There’s an interesting new fundamental thought emerging among computer security companies. The logic goes like this: First, your digital assets are going to be attacked. Second, no matter what preparations you make to defend those assets, a determined attacker is going to find a hole or a method of penetrating your defenses that you didn’t think of.

Most attacks are relatively cheap to carry out, because they’re not that sophisticated. More often than not, attackers copy the methods they use from each other. Attacks are inexpensive, and most attackers have the luxury of limitless time.

The exception is attacks using so-called “zero day” vulnerabilities, where a previously unknown vulnerability, usually in the operating system, is used to gain access to a system. Most — but not all — of the time, once a zero-day vulnerability is seen and documented, the weaknesses it reveals are patched, making it the type of weapon that can be used only once.

As such, zero-day vulnerabilities are often traded on the black market and sold at a high price. For example, when the Stuxnet worm — the malware that was used to attack and sabotage the Iranian nuclear program — was first discovered, security researchers were impressed that it used no fewer than four distinct zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows. So many used at once indicated that the cost to carry out the attack was high, leading to the conclusion that only a state-sponsored attacker would have the funds to carry it out. This led to the logical conclusion that either the U.S. or Israel had been behind Stuxnet.

I bring it up because Stuxnet is an example of the conclusion of this new fundamental thought I mentioned at the start. Why not make attacks expensive for the attackers? The early estimates on Stuxnet put its cost at $3 million, and it is believed that it required a team of 10 skilled programmers and as long as six months to develop. It was not a cheap attack. It was expensive.

That’s the idea behind Shape Security, which today announced that it has landed a $6 million Series A round of venture capital funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and TomorrowVentures, the fund led by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Peter Wagner, a former partner at Accel Partners, as well as executives from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, will also join the round. Ted Schlein, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, has joined the board of directors, along with Gaurav Garg, a limited partner at Sequoia Capital and personal investor in the round.

We don’t as yet know a great deal about Shape Security or its intentions. But we do know who’s running it: According to this filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, its CEO is Derek W. Smith. Another key exec and director is Sumit Agarwal, the former head of Google’s mobile product management, who in 2010 took a post in the Department of Defense as senior adviser for Cyber Innovation.

Another key exec is Troy Tribe, who appears to be the same person who used to be VP for business development at Solera Networks, which specializes in network-security analytics and forensics.

This is the second time in as many weeks that I’ve noticed a security company talking about changing the economics for attackers. The first was Crowdstrike, which announced that it had hired Shawn Henry from the FBI and landed a $26 million investment from Warburg Pincus. Neither has said yet exactly what you do to make launching a computer attack more expensive. I’m certainly eager to know more.

If the company is successful, it will have quadrupled its worth since raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation only 10 months ago.

While that would be astonishing for a three-year-old company, it’s important to note that negotiations continue, and that investors could ultimately value the company at a slightly more modest number (hmm, like $3 billion?!).

A Square spokesman declined to comment.

Square, which was founded by Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, has quickly made accepting credit cards via a mobile phone into a mainstream and affordable concept for small merchants.

Over the past year, it has quickly expanded beyond handing out magnetic-swipe readers to offer more robust experiences for both consumers and merchants, including software on the Apple iPad that acts like a register, and software on the iPhone that is a virtual wallet.

The payments method has received a warm reception from mostly small businesses, including taxicabs, food trucks, coffee shops and even lawyers and accountants.

The rumors of Square looking to raise more capital started spreading after Owen Thomas, formerly of the Daily Dot, noticed that Dorsey and Square’s COO Keith Rabois were in Boston and Baltimore, where many institutional investors are based. Thomas called Legg Mason, which confirmed it was looking at the San Francisco company.

Previous investors in Square’s three rounds, totaling roughly $137 million, include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Visa and well-known entrepreneur Richard Branson.

The big question is whether Square will be able to demand such a hefty valuation.

To determine that, based on what is known about the company, I did some back-of-the napkin calculations to come up with its annual revenue.

Last month, the company said it is now processing $4 billion in annual transactions. Since we know that Square charges 2.75 percent per swiped transaction, and 3.5 percent plus 15 cents per keyed-in transaction, we can start to get a better picture of its finances.

Let’s assume that a quarter of the company’s transactions are keyed in — which demands the higher rate. That would mean the company’s revenue would total nearly $83 million for swiped transactions, and $35 million for keyed-in transactions. Because of the additional 15-cent fee per transaction, let’s add another $15 million (which might be generous, but would break down to 100 million transactions at $10 apiece).

In all, the company’s annual revenue would then be close to $122 million.

Most, but not all of that revenue, is then handed over to the credit card companies for processing fees.

To be sure, the company has grown quickly since its inception, and has its eyes set on the very large point-of-sales market. This year, Square said it had plans to expand internationally, and has just hired a new executive from PayPal to take the lead on the effort. In the future it could also generate revenue from advertising or other loyalty programs, although it does not today.

But, by at least one historical measure, the valuation is rich beyond belief.

PayPal, which was also looking to disrupt the banking industry by enabling peer-to-peer payments online, was sold for $1.5 billion to eBay in 2002, just months after going public at a valuation of nearly $800 million.

At the time it went public, the company was roughly doubling year over year and had generated $103.7 million in 2001, its first full year of operations — or slightly less than Square’s estimated revenues.

Much like PayPal back then, Square faces intense competition, making alliances with much larger companies or raising big war chests critically important.

Square faces stiff competition and pricing pressure from Intuit, eBay’s PayPal, Google and other upstarts, like Pay Anywhere.

Still, it has made a splash that is seeing major reverberations around the sector, which a big valuation will make larger still.

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Aileen Lee is founding a new seed fund — still unnamed — that is focused on backing and helping develop early-stage start-ups.

Lee, who has been at the famed Silicon Valley venture firm for a dozen years, will remain a partner at Kleiner Perkins, although her full focus will be on the fund. While she declined in an interview this morning to say what the size of the new fund will be, most such efforts range from $10 million to $70 million.

Along with Kleiner, there will be several other unnamed investors and strategic partners, said Lee, who is in a quiet period of fundraising and could not give more details. It will be separate from Kleiner.

“I read a book that said you should make a big change every seven years, and this was an area of investing that I really have wanted to be in,” said Lee, who at Kleiner has backed companies such as One King’s Lane, Rent the Runway and Dollar Shave Club. “I really have become very interested at working with and helping entrepreneurs at the early stages of their growth.”

KP’s John Doerr said that while some VC firms are creating their own high-profile seed funds, he and Lee felt it was important for such an investment vehicle to be independent to be effective and also to work with other seed efforts that have exploded on the tech scene.

