Because I am an obessive-compulsive and Facebook is my new target of stalkery, I have re-read its IPO filing from earlier this week about nine times so far.

It’s chock full of interesting little bits of tasty info about the Silicon Valley social networking giant that I plan to shine a little more light on this week.

First up is not exactly a news flash: Besides graphic artists, VCs also clean up in the public offering docs.

But I am not talking about the variety of venture firms with their fingers in Facebook, which run the gamut from Accel Partners to DST Global and more.

I am talking about individual wins for venture capitalists, most especially Accel’s Jim Breyer and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.

According to the filing, while Accel holds almost 190 million shares, Breyer himself holds 11.7 million shares personally in the “James W. Breyer 2005 Trust dated March 25, 2005.”

Depending on what Facebook’s valuation turns out to be, based on current estimates, that hovers around $300 million. One caveat, according to the filing, is that 10.4 million of those shares — which are currently Class B stock and will be converted to Class A stock — are “subject to a voting agreement in favor of Mr. Zuckerberg.” That would be CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the company via such arrangements.

Not so the shares of super-VC Marc Andreessen, whose firm holds 3.6 million shares. But he himself has 5.2 million restricted stock units, presumably for board service and other advisory duties to Facebook. That’s a possible $125 million or more windfall.

Other board members have also gotten RSUs, but not in that large an amount. Washington Post head Don Graham holds one million of them, while Washington, D.C. political vet Erskine Bowles and Netflix’s Reed Hastings each clock in at only 20,000 each.

That’s a big delta, of course, which means it’s good times for VCs in Silicon Valley, both professionally and personally.

A range of major players interested in acquiring all or a large piece of Yahoo have been prepping possible bids and have been in touch with the Internet giant’s board over the last several days.

While Yahoo has publicly said it was not for sale, according to numerous sources both inside and outside the company, it has been receptive to the interest and its Chairman Roy Bostock and Co-founder Jerry Yang have spoken to several.

Among the possible players: Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is working with private equity firm Silver Lake, in a deal that also might include Russia’s DST Global and Yahoo’s Japanese partner Masa Son; former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin, who is partnered with Providence Equity Partners; and the possibility that Yahoo’s Chinese partner, Alibaba Group, might consider entering the fray in what could be a reverse merger of sorts.

Also being rung up by some of the parties: Microsoft — Yahoo’s advertising and search partner — which is being seen as a possibly moneybags in any deal.

The movement among these investors is against a backdrop of increasing pressure for Yahoo’s board, after it fired CEO Carol Bartz last week. In the wake of the dramatic move, shareholders have upped criticism of Bostock and the board and have been looking hard for alternatives.

Today, that included hedge fund investor Daniel Loeb of Third Point, which has a 5.1 percent stake in Yahoo. In a filing this morning, he said he might increase that amount, and described a testy hour-long phone call he had earlier this week with Bostock that ended abruptly with a hang-up from Yahoo.

Sources said Loeb called Bostock a “fool,” among other not-so-nice names, on the call and asked for Yang’s help in dumping him.

This comes as exactly no surprise, given his previously strong letter in which Loeb called for Bostock’s ouster.

Loeb has been calling out Bostock — who is also on the boards of Morgan Stanley and Delta Airlines — for a series of gaffes at Yahoo since he became chairman in 2008 (he’s been on the board since 2003).

Those have included: Yahoo’s bungled effort to stave off a takeover by Microsoft several years ago; the too-long enthusiasm for Bartz, who was hired in early 2009 and fired last week; sitting unusually still as competitors such as Facebook, Google and more have out-innovated and outgrown Yahoo; and, of course, the falling knife of a stock, which has dropped precipitously since Bostock has been in charge of the board.

As Loeb wrote in a letter he sent to the company last week:

“It is time that certain members of this Board were held accountable for its past failures and their individual roles. Accordingly, we insist that Mr. Bostock, who championed Ms. Bartz’s hiring and led the charge against the Microsoft deal, promptly resign from the Board.”

Loeb is likely to add to that later today at a high-profile investor conference in New York, where the colorful but tough-talking investor is sure to add more logs to the fire.

But it not only him. Other major shareholders of Yahoo are also in touch with possible outside buyers, seeking a change at the long-troubled company, after its shares have remained in the doldrums, its attrition rate of employees has spiked and its product pipeline has slowed to drip.

This has all been taking place — of course — during one of tech biggest and most innovative booms, in which Yahoo competitors have grown strongly.

Enter Marc Andreessen, the well-known entrepreneur who has transformed himself into one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists.

He and his partner Ben Horowitz recently pulled off another similar deal — with Silver Lake — to take control of a then-troubled Skype. They later flipped it to Microsoft for a large return.

