board of directors. Assuming her nomination goes through, it will be her first board seat at a major corporation. Walmart already has a Silicon Valley power player on its board — Accel’s Jim Breyer has been there since 2001.
Liz Gannes in News on November 15, 2011 at 12:53 pm PT
Early Facebook exec Parker and Accel partner Breyer claim that freely available money spreads talent too thinly among too many Internet start-ups, lessening the impact of each company.
Kara Swisher in News on June 16, 2011 at 8:06 am PT
Earlier this year, I moderated a panel of tech leaders from the U.S. and Europe, at the opening of the DLD conference in Munich.
To get things going, I used that old trick of word association — asking for lightning observations on Facebook, Google, Steve Jobs, Nokia, Rupert Murdoch and smartphones.
Results, well, varied.
Kara Swisher in News on April 18, 2011 at 5:46 pm PT
According to sources close to the situation, retail giant Wal-mart paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix, an acquisition announced earlier today.
That’s a big price for the six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic and had raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.
Peter Kafka in Media on April 7, 2011 at 6:30 am PT
Silicon Valley comes to Hollywood. What is Accel’s Jim Breyer thinking?
Kara Swisher in News on February 14, 2011 at 9:04 am PT
UberMedia, which just bought TweetDeck for $30 million in equity last week, has raised $17.5 million in a round led by Accel Partners.
The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.
“I would not. I like to wait a little bit longer. I don’t think there’s any rush to go to the public markets. And certainly the advice we give to our CEOs is take time, remain private as long as you can, build the business, build the profitability, and most importantly keep the product passion that is the definition of all the great companies out there. The ones who don’t have the long-term, deeply intense 24/7 product passion hit the rails, and I would point to Yahoo and AOL as two that have certainly done that.”
– Jim Breyer of Accel Partners
Kara Swisher in News on January 21, 2011 at 5:22 pm PT
It’s a big, wide and very digital world out there and that’s why I’m headed around the globe–quite literally–for the next week to see some non-Silicon Valley tech trends and more.
Kara Swisher in News on December 21, 2010 at 2:44 pm PT
Simply put: The five top Web 2.0 superstar companies have no women on their board of directors.
As in
zero.
Voices
Nick Wingfield, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on November 29, 2010 at 10:00 am PT
Some well-known investors are placing a bet that Brazil is fertile territory for the spread of social games.
Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management are investing $30 million in Vostu, a startup that has grown quickly in Brazil with a collection of games that have spread through Orkut, a Google-owned social networking site that’s popular in Latin America’s biggest Internet market. Jim Breyer, a partner at Accel and Facebook board member, will join Vostu’s board of directors.