“But we wanted to invest in it, so it’s the best of both worlds,” he said. “It’s really important that start-ups at that stage get the kind of attention Aileen can give them.”

According to her bio on KP’s Web site, Lee worked at the Gap before her VC life, as well as Odwalla and the North Face. The MIT and Harvard Business School grad also worked at Morgan Stanley in technology mergers and acquisitions.

The Menlo Park, Calif., venture firm, which has backed tech companies such as Google Inc. and Zynga Inc., is preparing to raise its 15th early stage fund — which is regarded as its main fund — said these people. Kleiner has told investors its new fund will be around the same size as its prior early stage fund, Fund XIV, which it raised in 2010 sized at around $650 million, said these people.

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Consider, then, the irony that I find myself at the Venture Capital in the Rockies conference at the Beaver Creek ski lodge near Avon, Colo., something of a skiing mecca, where pretty much everyone lives to glide down the mountain, and many people seem to take jobs that happen to include lift tickets as a fringe benefit. The conference is really only a day long, but is scheduled for two. Today is the “ski day,” where everyone disappears to take to the slopes. Except me.

I’m here because I was invited to speak on a media panel with reporters from a few other organizations. We talked for an hour or more about the changing nature of journalism and all that that entails, where before a crowd of start-up entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, we wondered aloud about such things as whether venture capitalist and Zynga director Brad Feld counts as a journalist because he also writes a widely read blog. Answer: No. The start-ups, most seeking some kind of investment, gave short presentations on their companies.

Here are a few of the companies that caught my attention, either because I saw their presentations or because I met their executives:

Flixmaster: How many times have you stopped watching a Web video that was going on too long, or because you couldn’t easily navigate to a particular highlight you wanted to see? What if Web videos were as readily navigation-friendly as a Web page? Flixmaster has a software-as-service video technology that makes Web video a lot more interactive than it generally is today. If you hope to engage potential customers with video, it helps to increase viewing time. And adding interactivity to a video nudges viewers to stick with a video longer. Many stop watching after less than a minute, CEO Erika Trautman said in her presentation. The videos are in HTML5, which means they’re already iPad- and Android tablet- and smartphone-friendly. You can get an idea of the result from this holiday-themed video on the company’s blog.

Mocavo: In the Web genealogy business there is as yet really no serious competition to the dominant player, Ancestry.com. Mocavo aims to bring it by challenging Ancestry’s walled-garden approach. In six months, it claims to have added six billion genealogical names to its index. Compare that to the nine billion records that Ancestry amassed over 15 years. Mocavo books $60 per new subscriber versus $20 per month for Ancestry. It aims to make people’s genealogical information a lot more easy to share on social media sites, and to publish.

Dizzion: This enterprise-focused start-up aims to help CIOs tackle the big trend you constantly hear about these days, the consumerization of IT: That’s where employees bring their personal devices to work and expect to have them supported. Its product is a “virtual desktop,” or desktop as a service, that provides an operating system, software, files and other stuff you need to get through the workday, all from the data center running as a managed service. Users can access it all from a desktop machine or a tablet or smartphone.

CMDirect: This company got my attention mainly because it was so unlike all of the others in attendance. It’s basically an electronic trading platform that specializes in commodities like sugar, which at the moment is the only commodity that is currently traded on it, but plans are in the works to expand into coffee and soybeans. It’s not about trading futures, but in the actual commodities, and includes a lot of tools for managing risk. The CEO, Julie Lerner, is a veteran commodity trader with Cargill, and has a lot of specialized knowledge in how that world works. The company has a bunch of patents pending around its processes and tools.

Sestus: This is a security and authentication company that caught my attention in part because during its presentation, CEO Taun E. Willis said that the firm is taking business away from RSA, the security unit of IT giant EMC. In a world where passwords are just not good enough at keeping intruders out, you need to authenticate using two factors, a password and something else. RSA hardware tokens are popular and widely used, as are the “soft” tokens that simulate the hardware tokens in software running on smartphones. Instead, Sestus offers virtual tokens that are less costly to deploy and to support than hardware and software tokens. It’s a small outfit, but punches above its weight, sporting 260,000 U.S. consumers who use its virtual tokens to access online accounts. One big customer is the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where Willis said Sestus supplanted RSA.

NextGreatPlace and Inspirato: If there was a rivalry to be found among any of the presenting companies, it was between these two. NextGreatPlace is a play on the vacation club theme. Members join for an annual fee, said to be in the sub-$1,000 range, for access to a network of vacation homes. It combines an online and offline travel planning process that’s been described as “Zappos for travel.” Inspirato, on the other hand, aims to do something similar, but with an emphasis on luxury and higher-net-worth travelers. I sat next to its CEO, Brent Handler, at dinner Tuesday night, and he told me that its members pay a one-time fee of $15,000 and an annual membership fee of $2,500 for access to a network of high-end vacation homes in your typical luxury destinations like Colorado, Hawaii and the Caribbean.

So those are but a few of the companies that presented here. The snow has been falling all day, and everyone around me is going on about how it’s a perfect day for skiing. So I’m off to go take my first downhill skiing lesson ever. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Update: I originally said that AOL founder Steve Case was an investor in NextGreatPlace. I got mixed up. It turns out that he had backed NextGreatPlace founder in founder Tom Filippini’s prior company, Exclusive Resorts. Sorry about that.

At that price, Jive will debut with a market capitalization of nearly $700 million, and has raised about $161 million.

The offering will amount to a nice payout for Jive’s investors and shareholders. Based on the reported share holdings in Jive’s S-1 filing with the SEC, here’s how some of them are making out — assuming the share price stays at $12:

• Sequoia Capital: 16.95 million shares, amounting to more than one-third of Jive’s equity, worth $203.4 million.

• Kleiner Perkins: 6.7 million shares, worth $80 million.
• Bill Lynch, Matthew Tucker: Jive’s co-founders own 7.1 million shares each, amounting to combined equity of nearly 32 percent, worth $85 million apiece.
• CEO Tony Zingale, the former CEO of Mercury Interactive who oversaw its sale to Hewlett-Packard, has 3.6 million shares, worth $43 million.
• John McCracken, Jive’s senior VP of worldwide sales, has 784,000 shares, worth $9.4 million.
• CFO Bryan J. LeBlanc has 694,000 shares, worth $8.3 million.
• Bill Lanfri, a Jive director, former CEO of Big Bear Networks (a Sequoia investment), and a founding investor in RedBack Networks, has 581,000 shares, worth $7 million.
• Robert F. Brown, Jive’s senior VP of client services, has 434,000, worth $5.2 million.
• Brian J. Roddy, senior VP of engineering, has 429,000 shares, worth $5.1 million.