Sources familiar with the situation said the pair have become increasingly intrigued by the situation at Yahoo and believe that its assets and brand are still strong, despite its management turmoil in recent years.

One problem is the huge cost of almost any kind of takeover and also the complexity, given much of Yahoo’s $18.5 billion valuation is due to its Asian assets.

The sale of those shares, as well as the selling off of some of Yahoo’s less core properties, makes for a very complicated situation for anyone.

Said one person looking at the company: “It is one of the more massive hairballs around.”

That is a common sentiment among many of those looking at Yahoo, which has hired Allen & Co. to manage the process.

Also of worry is a bid that would include too many players. Yahoo has long been plagued by indecisiveness on the part of its execs and, mostly, its board.

But one thing all the possible buyers of Yahoo, as well as an increasing number of its shareholders, agree on: The Yahoo board needs a major shake-up.

As Loeb wrote last week, which many I interviewed also echoed:

“This letter details our principled demands for sweeping changes in both the Board of Directors (the “Board”) and Company leadership, and outlines the hidden value of Yahoo, which has been severely damaged — but not irreparably — by poor management and governance.”

AOL and TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington have officially parted ways, almost exactly one year from the New York Internet portal’s acquisition of the popular tech news site.

He was replaced by longtime TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld.

The company’s statement said that the high-profile blogger had “decided” to move on, which was a decided understatement, given that the negotiations between the pair sometimes approximated a cage match.

The noisy media fight centered on a new $20 million venture fund that Arrington is now running, called CrunchFund, and his editorial status at TechCrunch with the new role.

Many, including myself, had raised questions about the conflicts of interest inherent in the situation, if Arrington had remained influential at TechCrunch. Arrington had argued that transparency took care of that.

The name of the fund, which is close to the name of TechCrunch, will remain, said Arrington onstage this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

“This is my baby and I built this,” he said, in an understated appearance. “So, it’s a sad day.”

Before beginning an opening interview with well-known Silicon Valley investor and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman at the conference, Arrington got off a good joke — one of many to come, apparently (uh-oh!) — by wearing a t-shirt with the label: Unpaid Blogger.

It was a humorous poke at AOL content czar and former Arrington boss, Arianna Huffington, who had called him that in one of the many rounds of fighting of late.

It was all in good fun, finally, after not so much fun.

Along with a media firestorm, the fracas included Arrington posting an angry blog on TechCrunch itself demanding that AOL give him editorial independence or sell him back TechCrunch.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Huffington were inclined to do neither and, thus, Arrington had to go.

Here’s a statement that was just put out by AOL:

“The TechCrunch acquisition has been a success for AOL and for our shareholders, and we are very excited about its future. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch has decided to move on from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund. Michael is a world-class entrepreneur and we look forward to supporting his new endeavor through our investment in his venture fund. Erick Schonfeld has been named the editor of TechCrunch. TechCrunch will be expanding its editorial leadership in the coming months.”

Oddly, Armstrong put the news of the change at the end of his weekly internal memo to staff, in which he noted that the company would continue as an investor in Arrington’s CrunchFund — a $10 million investment — which had started this whole controversy.

Tim, in old-timey journalism that’s called burying the lede, but here it is:

AOLers –

We’re right in the middle of the most important season of our year and we have some critical work to get done. I wanted to share the highlights of what we are expecting to have happen in the next 12 weeks. As I mentioned last week, we have prioritized our focus areas in a concise document.

The main items are below and there will be a steady set of reviews against these and related items at the weekly product reviews and monthly business reviews:

1. Traffic Growth: Full execution of the Bridge and Tunnel Project

2. Display Ads Growth: Premium formats and video growth/improvement in the quote to collect process for customers and sales

3. Video Platform: Launch of new video platform

4. Patch Monetization: Sales allocations/partnerships

5. Expansion of Content Verticals/Platform: Genre verticals in HuffPost/video expansion

6. Mobile: Content & ads priority match/move mobile engineering up the brand food chain

7. Expansion of Devil Network: Increase partners and scale production

8. Paid Services: Increase commerce partnerships

As we have discussed, the fall of ’11 will be about driving organic product improvement and reducing our focus to the high leverage opportunities. Every new opportunity at the company will be compared to our succinct plan. If we are going to add a new idea, an existing idea needs to be removed. There is room for execution and for improvement — everything else needs to be put on the back burner.

Finally, I’d like to announce that Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, has decided to move on from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund. TechCrunch continues to be a part of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group. AOL will maintain its initial investment in Michael Arrington’s fund and AOL Ventures will oversee our investment in the fund.

Have a great week everyone — stay focused and keep up the strong momentum –TA

Indeed, now that the disruption is over, it is long past time to focus on the entrepreneurs and start-ups that TechCrunch is built on. Here is the link to watch the live stream of TechCrunch Disrupt.

