[UPDATE: Twitter confirmed our post in a statement:

"Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson both played important and greatly appreciated roles in our success. Both saw what Twitter could become before most anyone else. We look forward to their continued input as both investors in the company and passionate users of the product."]

Wilson, a high-profile principal at Union Square Ventures, was one of Twitter’s earliest backers, and for a long period helped to steer the company’s direction. Sabet’s Spark Capital was also an early investor.

Both funds have sold some of their Twitter holdings via secondary market sales. But people familiar with the companies say both continue to hold a majority of their stake in Twitter, now valued at $8.4 billion.

If there’s a backstory here, it will be hard to tease out. People familiar with all three companies tell me there’s no bad blood behind the move. The one thing that’s easy to understand — for now, at least — is that Twitter’s board is a little less unwieldy.

It has been swelling over time, and last year got even bigger when Flipboard’s Mike McCue, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt and Silicon Valley advisor-to-many Peter Currie all joined. Other board members include Benchmark’s Peter Fenton and CEO Dick Costolo.

And, for a relatively young company, Twitter’s corporate history is full of twists and turns. The most recent and prominent ones were Costolo’s ascension from COO to CEO a year ago, when he replaced co-founder Evan Williams; and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s return to the company last spring to head its product efforts, after being pushed out in 2008.

I’ve asked Wilson, Sabet and Twitter for comment.

[Image credit: Lachlan Hardy]

Here’s USV principal’s Fred Wilson’s comment, via email: “Union Square Ventures is very fortunate to be able to add Andy Weissman to our partnership and we think he is a perfect fit for the entrepreneurs we want to work with and the sectors we want to participate in.” (More below.)

That will cause a small ripple in startupland, because Weissman was the one steering Betaworks’ investment portfolio. His partner John Borthwick handled the operational parts of the business, which has founded and/or nurtured startups like Summize, TweetDeck, Chartbeat and Bitly.

With Weissman’s departure, Betaworks’s focus will change. “Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house,” Borthwick said told his employees via email today. Betabeat first reported the news.

What Borthwick didn’t explain in his email is that he and Weissman had previously planned on raising a “sidecar fund” that would essentially split Betaworks into two businesses: An operating company run by Borthwick and an early-stage VC shop run by Weissman.

But that plan was discarded this summer, at least in part because of opposition from Betaworks’ investors, who include RRE Ventures, Intel, AOL and the New York Times. Investors argued that they had put money into a company where investing was only a component of the plan, not a full-time occupation; by raising a new investment fund, they argued, Betaworks would essentially be competing against some of its backers.

People familiar with the company say that the plan’s collapse didn’t lead directly to Weissman’s departure. But the backstory does provide context to his move to become a full-time venture capitalist.

When Weissman lands at Union Square, he’ll have plenty of money to work with. The firm, which has made a series of lucrative bets in high-profile Web 2.0 start-ups including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and Tumblr, is in the midst of raising a new $150-$200 million fund.

Four-year-old Betaworks, which now has more than 80 employees, ought to have plenty of money to work with, too. In addition to the $28 million it has raised to date, the company has also been able to turn some of its investments into cash via secondary market sales.

Most notably, it has recently sold Twitter shares it acquired in 2008, when the company bought search engine Summize. That alone should provide a nice cushion for Betaworks if it needs it: Twitter’s value has shot up from $100 million to $8.4 billion over the last three years.

And speaking of ripples, here’s one I’m guessing Weissman may enjoy:

Neither of those developments* are news, so let’s skip ahead and get to the stuff that’s not being talked about today, but should be:

In addition to the angels Turntable has announced — who include Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, former Facebook sales boss Tim Kendall, and big media investor Vivi Nevo — the company has also brought on other big music industry heavy hitters as investors/advisers. Turntable won’t confirm their names, but I’m told at least a couple of them hold big jobs at music labels, so go ahead and guess if you’d like.

Oftentimes the angel list accompanying a funding announcement isn’t much more than a vanity exercise. But in this case the news is important because Turntable is indeed trying to negotiate licenses with the big music labels and publishers.

That’s a change in strategy for Turntable, which had earlier argued that it wouldn’t need licenses, because it was a “non-interactive Web radio service” a la Pandora. So having executives at the big labels who are also investors is a nice advantage for Turntable to have.

And they’ll need as many as they can get, because they’re going to try to create a new kind of license. Basically they’re gunning for a hybrid license which would have them paying more per stream than Pandora does, but less than a full-fledged, on-demand interactive service like Spotify ponies up.