Additionally, the San Francisco-based company is announcing this morning that it has acquired Chatterfly, a mobile platform focused on creating loyalty, and DoodleDeals, a deal site focused on the East Coast markets that has distribution deals with Time Out New York Kids, What to Expect and Amazon-owned Diapers.com.

Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Altogether, Plum District now operates in 27 markets and has a network of 300 salespeople — the company calls them “mom consultants.”

Plum District uses a multilevel marketing sales approach to source its deals, meaning that the same moms who are receiving the deals can also act as its salesforce (a la Mary Kay). The incentive for sourcing deals on anything from spa discounts to family outings is making money, of course.

The third round of funding was led by General Catalyst Partners; new participants in the round include Comcast Ventures and Duke University, with existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also contributing. To date, the company has raised $30 million.

As part of the funding, Raul Vazquez, former president and CEO of Walmart.com, was named to the board of directors.

The capital will be used for geographic expansion, enhancing customer experiences and investments in technology.

The round also shows that while Groupon and LivingSocial may be the mainstream leaders and are capable of raising hundreds of millions of dollars, including yesterday’s news from LivingSocial that it had raised half of a $400 million round, there is still interest in companies that are focused on a specific niche.

Other more mainstream providers like BuyWithMe were unable to attract more financing. BuyWithMe was ultimately acquired by Gilt City at a massive discount.

Other companies are targeting mothers as well, including FamilyFinds in Los Angeles and even LivingSocial, which has a family-focused vertical.

Earlier this morning, Zynga announced it would price its stock between $8.50 and $10 a share when it goes public later this month.

That’s at the high end of the range that values the four-year-old company at as much as $7 billion. But that’s much lower than than what some investors paid as recently as February, according to documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

In fact, some of its investors are already underwater.

One of those investors is Morgan Stanley, which is also one of the company’s underwriters in its IPO. In February, 11 mutual funds associated with Morgan Stanley purchased 5.3 million shares at $14 apiece for a total of $75 million. Four other investors, which were unnamed, also contributed to the round totaling $490 million, according to the document.

At $14 a share, the company’s value in February totaled nearly $10 billion, or roughly 43 percent greater than today’s high-end of the range.

Zynga justified the higher stock price back in February, stating that the U.S. economy had improved and that the public markets were being receptive to Internet stocks, including generous valuations for privately held companies such as Facebook and Groupon.

Furthermore, in March, the company used that valuation as a guide to purchase shares back from five of its early investors and its CEO Mark Pincus at $13.96 a share.

While the market conditions have likely changed since then, it’s important to note that things are still in flux. If the company drums up enough demand for the 115 million shares being sold over the next two weeks, the price could move even higher.

As Kara Swisher previously reported, Pincus will not sell any shares in the offering, and no other executives at Zynga have plans to sell stock, either.

But a number of the company’s early investors will be cashing in. Institutional Venture Partners, Avalon Ventures and Foundry Venture Capital will sell 2.5 million shares apiece for up to $25 million each. Union Square Ventures will sell 2.2 million for roughly $22 million.  Google and Silver Lake Partners will also both sell 1.7 million shares for a proceed of $17 million each.

Google was originally not listed as an investor when Zynga filed documents with the SEC to go public, but it showed up in subsequent filings. Google, which was rumored to have invested as much as $100 million in Zynga, has an interest in social gaming because of its Google+ network. Following the offering, it will continue to own 21 million shares, or about 3.8 percent of the company.

One notable shareholder that won’t be selling shares is venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an early investor in the company. Its partner Bing Gordon, who personally owns a 10.7 percent stake in the company, also does not plan to sell any shares.

The company filed documents with the Securities & Exchange Commission this morning, indicating that it intends to raise between $850 million and $1.15 billion in its public offering.

At the high end of the range, that would translate to roughly $150 million more than it had previously estimated it could raise.

The company is seeking to sell 100 million shares at $8.50 to $10 a share and will reserve 15 million additional shares for extra demand. It expects to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ZNGA.

Under the best circumstances, the company will be valued at nearly $7 billion based on 699.3 million shares outstanding. That falls below some of the rumored expectations that have been floating around over the past few weeks.

Still, at that value, it will come close to the public valuation of Electronic Arts, which hovers around $7.8 billion, but falls short of other game publishers, like Activision, which has a value of  $14 billion.

Zynga has made its riches off selling virtual goods in social games on Facebook. Some of its most recognizable titles include FarmVille, CityVille, Poker and Words With Friends.

Virtual goods often allow players to continue to play the game and level-up faster, such as an energy boost. They also can be decorative in nature, like an outfit for an avatar or seeds to plant on a farm. Of the roughly 230 million monthly active users, very few players ever bother making a purchase.

Since the beginning, the company has a very close relationship with Facebook, which has been contentious at times, especially since the platform started collecting a 30 percent tax on all virtual goods sold. More recently, the company has tried to expand to other platforms, including the launch of several games on mobile and Google+. It also has its own online game network in production.

The company’s IPO will be one of the largest tech offerings in recent memory.

In early November, Groupon raised $700 million including overallotments. It had originally sought to raise $750 million. Other recent tech IPOs include Angie’s List, Pandora and LinkedIn.

But some critics think Zynga is rushing its offering before a broad financial collapse. If it waited until reporting fourth-quarter results, it could paint a stronger growth story as it completes the busy holiday period.

The San Francisco company, which was founded in 2007, was named after Founder and CEO Mark Pincus’s dog named Zinga.

In 2010, Zynga recorded a profit of $27.9 million on revenues of $597.5 million. In the first nine months of 2011, it broke even on revenues of $828.9 million.

While its revenues continue to grow, the number of daily active users that play its games has fallen two quarters in a row and some critics question whether the company can keep up its aggressive growth.

In recent weeks, Pincus has come under harsh criticism for his heavy-handed leadership approach. But to his credit, he has overseen rapid growth, including the acquisition of dozens of smaller game studios. Today, his company has 2,500 employees.

At the mid-range of its expectations, Zynga will bring home proceeds of $889.4 million after selling shareholders take their winnings.

The primary purpose of the sale is to increase its visibility in the marketplace and create a market for its stock. Proceeds will go towards working capital, but also $83.6 million will be spent to satisfy tax withholding obligations related to stock of current and former employees. Additionally, it plans to use a portion of the proceeds for charitable causes through its Zynga.org initiative.

As part of the sale, the company will have three classes of shares. Class A stock will have one vote per share; Class B stock will have seven votes; and Class C will have 70 votes.