UPDATE: It’s not over until it is over, apparently. In a blog post of her own, Huffington took aim at The Wall Street Journal over its coverage of the internal battle at AOL.

Calling out a Journal story from over this past weekend as “shoddy,” she took issue with its characterization of AOL as having a “culture of clashing fiefs and personalities,” with a focus on fighting between her and Arrington.

The issue at hand wasn’t about personalities. It was about principle; a very simple fundamental principle about conflicts of interest that every journalistic enterprise adheres to — including the Wall Street Journal, as its former publisher L. Gordon Crovitz points out today. But you wouldn’t know that from the breathless opening grafs of the exceptionally misinformed, substance-lite, and anonymous-quote-riddled piece.

Indeed, it takes a full eight paragraphs before the Journal’s reporters Jessica Vascellaro and Emily Steel move away from their gossip girl caricature “clash of personalities” narrative and get to — or at least near — the heart of the matter: Can someone running a venture fund edit a site covering the tech startup scene? This has nothing to do with personalities, either Mike Arrington’s or mine.

If only we could only find a way to also include the doofus-is-not-disparaging fired Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz, this giant rumble would certainly be complete.

SECOND UPDATE: But, wait, what tweet through yonder smartphone breaks?

It is the Arrington, now seemingly taking a shot at Huffington about their clash of personalities.

Wrote Arrington on Twitter just now: “ok @ariannahuff. Let’s go ahead and talk about how this really played out.”

Oh, let’s — although part of me (and I know this might seem ironic) wants to make it stop.

Okay, maybe not, but longtime tech entrepreneurs Josh Felser and Dave Samuel will announce a new early-stage VC firm called Freestyle Capital, with $27 million in new investment funds.

Felser and Samuel co-founded Crackle, which was acquired by Sony for $65 million in 2006; and Spinner.com, which was bought by what was then AOL Time Warner for $320 million in 1999.

The pair said the fund builds on 27 preexisting start-ups they had already made investments in.

Although Felser and Samuel are announcing Freestyle at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today, they don’t run any tech news site for AOL — so all should be well.

Here’s the official press release:

Veteran Internet Entrepreneurs Launch Freestyle Capital, a Venture Capital Firm Focused on Early Stage Startups Freestyle Capital Receives $27 Million in Fund I Close

SAN FRANCISCO — September 12, 2011 – Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, the industry’s early-stage startup networking event, Internet technology veterans Josh Felser and Dave Samuel formally introduced Freestyle Capital, a new venture capital firm focused on seed and early stage investments in consumer and web-based enterprise technology startups. Felser and Samuel, serial Internet entrepreneurs who together co-founded both Crackle (acquired by Sony for $65 million in 2006) and Spinner.com (acquired by AOL Time Warner for $320 million in 1999), also announced that they have raised $27 million in a new fund closed from limited partners including Cendana Capital and Hall Capital. The new fund builds on a pre-existing portfolio assembled by Felser and Samuel.

Freestyle Capital will focus on providing early-stage startups with both funding and counsel — drawing upon the investment capabilities and real-world experiences of Felser and Samuel — to guide technology startups to the next stage of development. Freestyle Capital is looking for young companies with transformational business ideas presenting seed funding and early stage investment opportunities in the range of $100,000-$500,000.

To date, Freestyle has invested in more than 27 companies, including: GoInstant; Byliner; CrowdFlower; Get Satisfaction; Typekit; about.me (acquired by AOL); BackType (acquired by Twitter); and CoTweet (acquired by ExactTarget).

“Every time we make an investment decision, we draw upon our own deep entrepreneurial experience to unearth the critical success factors for each company — an approach fundamentally different from that of most VCs,” said Felser, co-founder of Freestyle Capital. “Immediately post-investment, we provide a hands-on approach that leverages the knowledge we’ve gained as successful startup CEOs in developing, marketing and leading web-based businesses. Partnering with entrepreneurs at the seed stage is the next best thing to actually being founders ourselves.”

Samuel, who launched his first start up at the age of ten, said: “Like the rest of the world, Josh and I have seen how Internet technologies can transform our lives — but we also know first-hand the long road it takes to get there. This experience is what really sets Freestyle apart from many other investors. With a practiced eye toward bringing solutions to market for real-world business applications, we are excited to ‘pay it forward’ for the newest technology innovators.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110912/new-early-stage-vc-firm-freestyle-capital-launches/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110911/in-this-episode-of-as-the-aol-turns-will-arrington-appear-at-techcrunch-disrupt/ http://allthingsd.com/20110911/in-this-episode-of-as-the-aol-turns-will-arrington-appear-at-techcrunch-disrupt/#comments Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:52:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=119341

With the continuing negotiations between AOL and high-profile TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington likely to come to some conclusion soon, the big question remaining is whether he will appear at its flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, which officially begins tomorrow.