As I wrote in August, the notion of creating a brand-new digital music license and getting buy-in from all the big players would have seemed ridiculous a few months ago. But for whatever reason — lots of folks point to Spotify finally getting its U.S. deal approved after two years of work — people both inside and outside of the labels are murmuring positive things about what Turntable wants to do.

It will still be expensive, though — assume the start-up will have to hand over equity and a recurring royalty stream to make this work.

Just as important for Turntable: Parlaying its buzzy status into something regular people might actually want to use. Turntable says its users stream a million songs a day, but doesn’t say how many people are actually using it. But it’s clear that so far this is primarily something that appeals to a relatively small group of musical digerati.

And that group appears to have been shrinking since the company’s first burst of publicity this summer, according to metrics from AppData.

*One tiny correction for other reports about Turntable’s funding: Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, who had invested in Stickybits, the company that famously pivoted into what we’re seeing today, isn’t in this round. Via email, he says that he didn’t sign to back the company once it became a music start-up because his Kapor Capital “is focusing now on education, health care, and other positive social impact areas.”

Whether or not to sell any of their shares in Twitter is the big decision facing stakeholders of the microblogging service right now, as the second $400 million part of the company’s recent funding by Russia’s DST Global is completed in the next several weeks.

That includes everyone from early angel investors to those who bought it on the secondary markets to Twitter’s 600 employees, all of whom can sell a portion — up to 20 percent, sources said — of their holdings.

It’s all part of a recent $800 million mega-funding by Twitter, valuing the San Francisco company at $8.4 billion.

While $400 million went to Twitter, the second tranche of $400 million of the total was targeted to cash out current investors and also employees of the company.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors, such as Ron Conway.

Whether DST — as well as other smaller buyers, including early Twitter investor Chris Sacca and T. Rowe Price, according to the tender offer — gets them and others to sell enough shares is the big question, especially since few want to get caught in what one shareholder called the “Facebook idiot box.”

That would be referring to those who sold their investments in Facebook two years ago, when the social networking giant allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their stakes to DST.

The financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by the aggressive Russian investor.

At the time, the tender offer valued Facebook at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now. Oops!

That’s why high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is not selling out any of the shares it bought earlier this year in an $80 million transaction in private secondary markets.

Reasons to sell, of course, are also compelling.

Some investors might want to lock in upside, especially if they think the latest valuation is too high.

For venture capitalists in the company, some might want to return a win to their limited partners, while Twitter employees might want to put a down payment on a house after years of toiling in the start-up.

Others might also be worried about Twitter’s prospects going forward and might determine that the recent round was the high point of its market value. Twitter has indeed struggled to find a sustainable and lucrative business model, focused on advertising.

In addition, although it has recently stabilized, others might worry about Twitter’s management changes over the last year, as co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have departed. Twitter creator and other co-founder Jack Dorsey is now running the company’s product efforts, with CEO Dick Costolo (who looks a lot like that Woody Allen shot above from the classic movie, “Take the Money and Run”).

Then again, that was exactly the take on Facebook several years ago, so it is now a case on all sides of seller beware.

Twitter declined to comment and I have not heard back yet from DST about the status of the transaction.

Betabeat first reported Union Square’s involvement today; sources I’ve talked to tell me this has been more or less a done deal for about month.

Turntable is still lining up angel investor/advisers that it wants to recruit from the ranks of high-profile music industry executives, and once that’s done they’ll make the whole thing official. I’ve asked Turntable and Union Square for comment, but don’t expect to hear back.

Closing the funding round — which I believe will be somewhere in the $6 to $7 million range — will give Turntable’s Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein time to tackle their real challenge: Figuring out how exactly they’re going to work with the music industry.

The service, which lets users “DJ” streaming music for crowds who gather in online listening rooms, doesn’t have any deals with major record labels and publishers. Earlier this summer, the company told me that it planned to move forward as a “non-interactive” Web radio service, a la Pandora, which doesn’t have licenses, either: Instead it operates under the umbrella of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and pays copyright holders a rate established by an arbitration board.

But people familiar with the company say it is considering trying to strike deals with the labels after all. The upside is that negotiated pacts could give the service much more flexibility. The downside is that getting those deals done could take a long, long time — just ask Spotify, which took more than two years to break into the U.S.

At least one music industry source I trust, though, believes the fact that Spotify has gotten to the U.S. means there’s now some sort of music industry/business development glasnost. According to this line of thinking, the big labels are now more willing than ever to consider new arrangements, and perhaps Turntable can squeeze in through this window of opportunity.