Pincus owns some Class B shares, and all of the company’s Class C shares. Following the offering, he will control 36.2 percent of the company’s voting power.

As Kara Swisher previously reported Pincus will not sell any shares in the offering.

No other executives have plans to sell stock, either. But a number of the company’s early investors will sell stock, including Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures. Other interesting names that made the list include Google, which will sell 1.7 million shares.

The company’s largest institutional holder, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which owns 11 percent of the shares, will not sell any of its stock in the offering either.

“There’s no one like Steve,” Gore said of Jobs. “He’s the kind of guy that comes along once every 250 years. He was totally unique. So obviously his death is a terrible loss for the entire world. And we’ll all miss him. But his legacy lives on.

“I think that among his many tremendous breakthrough inventions, the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, iPad, the iPhone with Siri, Pixar, you can go right down the list,” Gore says. “Among them all, I actually think his greatest work was Apple itself. The most valuable company in the world, swapping back and forth with Exxon Mobil.”

Gore continues … “But more important than all that, he created an organization and inspired it, that really creates technology that people literally love. And the emotional attachment that people have to the degree of excellence embodied in Apple’s products is really quite unique and extraordinary. And that’s going to continue. There’s so many things in the pipeline, and the team that he built is hitting on all cylinders. It is, in my opinion, the best in the world, bar none. …You can go right across the list and every single one of them is world class. Every single one of them could be the CEO of a major corporation.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111020/al-gore-on-steve-jobs-hes-the-kind-of-guy-that-comes-along-once-every-250-years/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111020/former-u-s-vice-president-al-gore-live-at-asiad/ http://allthingsd.com/20111020/former-u-s-vice-president-al-gore-live-at-asiad/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:11:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=133831 Former Vice President. Nobel Peace Prize winner. Current TV chairman. Apple board member. Senior adviser to Google. Partner at storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Al Gore’s CV is as broad as they come. The latest addition to it is Generation Investment Management LLP, an asset-management outfit intended to incorporate sustainability values into the financial-services world.

10:18 am: Walt greets Gore by noting that he has just come from Steve Jobs’s memorial service. What was that like?

10:18 am: “A beautiful and moving event … It’s a terrible loss, of course, for the entire world. We’ll all miss Steve.

But for all of his inventions — “among them all, I actually think his greatest work was Apple itself.”

“He created an organization — and inspired it — that literally creates technology that people love … and that’s going to continue. There’s so many things in the pipeline, and the team that he built is hitting on all cylinders.”

10:20 am: Walt: So, no offense to Tim Cook, at what point does the lack of having Jobs at the helm of the company become apparent? There’s a pipeline, “but at some point that pipeline runs out, and then what happens?”

10:21 am: Gore: Steve cultivated a team, “and we had discussions at every single board meeting, for several years, about cultivating that team.” No one will replace him, and he’s totally unique. “And yet, he also served on the board of Disney … and he used to talk initially about how, after Walt Disney died, the company always got in trouble about asking ‘what would Walt do in this situation?’ And he made it very clear: ‘I don’t want that.’ He made it clear to Tim Cook and everyone else. ‘Don’t ask what Steve would have done. Follow your own voice.’”

10:23 am: Walt: So you still expect risk-taking and game-changing?

10:23 am: Of course. Everyone on that management team could be CEO of a world-class corporation.

10:23 am: Walt: Isn’t that a problem? That people come after them?

10:24 am: Gore: Of course. But that’s not new. And I’m on the compensation committee, and we pay real close attention to that.

10:24 am: Walt: You’re also a Google adviser, and those two companies are competing. How do you handle that?

10:24 am: Gore: After Eric Schmidt left the Apple board because of conflicts, I pulled back as well. I still talk to Larry and Sergey, but never about anything where there’s competition. It’s not really a problem, but “I don’t have as many conversations with them now. And I miss that.” I’ve known them since they were 27 years old.

By the way, I think Larry is doing a great job since he became CEO.

10:27 am: Walt: America has been the big tech innovator for a long time, and in Asia they are still mostly imitating what we’ve done. But Asia is coming up fast. “How much longer can this be an advantage for the United States?”

10:28 am: Gore: That depends on choices we make. “I think our political system is now badly broken.” We’ve been able to use the political equivalent of massively parallel processing to make great decisions over the past 200 years.

Let me digress for a minute: The U.S. formed its superior decision-making in the wake of Gutenberg and the evolution of the print press. Allowed “the rule of reason” to let citizens and their reps make good decisions. Then, 60 years ago, TV surpassed print. And unlike the public square of print, the TV public square is controlled by gatekeepers, and access to that square requires a lot of money. So now we’ve seen a huge degradation of the conversation.

10:31 am: Walt: Hasn’t the Web fixed that?

Gore: Not yet. Right now, TV is by far the dominant medium. If you take primetime out of the picture, the activity on iOS and Android is now rivaling TV. But you include primetime, 7 to 10, TV “blows everything else away. Still.”

“Television is still the big kahuna. It’s because people like to sit back, and the relationship between the television and the human brain is extremely close.”

It’s part of evolution — back on the savannah, the people who didn’t notice the leaves moving suddenly didn’t become our ancestors. We’re hardwired for this stuff; “it becomes a quasi-hypnotic state.” It’s why lead-in shows are so important. (Peter Chernin disagrees — see earlier.)

So that’s why so much political money goes into TV, and that helps explain why the system is so broken.

10:35 am: (Sorry, tech issues here.)

10:35 am: And we’re back. Gore is talking about companies who can take advantage of the innovator’s dilemma, Metcalfe’s law, etc.

Gore: 5.6 billion of the world’s seven billion people have mobile phones. Less than one billion are smartphones. “But that is going to change dramatically” … “Moore’s law makes it inevitable that the low-end phones are going to get smart.” And as those 5.6 billion get smarter and smarter phones — remind me to mention the climate crisis, by the way — that’s going to unleash amazing creativity.

10:38 am: Walt: Okay, let’s talk about the climate. This ties into tech: We love all these devices. Walt gestures to writers sitting in the front row, and Gore notes “All Apple — almost all Apple.” But it seems like people in the developed world have all these great devices, but people in the rest of the world deal with the pollution. Here in Hong Kong, there’s a lot of smog, and I’m told that much of it comes from over the border in mainland China, where much of this stuff is made.

Gore: About two percent of global warming comes from this stuff. “It’s a nontrivial factor.” But the good news is that the IT sector has been really good about addressing this stuff, much more so than other industries. And the other good news is that the information revolution that comes from this tech makes it easier to combat this, as well.