Sources said that seems more likely than not, although the talks between AOL and Arrington are not resolved as yet and his appearance at the highly lucrative conference is part of a whole package.

But it seems unlikely that neither Arrington nor AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and content chief Arianna Huffington wants to damage TechCrunch Disrupt, which makes piles of moolah from sponsors and fees, attracts thousands of attendees, and where a plethora of promising start-ups compete with each other.

And, in fact, some of the slated speakers I have contacted have said that they have not been told of any changes in the program.

A hackathon of those entrepreneurs is now taking place before the main event, where well-known Silicon Valley players will be interviewed on stage by the staff of TechCrunch.

The conference is mostly run by TechCrunch exec Heather Harde, as well as the site’s leading editor Erick Schonfeld.

But, of course, TechCrunch Disrupt has starred Arrington, the larger-than-life blogger now turned venture capitalist.

That shift and how badly it was done is at the center of complex severance negotiations.

As I previously wrote, sources said the company has so far refused Arrington’s bold demand, posted on TechCrunch itself, to either give the popular tech news site “editorial independence” or sell it back to him.

As I wrote last week:

The situation between the popular tech blogger and top execs at the Internet company — which bought his site earlier this year — comes after a week of increasingly testy back and forth between them, after it was revealed that Arrington was starting his own $20 million venture fund called CrunchFund.

The move caused a media firestorm over the ethics and propriety of the move, which was followed by an ugly internal war at the company, with Arrington and TechCrunch staffers on one side and Armstrong and Huffington on the other.

(Full disclosure: Although no one cares what I think, I consider the deal appalling and wrote that it was a “giant, greedy Silicon Valley pig pile.” Now, it seems to be 56 percent piggier!)

After many confusing messages from AOL, Arrington was removed from his longtime job at TechCrunch and placed in its venture arm, after editorial objections from Huffington.

That had supposedly been the the plan until it all blew up, with reveleations about what the CrunchFund deal — which includes $10 million from AOL — meant to TechCrunch and its news gathering.

That seemed clear from a widely cited quote from CrunchFund investor and well-know Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reid Hoffman to me last week:

“TechCrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, CrunchFund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylock invests in.”

There you had it: No one can afford to be out of the deal flow in these competitive times, even if it means cutting corners and using a tech news site as fodder.

Arrington obviously has another view of the deal he struck with Armstrong and, sources said, wants his powerful tech news platform back. He has been talking to many Silicon Valley power players about the situation, said sources.

More to come soon from this Silicon Valley soap opera. And, hopefully, it will be a happy — well, happy-ish — ending.

(Full disclosure: AllThingsD also runs conferences that could be construed as competitive to TechCrunch Disrupt, although we both we seem to do just fine. In addition, Walt Mossberg and I are getting along like peas and carrots, although we vigorously disagree over the humongous talent of Barry Manilow.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110911/in-this-episode-of-as-the-aol-turns-will-arrington-appear-at-techcrunch-disrupt/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110819/roger-and-pre-those-were-the-days-mcnamee-he-thought-palm-would-always-be/ http://allthingsd.com/20110819/roger-and-pre-those-were-the-days-mcnamee-he-thought-palm-would-always-be/#comments Sat, 20 Aug 2011 02:30:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=112381

Given all that has happened to the once promising Palm mobile platform this week, via the strategery machinating of its current owner Hewlett-Packard, it is long past time for a good laugh.

Ergo, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and pundit Roger McNamee, who always provides.

(He’s shown in the above photo pointing out the most excellent lady feature — a mirror, cuz us gals like to take a gander at our lipstick now and again — of the Palm Pre).

Mirror notwithstanding, here is the spoof video done by McNamee and former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, which was shown before their introduction to the stage at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in 2009.

In it, they are trying to figure out the right marketing message for the new Palm Pre, hindered only by McNamee’s penchant for telling tall tales about technology.

It is very, very funny and but a wee taste of a time of hope for the innovative mobile operating system. As everyone knows now, HP kicked Palm’s webOS to the curb earlier this week.

Along with the mock commercial — which remains better than Palm ever did seriously — is the full video of the interview the pair gave at D7 and also Rubinstein’s solo stage appearance at D@CES in early 2010, in which he talks about not using an Apple iPhone.

Enjoy (really):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110819/roger-and-pre-those-were-the-days-mcnamee-he-thought-palm-would-always-be/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110407/the-midas-list-or-why-facebook-may-be-the-new-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20110407/the-midas-list-or-why-facebook-may-be-the-new-google/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:30:46 +0000 Zoran Basich http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38643 With hundreds of prominent venture capitalist gathered at the NVCA conference in Boston today, it was an interesting time for Forbes to release its sometimes-annual Midas list of 2011’s top 100 tech investors. We imagine some VCs gave their touch-screens a good workout as they scrolled through the list to see where they ranked – or if they ranked at all.