My bet is that you can’t ever go wrong wagering on big music label intransigence, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to note that this is the second big bet Union Square has made on music — at the beginning of the year, it announced an investment in music distributor SoundCloud.

Union Square partner Fred Wilson has always had a big personal interest in music, but until this year he hasn’t put his company into any music bets, precisely because of the licensing headaches that come from most ventures. Maybe the business really is changing.

Etsy, the handmade goods online marketplace, has appointed its CTO Chad Dickerson (pictured here) as CEO. He replaces founder Rob Kalin, who stepped back into the top leadership role in late 2009.

Kalin is again transitioning out of the day-to-day management at the New York-based start-up.

In a blog post about it, Dickerson wrote, in part:

With engineering well in hand and a strong partner in Adam Freed (our COO), it’s time for me to focus my attention on other aspects of the business. I’m stepping into the role of CEO at Etsy, and I’m looking forward to working with all of the teams at Etsy to move faster as we scale while staying true to our values.

Before we talk about the future, I wanted to say a heartfelt thanks to Rob Kalin. Rob started Etsy. It was his idea. Hiring me was his idea. We all owe him a huge debt for starting the company that we all love, and I owe him a huge personal debt for bringing me to Etsy. Thanks, Rob.

As CEO, I’m going to focus the entire company on moving faster and and more purposefully, learning by doing, iterating, and taking risks. That’s a long way of saying we’re going to get things done. I’m going to prioritize the needs of the Etsy community in the broadest sense — Etsy’s sellers, how we work with each other within the company, our local communities, and everyone whose lives we touch. It’s a big responsibility that I take very seriously.

Etsy added former Google exec Freed in mid-2010.

Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson also addressed the management change on his blog, A VC:

“Transitions are never easy on the people involved and the company that goes through them. But they are inevitable in any company’s evolution. Some of them work out well and others not as much.”

In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is close to completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.

According to several sources close to the situation, the complex transaction could be completed within two weeks.

Along with basic funding needs, this is largely being done this way to give those with stakes in the San Francisco microblogging company an ability to monetize their privately held common stock and also to do this selling in a more organized — and legal — manner.

That is especially important since the company is not likely to go public for at least a year or more. And, while it could also be sold to a bigger company such as Google, that is also not in Twitter’s immediate future.

Before this secondary follow-on, the first part of the deal will be a $400 million investment for preferred shares by new and also existing shareholders, as was reported by the New York Times last week.

That round will indeed value Twitter at $8 billion, as the Times reported, which is a higher number than in other earlier reports.

This is more than double what Twitter was valued at when it got $200 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins in December at a $3.7 billion valuation.

Once the latest investments are complete, Twitter’s total cash haul since it was founded five years ago will be $760 million.

Key new moneybags are expected to be Russian investing heavyweight DST Global, which has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon; as well as the digital growth fund of J.P. Morgan and perhaps others.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors.

The latest funding is an important one for Twitter and will up the pressure for its management, including CEO Dick Costolo, to really get its business growing in terms of revenue and profits.

Twitter is still struggling with coming up with a truly lucrative business model, and its execs have presented a number of them, such as promoted tweets, largely based on advertising.

It reportedly has $200 million in annual revenue from its efforts, which is still small in comparison to other Web 2.0 start-ups.

Interestingly, that was a similar situation to where Facebook found itself two years ago, when it allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their shares.

That financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by DST. At the time, the tender offer valued the company at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now, so any Twitter sellers might want to consider their options carefully.

It is not clear exactly who can sell their Twitter shares, and in what amount, in the new deal. When Facebook did a similar move, for example, its top leadership could not sell any of their stakes.

A Twitter spokeswoman would not comment about any fund raising.

But, interestingly, in an onstage interview at a Fortune magazine tech conference this week, Costolo criticized stock trading of the shares of popular start-ups on secondary exchanges as a “distraction.” Like other companies, he said, Twitter had instituted stricter policies to limit the ability of its employees and investors to trade on those markets.

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

So exactly how fecund is “FarmVille”?

If reports hold, we’ll all find out today what the yield is from the online gaming phenom Zynga, which will finally be filing its regulatory documents sometime today.

The S-1 for a public offering valued at up to $20 billion, which will contain all kinds of juicy information about the San Francisco-based start-up’s business, is likely to come out after the markets close. Zynga is expected to raise $2 billion in the offering.