Except for this massive disinformation campaign — reminiscent of the tobacco industry in the 1950s telling us that smoking didn’t cause cancer — that tells us this stuff isn’t a problem. One hundred million people died unnecessarily because of this, because of smoking.

In this case, the largest carbon polluters — starting about 19 years ago, in the U.S., Europe and Australia and other countries — these polluters and their ideological allies “have put out a massive campaign to put out false doubts … they know that they don’t have to prove” anything, “all they have to do is put out enough false doubt.” Meanwhile, there’s nearly unanimous consensus on climate change.

If you had chest pains and you consulted 100 leading doctors, and 98 of them told you to take care of your heart, that’s what you’d do. You wouldn’t pay much attention to the other two.

So now you have more pollution than ever, etc.

10:46 am: Walt: But wait — isn’t a Democrat in the White House? Isn’t that your party?

Gore: I’ve expressed disappointment.

10:46 am: Walt: What do you tell Obama?

Gore: I give him advice, and most of the problem is in the Senate, which is totally broken. But the White House has pulled back from environmental reform, and that’s disappointing.

10:48 am: Gore: Meanwhile, look what’s happening in Pakistan, Thailand, Russia, Colombia, all facing terrible crises because of the climate. Colombia has had five times its normal rainfall this year. The Philippines have had a massive series of downpours for the past two years. Nashville, my hometown, just had “once-in-a-thousand-years rainfall … at some point, there has to be a reality check.”

10:49 am: Walt: And this is all because of pollution?

10:49 am: Gore: Yes.

[Long explanation of how massive downpours are a result of pollution] “It will get a lot worse. Until we take action. Even after we take action, it will be a problem.” And the same factors creating all this rain are also creating droughts. Double, triple whammy.

“I’ve been trying to communicate about this. And I wish I could communicate more effectively about this.”

“This is a global issue … we’re now being assaulted by this 90 milllion tons of global-warming pollution every day … it’s not okay.”

Questions From the Audience

Q: Back to the print-TV-Web conversation. Please keep talking about the evolution of TV, in connection with your involvement with Current TV.

Gore: We’ve done creative stuff at Current TV with Twitter. It’s one of a series of experiments. Last year, we had a drama series with the Sims’s Will Wright, where he had an online story-creation engine online, where people could have input on story line. Many other examples.

But when you look at the opposite direction — TV on the Internet — you run into a broadband capacity problem. In the 1970s, there was only ARPANET, and twisted copper pairs. And we wanted to increase capacity via the information superhighway. But now, with video, the number of digits in a 30-minute video “is like a year’s worth of email.” And even with compression, etc., “there is a crunch coming” and “that is what has impeded the migration of TV proper onto the Internet.” For the majority of people, in the majority of the world, it is still going to be a while before we get full TV on the Internet.

Q: Back to the environment. What’s actually feasible for policymakers to do?

Gore: With individuals, start by “winning the conversation” — like the civil rights movement in the ’60s. Don’t put up with pollution. Then we can make changes on the consumer side.

For politics: Number one, we can start putting a price on carbon. Right now we tell people it’s okay to use the global commons as a sewer. It’s not. The market is telling polluters it’s okay to pollute, so of course they will. A carbon tax and cap are important.

Number two: Governments should create a green bank of development for renewables. Moore’s law is not a law of physics. It’s a law of investment. Chip power grows fast now because investors invest in R&D to make it grow fast. Same thing can be true for green R&D like photovoltaic electricity.

Q: Please talk about Apple. Senior talent there — if you look at their background, prior to joining Apple, they don’t look like world-class guys. Very different background than the resumes of the Google guys. So one’s not better than the other, but how does Apple think about talent? Also: Please talk about the Apple board — lots of folks have criticized the Apple board. (Gore is a member, of course.)

Gore: First of all, the way the executive team at Apple are chosen is not all that different from a lot of other places — they proved themselves in other positions and worked their way up.

As for the Apple board, I won’t talk about what goes on inside. But I will say this: “I have the deepest respect for my fellow board members, we’re all very good friends… I think that people who specialize in kibitzing about these things — I respect them, it’s good for them to think about this kind of stuff, but I wouldn’t change a thing about the way the Apple board has operated.”

We handled privacy and medical issues and succession all correctly there. “If you were running a corporation, and you had a star-studded executive team, would you really think it would be a smart thing to lay out in public your thinking about who’s going to move to what position over the next couple years? Of course not!”

Q: Please talk about impact of tech on the news business.

Gore: I used to be a journalist for the Army. I’ve watched the evolution of the business. The most important part of the problem you’re getting at is that with the transition to Internet journalism you don’t get enough critical mass to throw off enough revenue to create good investigative journalism. Crowdsourcing helps, but that’s not a substitute for real investigative journalists who can make a decent living doing what they do best.

Where will it go? It’s literally impossible to predict. I have a great iPhone 4S and an iPad, but “most of the quality stuff is still produced by newspapers and magazines.”

Walt: You don’t have the model for a new journalism, right? You just want there to be a new one?

Gore: Current TV has won a lot of awards. Those guys do a great job. And “60 Minutes” is great. But, increasingly, shows that used to do news are moving into infotainment.

I turn on the morning news and a program that used to do news is doing a segment about a kid who’s hiccuping. But I do have to confess it’s pretty interesting.

Q: What should Google do in China?

Gore: [Waits a beat.] “God bless you.”

Q: Advice for Obama going into 2012?

Gore: I’ve given it privately.

Q: What about the T-Mobile-AT&T merger. What do you think?

A: My guess is that Justice so rarely takes a move like they made — “I think it’s going to be hard to overturn that decision.” They’ll fight it, but they should think about other plans.

Q: Question about the failing of American education.

A: I’ve tried hard! I have an “our choice” app about environmental education. I had a documentary on TV, etc. But we have a major party embracing the rejection of science, even while the majority of American people believe in the science.

Q: Can you talk about financial reform in the U.S.?

Gore: I think financial reform and political reform are connected. “Money plays such an unhealthy role” in U.S. democracy — “way more than in the past”. There are four anticlimate activists for every member of the Senate.

“We need to move toward sustainable capitalism. Capitalism is the best system for organizing economic activity … but we have to pay careful attention to how those incentives are structured, and what they are applied to. We have to measure the full system of value.” And not just discard things that are difficult to measure — externalities. “So if we’re committed to capitalism, as I am, we have to make it sustainable.” Price tag can’t be the only marker of value.

Lots of conventions of modern-day trading and investing are “functionally insane.”

Q: [Didn't catch.]