Such lists are always heavily subjective, since picking the methodology determines how the list will turn out (full disclosure: our friends at Dow Jones VentureSource provided the raw data for the Forbes report, though neither VC Dispatch nor VentureWire was involved in the project). And indeed, some VCs get irritated by the list, believing it doesn’t accurately reflect true returns.

But it certainly gets attention. The project examines returns gained from IPOs and M&As over $200 million in the last five years, and used a series of additional metrics as well as an expert panel to come up with the final list.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110407/the-midas-list-or-why-facebook-may-be-the-new-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110212/google-ventures-sows-seed-funding-with-new-startup-lab-video-tour/ http://allthingsd.com/20110212/google-ventures-sows-seed-funding-with-new-startup-lab-video-tour/#comments Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:00:02 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3508 As incoming CEO Larry Page seeks to recapture Google’s entrepreneurial spirit, Google Ventures thinks it’s in for a year of expansion and support from its corporate parent.

The VC arm, which gets $100 million from Google each year to invest as it sees fit, wants to give more early-stage companies seed funding, and to that end has taken over an enormous Google-owned building in Mountain View, Calif., and started filling it with companies. The space is mostly empty; there are just about 20 people working there now.

Google Ventures Partner David Krane took us on a tour of the Startup Lab, which opened in October and is currently occupied by start-ups like LawPivot (legal Q&A) and OpenCandy (software discovery), a product group from the vacation rental roll-up company HomeAway, and the yet-to-be-launched company of GrandCentral (now Google Voice) founder Craig Walker (which Google Ventures hasn’t invested in yet, though it’s made Walker an entrepreneur in residence).

The companies each pay $5 per month for as much space as they need, filled with recycled furniture from AdMob. They get a ping-pong table, free bikes and a microkitchen filled with snacks, courtesy of Google. They also added their own barbecue for the universal getting-to-know-you activity of grilling meat.

“This is not to be thought of as any sort of curated environment,” Krane said, anticipating the are-you-copying-Y-Combinator question. “This is merely work space.”

Krane said he mostly leaves the companies at the Startup Lab alone, stopping by about once a week. Google Ventures occupies its own floor of a building over on the other side of campus, right below Google’s autonomous car team, and also has offices in New York City, Cambridge, Mass., and Seattle.

Google Ventures has made about 30 total investments to date, with one exit: Ngmoco to DeNA. Just last week, it closed its first deal with a company led by former Google employees, the Web security provider Dasient.

It’s kind of crazy that a two-year-old venture firm with a staff of about 20 former Google employees wouldn’t have stumbled into investing in a former Googler’s company before now. And this is at a time when Google is fighting a talent war against its own employees’ entrepreneurial urges, which often lead them to join younger companies or start their own.

Krane said to expect more deals with former Googlers as Google Ventures “will do substantially more than 30 deals” this year.

“We don’t advocate or want people to leave Google,” Google Ventures Partner Bill Maris said, “but if someone has the entrepreneurial bug at that exit interview…”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110212/google-ventures-sows-seed-funding-with-new-startup-lab-video-tour/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 18:17:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40488

One of the more interesting pieces of news that got pushed deep down in stories in the noisy swirl around AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post was the move of its CEO Eric Hippeau back to the investor side.

He’ll be going to Lerer Ventures, which is run by HuffPo co-founder, chairman and major investor Kenneth Lerer.

(In case you wondered: Yes, everyone is interconnected.)

Before landing at HuffPo in mid-2009, Hippeau was a high-profile venture capitalist at SoftBank Capital for many years, starting with his involvement in the legendary $100 million investment in Yahoo at its start.

Hippeau went to SoftBank Capital after selling Ziff-Davis to its parent SoftBank Corp. for $2.1 billion in 1995.

Now he is headed to Lerer, where Hippeau has been an adviser. It which has been run by Lerer and his son Ben–as well as VC and entrepreneur Jordan Cooper–as an angel investing at early-stage seed level.

About a year ago, the New York-based investment fund raised $8.5 million, all from friends, and has focused on 35 start-ups in the city.

Those have included GroupMe, a group texting service, and ad service AdKeeper.

Now, with the addition of Hippeau as a general partner, while still spending down the initial fund, Lerer Ventures is considering a second fund of up to $50 million to allow it flexibility to invest in later stages.

That’s an increasingly common strategy of late, most prominently at Andreessen Horowitz.

“I am really glad to be getting back into investing, since the New York area is especially vibrant at the moment,” said Hippeau in an interview today, who noted that Lerer Ventures also has some investments in Silicon Valley. “And we are really determined to look at changing the way funds are organized.”