Before everyone gets to see what’s in it, there’s a lot that investors should be looking out for, based on recent IPO filings by similar companies, such as Groupon.

Digging Up New Accounting Ground

As Tricia Duryee pointed out, Zynga will be the “first major U.S. company supported primarily by the sale of virtual goods” to file.

That’s what will likely make the Zynga filing very interesting, from an accounting point of view.

How Zynga handles its accounting is sure to be much scrutinized, especially since Groupon attracted all kinds of ugly from its unusual treatment of its financial results.

To defocus from its money-losing under GAAP acounting, the Chicago-based social buying service used the more attractive “Adjusted CSOI,” which is defined as adjusted consolidated segment operating income.

My definition: Sketchy!

Zynga’s finances are expected to look better, reportedly generating about $400 million in profit last year on about $850 million in revenue.

It will be important to pay attention to the breakdown of those revenues and about what period of time the company accounts for them.

As Duryee wrote, Zynga has several choices:

Game-based model: The company recognizes revenue over the life of the game.

User-based model: Revenue is recognized over the estimated life a user plays the game.

Item-based model: Revenue is recognized based on the implied or explicit life span of the item — in other words, how long it would last in the real world. Examples of more durable goods are virtual vehicles, furniture or weapons. Revenue from these would be recognized for as long as the player stays active in the game. Revenues from a more consumable item, like a virtual cup of coffee or a jolt of energy, would be recognized almost immediately.

And there are still other factors to take into consideration, such as whether the goods were paid for with virtual currency or real cash, and how much information a company has for establishing the averages.

In the Revenue Weeds

Another interesting thing to study will be the revenue breakdown for Zynga, especially as it relates to its biggest platform provider, Facebook.

Such as: How many in-game items are purchased directly on Facebook versus through gift cards purchased in the store? How big (or small) is Zynga’s advertising business? What about mobile games? Will the profitability of individual games be called out, with details about their performance?

And, of all its various distribution platforms for its games, where does it get the most mojo?

That’s important, since Zynga will be seen as a proxy for Facebook’s business. Thus, a lot of investors might find some nuggets of information, since the pair are so tightly intertwined as businesses.

Facebook, of course, has been famously trying not to IPO, so any indication of the social networking site’s business will be carefully studied.

Reaping the Insider Rewards

Lastly, it’ll be important to see who is selling what and when among current Zynga investors.

Groupon ran into a buzz saw of criticism from the giant payouts its founders took out of the company from its massive venture funding rounds.

As Peter Kafka wrote:

Groupon raised a total of $946 million in two funding rounds last winter. It kept $136 million of it to help run the money-losing company. The remaining $810 million was paid out, via stock purchases, to CEO Andrew Mason and some of his backers, including Eric Lefkofsky, and, notably, the Samwer brothers, who sold their CityDeal company to Groupon in 2010 … Of note: This wasn’t the first time Groupon had raised money and taken cash off the table. In April 2010, the company raised $130 million, and handed $120 million to many of the same people.

My definition: Even sketchier!

Along with its founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Zynga investors are the pantheon of venture players, including Digital Sky Technologies, Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures and angel investors LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.

How much Pincus and others inside the company have taken out and are selling should be one of the first places new investors should look.

Because with the hyped valuations that many of these Web 2.0 companies are getting, who’s zooming who should be a key sign to pay mind to.

Great idea, says Dave Morgan.

If you pay attention to Web advertising but haven’t kept track of Morgan recently, his position might strike you as a bit odd, coming from a well-known Web entrepreneur who built and sold two big digital ad companies.

But Simulmedia, Morgan’s newest effort, has nothing to do with Web ads. Instead he’s helping TV advertisers buy the same TV ads they’ve always bought. He just says he can help them spend their money efficiently, using data from cable companies’ set-top boxes.

Simulmedia has been working on this for a couple of years, and originally focused on a relatively narrow slice of the TV ad market: TV networks advertising their own shows on other networks. But earlier this year the company changed strategies–you can go ahead and call it a pivot without being embarrassed–and is now targeting the entire $70 billion TV ad market.

Morgan raised another $10 million last week–an inside round from previous investors including Avalon Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Time Warner–which brings the company’s total funding to more than $20 million.

That’s a good reason to ask him to provide an update on his business, which he does in the video interview below. I’m particularly struck by the comments Morgan makes about adapting a go-go Web start-up mentality to accommodate the TV industry’s deliberate pace.