Gore: The last century and a half is an exception to the longer history, in which Asia has been the dominant force in the world. China is becoming more competitive, “and I wish them well.” But I also remember when the Soviets were going to eclipse us. Didn’t happen. Japan Inc. Didn’t happen. So, is China’s rise inevitable? I don’t know. Chinese labor costs, inflation are going way up. I’m not so sure that we can predict in a linear way what’s going to happen in the future.

Ends with plug for AllThingsD. Thanks, Al!

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111020/former-u-s-vice-president-al-gore-live-at-asiad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111018/waze-raises-major-funding-to-drive-social-traffic-apps/ http://allthingsd.com/20111018/waze-raises-major-funding-to-drive-social-traffic-apps/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:00:40 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=133257 Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures Hong Kong and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have invested $30 million in social traffic and navigation company Waze.

Waze now has seven million users, up from the two million it had last December, when it raised $25 million led by Blue Run Ventures. The company’s services are powered by passive driving data collected by users, plus their reports of accidents and hazards on the roads.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which recently rewrote all its apps, expects to dedicate some of its new funding to partnerships, in order to launch in China.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111018/waze-raises-major-funding-to-drive-social-traffic-apps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111017/kleiner-perkins-invests-in-inspirato-for-new-spin-on-luxury-vacation-rentals/ http://allthingsd.com/20111017/kleiner-perkins-invests-in-inspirato-for-new-spin-on-luxury-vacation-rentals/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:20:50 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=132908 Denver-based Inspirato has secured $17.5 million in funding for its membership luxury vacation business.

The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with other investors participating, including Access Venture Partners and New York Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira.

The business sounds a little bit like a timeshare, but without a lot of the restrictions.

Members pay a one-time initiation fee of $15,000 and an annual membership fee of $2,500. Members can travel as often as they like and can pick from a property portfolio of 85 residences in 25 destinations, for which Inspirato has entered into long-term leases with the property owners.

Members receive deeply discounted nightly rates, no black-out dates and no brokers’ fees.

The company was founded by Brent and Brad Handler, the co-founders of another travel club called Exclusive Resorts, in January.

So far, the company says it has sold more than 900 memberships and says it is cash flow positive. It plans to use the capital to add even more vacation choices for its members.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111017/kleiner-perkins-invests-in-inspirato-for-new-spin-on-luxury-vacation-rentals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110829/kleiner-plays-catch-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20110829/kleiner-plays-catch-up/#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:00:35 +0000 Pui-Wing Tam and Geoffrey A. Fowler http://allthingsd.com/?p=114633 Venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the late-1990s dot-com frenzy with investments in Netscape Communications Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and, later, Google Inc.

But after spreading its bets to clean technology — and missing out on early-stage investments in some of the hottest new Internet companies — the firm is scrambling to grab a leadership role in the latest Web boom.

That was evident at a June event in San Francisco, where the firm hosted a packed room of entrepreneurs. At the front of the room, Kleiner venture capitalist Bing Gordon spent an hour onstage espousing his theory of “gamification” — that is, how start-ups can benefit from using online gaming techniques — to the gathering.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110829/kleiner-plays-catch-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110817/she-does-kim-kardashian-to-wed-at-eric-schmidts-socal-estate/ http://allthingsd.com/20110817/she-does-kim-kardashian-to-wed-at-eric-schmidts-socal-estate/#comments Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:43:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=111258

Here’s a delicious juxtaposition you don’t get often: Various reports indicate that reality show empress Kim Kardashian’s upcoming wedding to New Jersey Nets basketball player Kris Humphries will be held at the Montecito estate of Google’s Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt.

And, according to another report, if not there, then at a house owned by one of Silicon Valley’s most famous VC legends.

Schmidt won’t be a guest at what is sure to be a heavily chronicled event — which the New York Post said will have a $20,000 cake, three dresses and 500 guests.

You know, simple nuptials.

Instead, it appears Schmidt rents out the lush house, which he bought from talk show host Ellen DeGeneres in 2007 for $20 million.

Fun fact: It is the same spot where Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck — or Bennifer, as I like to call them — were set to be hitched in 2003, before they called off their engagement.

According to blog site The Real Estalker, who also wrote about the possible rental:

The privately situated and heavily secured luxury compound’s architectural heart and soul is a 5,000-plus square foot main house with 4 bedrooms and 4 full and 2 half bathrooms designed by beloved Santa Barbara architect George Washington Smith. Staff and/or guests can be comfortably accommodated in a detached 1-bedroom guest house with kitchen and an additional studio space tucked into a quiet corner provides private respite from family members and all the full-time staff people required to maintain an estate of this magnitude.

At the time Mister Schmidt snatched up the property, the extensively and meticulously landscaped grounds included a long winding drive, massive motor court, championship grade tennis court, extra-long swimming pool with raised spa area, wide terraces, broad lawns, and a stunning allée with colorful tiled fountain that screams out for a highly stylized celebrity wedding designed — we presume — by an efficient, innovative and extremely well-paid event planner.

[UPDATE:] Later, The Real Estalker changed its report and said the wedding might not be held at Schmidt’s place, but at another over-the-top estate owned by Silicon Valley venture legend Frank Caufield, one of the founders of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

I have a call in to the Kardashians, who are usually so shy with the press, so I will update as soon as I hear or a camera crew arrives at my house.

Until the I-dos are done, below are some pretty pix of Schmidt’s fancy spread from back in 2006:

A Google spokesman had no comment, obviously.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110817/she-does-kim-kardashian-to-wed-at-eric-schmidts-socal-estate/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110810/is-turkey-the-next-big-market-opportunity-kleiner-perkins-is-betting-on-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20110810/is-turkey-the-next-big-market-opportunity-kleiner-perkins-is-betting-on-it/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:00:11 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=107951 Nope, it’s not China or India. It’s Turkey.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, best known for investing in Google, Amazon, Twitter and Zynga, has made a bet on Turkey as the next big market with its first major investment there.

The receiving company — Trendyol.com, an e-commerce site based in Istanbul — is announcing today that it has raised $26 million from Kleiner Perkins and Tiger Global.

Trendyol is similar to other flash sales sites in the U.S., such as Gilt Groupe, Rue La La, and Ideeli. The site sends out daily emails offering a heavily discounted selection of clothes. Consumers have a limited amount of time to purchase the items before the sale expires or quantities run out.

The company was founded by Demet Mutlu, a 29-year-old dropout from Harvard Business School — she is now running the company with about 350 employees.

Kleiner partner Aileen Lee said a combination of a hardworking executive team, the company’s phenomenal growth, and Turkey’s increasingly attractive market opportunity led to the investment. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to introduce e-commerce to a market that doesn’t have a strong brick-and-mortar environment.