And now that he’ll not have a job with the AOL buy–”It has a very good CEO in Tim Armstrong,” joked Hippeau–and having just also stepped down from the Yahoo board, he will have plenty of time to consider all that.

Hippeau listed social, mobile and commerce as big investment arenas, as well as companies related to tablet devices.

“At the Huffington Post, we could see the changes happening to how we distribute our content were becoming profound,” Hippeau said. “It’s a completely different experience.”

I also talked to Ken Lerer, who said that the fund–started off pretty simply–will be trying to define itself more in the coming months before fundraising begins.

“Ben and Jordan are especially plugged into the New York scene–these start-ups were created by their friends,” he said. “And Eric and I bring a different skill set and perspective on top of that.”

Lerer also expressed interest in commerce, as well as local and real-time technologies.

“While it is always an interesting time on the Internet,” he said, fresh from the AOL sale of the HuffPo, in which he was the largest individual shareholder. “But right now is a really interesting time.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apples-jobs-tops-boomtowns-10-most-fascinating-techies-in-2010-survey/ http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apples-jobs-tops-boomtowns-10-most-fascinating-techies-in-2010-survey/#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 16:02:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39049

Of course, he won.

Dominating tech’s mindshare and press coverage in 2010, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs also handily took the No. 1 slot of a reader poll conducted by BoomTown in the last days of year.

Jobs–who introduced a range of innovative products, such as the iPad, over the course of the 2010–garnered just over 30 percent of the votes for the question that asked: “Who are the 10 Most Interesting People in Tech in 2010.”

Among the reasons he was selected, from comments posted by those who took the survey:

“With the iPad, he’s re-inventing the personal computer. Again.”

“Because he never stops.”

And my favorite: “Because if he had to be dictator of the world, he’d actually take doing a good job of it seriously.”

And, despite not acing him out for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” WikiLeaks head Julian Assange got 16.3 percent for the No. 2 spot, followed by Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at 10.1 percent.

Said one voluble commenter: “Whether one agrees or not with the how, governments and the individuals in power tend to do things that, we as a public, need to know, given that their actions, ultimately, impact how we must live our lives. Assange, is merely bringing to light things that many would rather not have brought into the light of day. One could argue that we do not need to know, for security or other reasons. However, negotiations, diplomacy and conflict, are all simply ways or resolving issues. Since, as a public, we allow these people into power, should we not know they are acting on ‘our behalf’?”

Arguing for Zuckerberg and his increasingly powerful social networking site, one person said: “Changed the way we looked at the Web and added another layer of connection between user and the Web, as well as sites connecting to each other.”

A wide range of people, not included by name on the list I compiled, got the No. 4 slot with 7.3 percent. They included Google Android head Andy Rubin, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Demand Media co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Arianna Huffington and, um, me!

Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was No. 5 at 6.3 percent.

“Visionary as a grad student, very successful as an entrepreneur, now doing some really interesting things as a VC,” said one person.

The red-hot attention around social buying start-up Groupon–and its gutsy choice not to take Google’s offer of billions of dollars–got co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason the No. 6 slot with 5.7 percent.

Pure curiousness about the future outcome spurred one choice: “Is he really lucky or really good? I’m guessing 2011 is a fairly decisive year. I’d like to know more about him…”

The mishegas around Yahoo and its voluable CEO Carol Bartz put her in the No. 7 position.

Said one commenter: “She’s taken the impossible job and will succeed. However, rewiring is taking more times than expected…”

Innovation put social magazine iPad app Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue at No. 8 with 2.3 percent.

No. 9 was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the same percentage, with the inevitable Betty White clocking in at No. 10 with 2.1 percent.

The reason for picking the longtime Hollywood movie and television star, after lobbying by rabid Facebook fans got her a gig on “Saturday Night Live”?

Simply put: “She rocks.”

And, indeed, she does.

Here’s my lovely bar chart showing the winners, which, perhaps most fascinating of all, did not include anyone from search topper Google or software giant Microsoft or microblogging leader Twitter (click on the image to make it larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110103/apples-jobs-tops-boomtowns-10-most-fascinating-techies-in-2010-survey/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:44:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38810

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/feed/ 60 http://allthingsd.com/20101118/the-best-3-videos-from-the-web-2-0-summit/ http://allthingsd.com/20101118/the-best-3-videos-from-the-web-2-0-summit/#comments Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:08:40 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=579 I spent the first half of the week at and around the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. This year’s edition felt a bit smaller than before, but it still attracted some of the key characters on and off the Web. If you weren’t there or didn’t tune in to the event’s first-ever full livestream, or you spent too much time networking in the hallway, here are some of the highlights, which have already been posted to the O’Reilly YouTube account:

Big Web CEO/very recently CEO Interviews:

The headliners for the Web crowd were Eric Schmidt of Google on day one, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook on day two and Evan Williams of Twitter on day three. None of the conversations were super revelatory, but they did highlight the heightening competitive tensions between Facebook and the rest of the Web.

