Sean Parker and Jim Breyer Slam Silicon Valley Funding Glut

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.
Sean Parker and Jim Breyer with Techonomy host David Kirkpatrick

Let’s Play Word Association With Tech Moguls!

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.

Exclusive: Wal-Mart Paid $300 Million-Plus for Kosmix

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.

Why Is Facebook Investor Accel Investing In Hollywood? Because It's a Facebook Investor

Silicon Valley comes to Hollywood. What is Accel’s Jim Breyer thinking?

Bill Gross's UberMedia Raises $17.5 Million From Accel, Index and Steve Case

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.

QOTD: Would You Take LinkedIn Public Now?

“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

From U.S. to Germany to China–BoomTown Goes Around the (Digital) World in a Week

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.

The Men and No Women of Web 2.0 Boards (BoomTown's Talking to You: Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare)

Simply put: The five top Web 2.0 superstar companies have no women on their board of directors. As in zero.

Vostu Harvests Funds from Facebook, Zynga Backers

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.

Booyah CEO Keith Lee Talks About Social Gaming, Moolah and More (With Accel's Jim Breyer as Sidekick)!

Earlier this week, BoomTown motored on down to the HQ of Booyah in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., for a chat with its CEO and co-founder, Keith Lee. Also there: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners moneybags who recently joined the board of the mobile social gaming start-up, forking over $20 million in new funding for the privilege. Here’s the BoomTown interview about this fast-growing–it’s a lot bigger than Foursquare–start-up.

Andreessen to Facebook Board?

Sandberg Tidbits

Best of 2007 Video: I Heart Mark Zuckerberg

Kara Visits Founders Fund's Peter Thiel