“I had some assumptions that there were things that had not happened in television because people didn’t understand the changes, and they were Luddites and didn’t want to change,” he says. ”The closer I’ve gotten into the marketplace, I realize they absolutely know what’s going on–they’ve made very calculated decisions.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110517/web-ad-pioneer-dave-morgan-adapts-simulmedia-to-tvs-reality/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110504/web-commenting-platform-disqus-raises-10-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110504/web-commenting-platform-disqus-raises-10-million/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 17:08:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32473 Disqus, a startup that operates a commenting platform for 750,000 Web sites, including this one, has raised a $10 million funding round led by North Bridge and Union Square Ventures. The start-up, hatched at Y Combinator in 2007, had previously raised $4.5 million from USV and others. It faces competition from Facebook, which just launched its own commenting system; Twitter may also offer a competitive product.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110504/web-commenting-platform-disqus-raises-10-million/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20110317/kickstarter-fesses-up-the-crowd-sourced-funding-startup-has-funding-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20110317/kickstarter-fesses-up-the-crowd-sourced-funding-startup-has-funding-too/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:47:02 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30861 Kickstarter has all the requisite characteristics for a hot startup: an ah-ha! concept, a growing user base, and great buzz.

The one thing it doesn’t have are stories about investors clamoring to throw money its way. And the three-year-old company has never disclosed a funding round. Is it possible it has never taken in any money?

Nope. It’s not. I hear that Kickstarter, which helps artists and entrepreneurs raise money for their projects via crowd-sourced donation, has itself raised around $10 million in venture backing so far.

Its investors are high-profile, too: Union Square Ventures is the company’s best-known backer, but Kickstarter has also received money from the Betaworks incubator/seed investment fund, along with contributions from well-known entrepreneuer/angels like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

Kickstarter’s public profile has been shooting up, up, up–most recently, as the company that helped fund watches made out of Apple’s iPod nanos — and its backers are a bit of an open secret in tech circles. But for whatever reason the company hasn’t wanted its investors chatting about it.

Union Square, for instance, doesn’t include the company in its public portfolio. [UPDATE: Now they do. "Recently the company has been getting a lot of attention and it has become clear to all of us that the quiet period is over," USV partner Fred Wilson writes in a blog post this morning. "So now we get to add the Kickstarter logo to our investments page and we can talk about the company publicly as much as we talk about it privately.]

That quiet period is over now, though, courtesy of a profile in the new issue of Wired magazine. The story is primarily about the company’s origins and ambitions, but casually mentions Union Square’s backing, and identifies Fake, Klein, Dorsey, Meetup founder Scott Heiferman and comedian David Cross (!) as other investors.

I asked CEO Perry Chen for more details about the company’s funding, but didn’t expect much. And via a pr agency, I ended up with a list of other angels, but nothing else. Here it is, for the record: Josh Stylman; Peter Hershberg; Joi Ito; Chris Sacca; Joshua Schacter; Matt Haughey; Josh & Jared Kushner; Chris Kaskie; “some other friends.”

The Wired issue with the Kickstarter profile is just landing in subscribers’ mailboxes now, and should be on newsstands and iPads next week. If you’re waiting for a free peek, though, you’ll have to be patient–the magazine usually waits a bit before it puts a new issue up on the Web. Meantime, here’s a look at the cover, via the magazine’s Twitter account:

[Kickstarter image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110317/kickstarter-fesses-up-the-crowd-sourced-funding-startup-has-funding-too/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110120/the-most-read-blogs-by-venture-capitalists/ http://allthingsd.com/20110120/the-most-read-blogs-by-venture-capitalists/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:00:41 +0000 Scott Austin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35384 Fred Wilson is no longer the venture-capital blogging king.

The Union Square Ventures partner, whose firm is an investor in many high-profile web companies including Twitter Inc., is known more to some in the start-up community for the valuable insight he shares on his blog than for the deals he actually makes. For the past couple of years, his site, “A VC,” has consistently drawn the most eyeballs among the dozens of blogs manned by venture capitalists.

But data from web analytics firm Compete shows that Wilson’s blog now ranks second in average monthly uniques. The top spot belongs to Paul Graham, who runs seed-capital firm Y Combinator.

Wilson’s blog averaged 81,483 average monthly unique users in the fourth quarter, down about 19 percent from a year earlier. Graham, meanwhile, saw his readership for “Essays” surge 35 percent to 97,227 uniques. Both blogs are considered must-reads in the start-up community.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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