Here’s the Zuckerberg video, which was notable for being one of his better public interviews in terms of ease and clarity (nothing like the near-fainting incident while being pummeled with privacy questions by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D8).

Two good comments from Web 2.0: About giving Google access to Facebook user email addresses, Zuckerberg said, “I’m not sure we’re 100 percent right on this.” (For someone with his hubris, that’s practically an admission of guilt.) Zuckerberg also criticized the visualization of the Web as a map of territories that illustrated the Web 2.0 stage.

“Your map is wrong,” he said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory–this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.”

Here are Schmidt (already at 170,000 views!) and Williams.

Best panel:

The most captivating panel was the one with venture capitalists John Doerr and Fred Wilson, ably moderated by John Heilemann. Wilson argued that Google has bought all of its recent interesting products, saying its last in-house success was Gmail. “They haven’t home-built from the ground up anything interesting in a half decade,” he said. Doerr replied passionately, “Ideas are easy. What’s really dear is execution. Google executes. Facebook executes.”

Best start-up presentation:

Brian Pokorny, CEO of DailyBooth, explained how the young people who use his site to share pictures are having conversations with each other. Pokorny made an interesting distinction about how–unlike with other photo-sharing apps–his users choose to use the front-facing camera on the iPhone and iPod Touch so they can take pictures of themselves.

An evening talk by agent Ari Emanuel was also quite well-received, with many people mentioning it to me the next day. You can watch it here.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics
statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101118/the-best-3-videos-from-the-web-2-0-summit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101011/a-boomtown-tries-to-get-some-answers-from-quoras-adam-dangelo/ http://allthingsd.com/20101011/a-boomtown-tries-to-get-some-answers-from-quoras-adam-dangelo/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:56:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=34223

Adam D’Angelo (pictured here) is too shy to subject himself to a BoomTown video–or perhaps too savvy–but he did agree to a sit-down for a short interview recently in a nondescript room in the Palo Alto, Calif., office building that houses Quora, the hot social answers start-up.

D’Angelo was, of course, the CTO and VP of Engineering at Facebook, as well as a prep school friend of the massive social networking site’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

But D’Angelo left the company in mid-2008 and with former Facebooker Charlie Cheever launched the question-and-answer site in January, after much venture capitalist shoving to get on board.

With more than $10 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and a whole lot more hype to contend with, D’Angelo and his small team have been trying to move the site well beyond its Silicon Valley-tech-dudes forum to one in which a plethora of topics and memes thrive.

As was the initial goal, D’Angelo said the aim remains to become the best place to find pertinent information about just about anything.

“The Web is a great place for finding information, but a lot of information that is really important is actually in people’s heads,” said D’Angelo. “If I had to pick one, I would say Wikipedia is a good comparison [to Quora], but there is room for more.”

Not such an easy task, which is why D’Angelo believes most Q&A sites still come up short for users.

“Quora is a simple interface, but it is very complicated underneath,” he said. “Q&A sites in the past had good systems, but they did not add in identity, reputation and quality.”

The hope is that by adding those elements, as it develops, Quora can more correctly answer the questions people are looking for.

“We are really interested in info that changes quickly and in unstructured info,” said D’Angelo, which he noted was at the heart of a lot of searches and well beyond data that search engines such as Google (GOOG) provides.

And for answerers, D’Angelo believes, it also gives them a place to feature their expertise in a much easier way than if they used their own Web site.

“We think people have found that Quora is different from a blog, in that people now have to think up what they think people might want to know,” said D’Angelo. “Here, they are given the topics and the questions, which means they are hitting areas they already know their audience is interested in.”

Interestingly, D’Angelo said he has wanted to turn down the spotlight on the site in recent months, as he hopes to get Quora on as solid footing as possible.

“We want to make a product that markets itself and not because we are big in Silicon Valley,” he said. “So, we want to tone down anything that does not have to do with improving Quora itself.”

Perhaps one of the reasons is the competing effort by his old pal and employer at Facebook, which launched its own Answers product soon after D’Angelo did.

D’Angelo declined to answer any questions related to the obvious and decidedly odd competition, although it is clear the move irks him, since it was a longtime interest Facebook was never interested in until he was and Quora attracted a giant amount of attention.

“There were a lot of different things I could have done [when I left Facebook]. But I felt this was an area that was completely neglected compared to other stuff,” is all D’Angelo will say.

Luckily for Quora, so far the Facebook Answers product has not garnered a whole lot of buzz, although D’Angelo discounted that as being a sign of Quora’s success.