Check out some of these facts:

• Turkey has 35 million Internet users, representing the third largest Web market in Europe.
• Turkey is a socially engaged country, ranking fifth-highest for Facebook usage globally; eighth for Twitter and first for FriendFeed.
• Turkey has a high credit card penetration rate of about 60 percent with 46 million credit cards.
• In the past 16 months, Trendyol has signed up four million members, translating into one out of every nine Turkish Internet users.

“When you go there and walk around the company, it looks like any other hypergrowth Silicon Valley start-up,” Lee said. “Trendyol has an incredible dedication to customer service and is driven by metrics and analytics. It has a good sense for what to outsource and what to keep in-house, and is building the brand.”

She said Trendyol has also been good at leveraging social media, including a store inside Facebook that allows users to make purchases without leaving the site.

The funding will be used for new initiatives, such as building out the company’s customer service team, increasing its membership, and potentially moving into new geographies. Trendyol.com has secured more than $50 million in total financing since the site launched in March 2010.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110810/is-turkey-the-next-big-market-opportunity-kleiner-perkins-is-betting-on-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110803/lockerz-nearing-closure-on-45-million-round-from-live-nation-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20110803/lockerz-nearing-closure-on-45-million-round-from-live-nation-others/#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:00:29 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=105797 Seattle-based Lockerz, an e-commerce company trying to build a rewards-based program for teens, is close to securing a third round of capital totaling $45 million.

Lockerz’s CEO Kathy Savitt said so far $36 million has been raised, but that the total amount should be final in the next 60 days.

The led investor is DAG Ventures, with Lockerz’s previous investors, Liberty Media and Liberty’s CEO, Greg Maffei, as well as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participating.

New to the round is Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster. Already, Live Nation has started to work with Lockerz to sell concert tickets for Britney Spears, Rihanna, Blink-182 and others. Members of the Lockerz community can use points they earn to get discounts on those tickets.

Savitt, who started the company in 2009, said it has started to see some significant traction, clocking 46 million unique users a month, who spend an average of 17 minutes on the site, and with most of the users falling between the ages of 13 and 35.

With the round of funding, Savitt said they will be expanding the number of places users can redeem their points, making them more valuable. To date, they’ve only been used in Lockerz’s own shop, but going forward, she said, they can be used for concert tickets, like with Live Nation, but also in restaurants and retailers.

“The whole notion of points is to be a social loyalty currency that would reward engagement in a meaningful way. The first phase offered a limited number of prizes, and then discounts on merchandise, and now we are taking that next step to make it a true global currency, by making them redeemable all over — on Lockerz and off of Lockerz,” Savitt said. “We have a lot coming in the next 60 to 90 days.”

Members of Lockerz can earn points, technically called PTZ, in more than 10 ways, including uploading photos, answering polls, watching videos, listening to music, inviting friends, or just logging in. More information on how Lockerz works and its target demographic of Gen Z can be found in this interview with Savitt from February.

The money will also go toward future acquisitions. Earlier this year it acquired Plixi, a photo-sharing site, and more recently purchased AddToAny, a content sharing site, which will ultimately become Lockerz Share. Savitt said they have a third acquisition coming in the next few weeks in the social content space.

The company has about 65 employees, and previously raised $30 million in capital.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110803/lockerz-nearing-closure-on-45-million-round-from-live-nation-others/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110719/reputation-com-raises-a-new-41-million-round/ http://allthingsd.com/20110719/reputation-com-raises-a-new-41-million-round/#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:31:43 +0000 Pui-Wing Tam http://allthingsd.com/?p=99961 Reputation.com has raised a $41 million round of funding, as the online privacy start-up aims to expand its business with new offerings.

The new round was led by venture-capital firm August Capital, with participation from Insight Capital and existing investors including Jafco Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Bessemer Venture Partners, said Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. The round, which Fertik said was oversubscribed, brings the company’s total capital raised to more than $65 million. It was the company’s fourth round of institutional financing, otherwise known as a Series D.

Fertik said Reputation.com decided to raise more money because it is planning a big push into a new line of business. To date, the company has offered several services that help consumers manage their privacy, information and reputation online. Now Reputation.com has also built a dataset business–essentially, the start-up has collected data on individuals and layered that information with its own technologies–which allows the company to come up with assessments on people, among other things.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110719/reputation-com-raises-a-new-41-million-round/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110701/the-zynga-ipo-who-owns-what-who-makes-what/ http://allthingsd.com/20110701/the-zynga-ipo-who-owns-what-who-makes-what/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:10:52 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=93857 Having teased the markets and numerous reporters for several days, online gaming company Zynga finally dropped its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission just as the nation was getting ready for the long July 4 holiday weekend.

The plan is to raise as much as $1 billion at an implied valuation of $10 billion, though The Wall Street Journal, citing people close to the situation, says the offering could raise as much as $2 billion and value the company at $20 billion. The company didn’t give a price range but said it had 562.5 million shares of Class B common stock as of March 31, plus an additional 20.5 million shares of class C stock.

The big number that everyone is going to focus on is the value of the $43 million compensation package going to executive VP and former Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta. That includes nearly $29 million in options and more than $14 million in stock awards. His base salary is $77,000 a year and he earned a $48,000 bonus is 2010.

Behind Van Natta was Steve Chiang, co-president of games, whose total compensation was north of $28 million, including $25.7 million in stock and a $2.9 million bonus. The bonus included more than $600,000 in a relocation bonus, the filing says.

Another big earner is CFO David Wehner, whose package is worth $18 million, $16 million coming from stock awards and $1.8 million paid in a bonus. Half a million of that was a retention bonus.

So who owns what? Founder and CEO Mark Pincus owns a big piece of the action. The filing shows he owns 91.4 million shares, or about 16 percent, of the Class B stock, and 20.5 million shares of the Class C stock. Both classes of stock are convertible into Class A common shares. Assuming the Journal’s sources are right and Zynga is worth $20 billion, then Pincus’s stake should be worth $3.2 billion on the Class B shares alone. (I’m not sure exactly how the Class C shares work into the calculation, but Pincus is the only one who has any, except for a block of 5.3 million shares that were sold to a bunch of mutual funds let by Morgan Stanley.)

Pincus, incidentally, is not only founder and CEO, but also Zynga’s landlord. The filing shows that the company leases office space he owns and paid him $500,000 in 2009 and $400,000 in 2010. The lease puts the current rent on the office space at $28,000 a month. Zynga also reimbursed Pincus $25,000 in 2009 and $120,000 in 2010 for the use of his personal plane, on occasions where he uses it for business travel.

Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins holds 11 percent, or slightly more than 64 million, of the Class B common shares. That works out to a stake worth $2.2 billion, assuming the $20 billion valuation.

Other venture funds with a piece of Zynga: Institutional Venture Partners, which owns 34.3 million shares, or 6.1 percent of the equity, worth $1.2 billion. Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures also have 6.1 percent of equity, or another $1.2 billion each. Union Square Ventures has a stake worth 5.5 percent, or $1.1 billion. And Russia’s DST Limited has a stake at 5.8 percent, worth $1.16 billion.

The filing says that Zynga has raised $845 million in three rounds of funding, though the filing makes it look like some rounds were closed in smaller increments. Other funds and individuals known to have invested — but not listed as major shareholders in the filing — include Andreessen Horowitz, the Pilot Group, Tiger Global Management, and Peter Thiel, head of Clarium Capital, according to its Web site.

Reid Hoffman, the former LinkedIn CEO who’s also a Zynga director, has 3.1 million shares, which amounts to less than 1 percent of the equity, though elsewhere in the filing, the value of stock awards as a director is valued at $9.5 million, assuming a grant price of $6.435 per share on the date of the grant.

Related posts

• The Zynga IPO: Who Owns What, Who Makes What
• Zynga Has Raised $845 Million in Capital, But No Mention of Google as an Investor
• The Zynga-Facebook Codependency Becomes More Clear
• Here’s the Zynga S-1 to Play With (Get It?!?)
• Zynga Finally Files for IPO to Raise $1 Billion
• Day 3: Zynga Holds Tech Reporters Hostage in Endless IPO Watch
• What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Zynga IPO (Insider Selling, Natch!)
• A Sneak Peek at Zynga’s IPO: How to Turn Virtual Goods Into Real Money
• Exclusive: Zynga About to File for IPO
• Zynga Full Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110701/the-zynga-ipo-who-owns-what-who-makes-what/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110628/look-at-all-those-zeros-square-raises-100-million-at-1-billion-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110628/look-at-all-those-zeros-square-raises-100-million-at-1-billion-valuation/#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:42:15 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=92463 That’s a lot of zeros.

Square, the mobile payments provider that is trying to redefine the way consumers spend money and the way merchants charge for it, has secured $100 million in a third round of funding, led by new Square investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from Tiger Global Management.

The extraordinarily large round comes at a $1 billion valuation, the WSJ reports.

I guess it’s fitting that a company whose primary business is accepting credit cards can practically print cash.

Only seven months ago, Square raised $27.5 million round in a second round of funding. Now that looks like pocket change.

Since then, the San Francisco-based company has expanded significantly.

It has quickly evolved beyond its original model, which consisted of handing out magnetic swipe readers that allowed users to accept payments via their mobile phones. That business was met with warm reception by small business owners, ranging from individuals at a garage sale to musicians selling CDs at a concert.

Last month, it continued its vision by rolling out an iPad-based solution for small retailers and merchants who were looking for a way to replace the clunky register on their counter, and also a new way to track inventory and manage a menu.

An accompanying mobile app enables individuals to open a tab at their favorite local merchants, store digital receipts and browse nearby directory and menu listings.

The words that Square’s CEO Jack Dorsey, who is also the head of product at Twitter, said earlier this month at D9 ring more true now than ever.

While on stage, All Things D’s Kara Swisher asked Dorsey: “Want to tell me about your IPO?”

Dorsey answered: “Which one?”

Square might still need every dime it can get to fend off the competition, which includes Google among many others.

As part of the financing, Mary Meeker, a partner at KPCB, will join the company’s board.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110628/look-at-all-those-zeros-square-raises-100-million-at-1-billion-valuation/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110523/rent-the-runway-gets-15-million-from-kleiner-perkins-to-be-the-netflix-of-fashion/ http://allthingsd.com/20110523/rent-the-runway-gets-15-million-from-kleiner-perkins-to-be-the-netflix-of-fashion/#comments Mon, 23 May 2011 14:45:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=76179 Rent the Runway is a New York-based start-up that lets you look like a million bucks while spending much less.

Think of it as the Netflix for fashion.

The 18-month-old company lets you rent high-end dresses and accessories for special occasions. It even gives you the prepaid envelope to send it all back when you are done–no dry cleaning necessary.

If you didn’t know better, you would have thought Rent the Runway starred in the hit movie “Bridesmaids.” That’s because there are dresses for most occasions, even a wedding that you aren’t willing to break the bank over.

Rent the Runway was founded by two Harvard Business grads, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, and is announcing today that it has raised $15 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The funding follows a first round by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital totaling $16 million. Aileen Lee, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, will join Runway’s board.

On the site, women browse from 25,000 dresses from 95 designers, such as Dolce and Gabbana and Vera Wang. Next, they enter a date for the event and their dress size. After that, you make a reservation, and can even get a back-up size free, so you don’t have to worry about it fitting on the big night.

Rental prices vary depending on the price of the dress. For example, a knee-length dress from Sachin + Babi rents for $125 and retails for $660. But a $2,250 peach-colored dress from Nina Ricci rents more than twice that at $300. In general, the colors and styles seem endless.

The investment will allow Rent the Runway to offer a wider selection of brands and price points. It also will go toward some of the less glamorous work, such as beefing up its back-end systems to handle future growth and pay for new warehouses outside of New York City (coming in January 2012).

If the model doesn’t already sound like the mail-order DVD rental business, the company is willing to draw the comparison itself. In a release, it said it will also be personalizing the shopping experience “using proprietary algorithms rivaling that of Netflix.”

So far, the company claims to already have more than one million members.

Part of its business proposition is also exposing women to new brands.

In that way, Fleiss, the company’s president, says the company can be used as a marketing and customer acquisition channel for its partnering brands. In a release, she said, “Ninety-eight percent of our customers are trying brands they’ve never before worn. We are introducing experiential brand marketing into the fashion industry–not just a onetime transaction–which is the power behind Rent the Runway.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110523/rent-the-runway-gets-15-million-from-kleiner-perkins-to-be-the-netflix-of-fashion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110329/meg-whitman-joins-kleiner-perkins-to-try-hand-at-advising-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20110329/meg-whitman-joins-kleiner-perkins-to-try-hand-at-advising-start-ups/#comments Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:06:37 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3978 Former eBay CEO and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is joining the Silicon Valley venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Her part-time role will include acting as a strategic adviser to start-ups and evaluating investment opportunities, reports Fortune. Whitman’s hiring closely follows that of Mary Meeker, who left her job at Morgan Stanley to join Kleiner Perkins in November.

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