“This thing is up to us, whether we succeed or fail is something that only we can determine,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101011/a-boomtown-tries-to-get-some-answers-from-quoras-adam-dangelo/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101008/vc-ben-horowitz-takes-aim-at-hp-critics-are-you-listening-larry-and-jack/ http://allthingsd.com/20101008/vc-ben-horowitz-takes-aim-at-hp-critics-are-you-listening-larry-and-jack/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 23:32:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35225

Today, in a sharply worded post titled “In Defense of Standards, Ethics, and Honest Financial Reporting at Hewlett-Packard,” prominent venture capitalist Ben Horowitz took to his blog to shoot back at the plethora of critics of the Hewlett-Packard board for their conduct related to the controversial jettisoning of CEO Mark Hurd.

That came after Hurd admitted to filing inaccurate expense reports related to an outside contractor who worked closely with him, and who later alleged sexual harassment on his part. Those charges were dropped after Hurd settled with the woman, named Jodie Fisher, but before HP could complete an investigation.

Since then, the board has been under fire from Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison, who hired Hurd as the database giant’s president, and former GE head Jack Welch, who laid into the HP board this week.

Now Horowitz has fired back and here’s a taste of his ire, which is aimed at execs, the media and more:

If a CEO is prone to compromise for any reason, he will have every reason. This time it was his expense report. Next time will it be a marginal accrued liability? A deal that came in at 12:01 am on the last day of the quarter? This is a slippery slope that a public board simply cannot tolerate.

And:

Who is Jodie Fisher? According to press reports, Fisher is a former Playboy model, reality show contestant, and softcore porn movie actress with no work history relevant to her job with HP. She was hired by Hewlett-Packard and paid up to $5,000 per meeting to meet with Fortune 50 CEOs.

The mainstream press has reported these facts as mundane, ordinary, and hardly worth concern. I disagree. HP employs over 300,000 people. Every single one of HP’s employees is keenly interested in the qualities, skill sets, and behaviors that HP values most. Financial compensation and access to the CEO are the most important ways that HP communicates what it values to its employees. Jodie Fisher had more access to the CEO and was paid more than 99.9% of HP’s workforce, despite having no traditional qualifications.

It’s important to note that this was not Hurd paying for his personal extracurricular activity out of his own pocket. This was the Hewlett-Packard Corporation paying a softcore porn movie star with no relevant work experience more than it pays Harvard graduates with 20 years of industry experience. This was the company spitting in the face of the people who worked hard and sacrificed every day to help the company win in the market. It was completely and categorically unacceptable.

And:

There are many who take the view that business is singular in purpose–to increase shareholder value. They further take the position that constraining that purpose in any way is inefficient and counterproductive. The mainstream press seems to have broadly adopted this position in its attacks on HP. The Wall Street Journal Op Ed page even complained that businesses were being held to an unfair standard when compared to politicians.

I do not subscribe to this view. Running our companies with no moral or ethical standards is bad for society, bad for the country, and ultimately leads to criminal behavior.

So, what do you really think, Ben?

Horowitz does have an interest in the situation, which he discloses clearly at the top of his piece: His longtime business and now venture partner is HP (HPQ) board member Marc Andreessen.

And the Silicon Valley soap opera continues….

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101008/vc-ben-horowitz-takes-aim-at-hp-critics-are-you-listening-larry-and-jack/feed/ 19 http://allthingsd.com/20100927/how-to-find-googles-next-ad-tech-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20100927/how-to-find-googles-next-ad-tech-acquisition/#comments Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:00:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23880 Earlier this year, Google spent $81 million to buy Invite Media, an ad tech start-up. There’s a very good chance that won’t be the last ad tech start-up the search giant buys, and if you want to get a sense of what it might grab next, take a look at this chart. It’s a crazily comprehensive map of the display ad technology ecosystem, compiled by investment banker Terry Kawaja (click on image to enlarge; you can get an even bigger version via AdExchanger.com):

The two big takeaways here:

• The sheer density of all the players on this chart gives you a sense of how frothy the market is, and how much consolidation we’re going to see in the near future. That’s exciting for both venture capitalists, who are still pouring money into the sector, and bankers like Kawaja.
• The sheer density of all the players on this chart gives you a sense of how new the market is: Display advertising has been around on the Web for a very long time, but it’s been overshadowed by the search market for the past decade or so. Blame Google (GOOG). But now that Google itself is concentrating on display (see its ad campaign on this site and many other places), that’s changing. Now we need to see just how any of these companies are going to stick around for the long haul.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100927/how-to-find-googles-next-ad-tech-acquisition/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100907/still-pitching-a-twitter-startup-to-investors-good-luck/ http://allthingsd.com/20100907/still-pitching-a-twitter-startup-to-investors-good-luck/#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:08:13 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23151 You knew this already. But some of you like to see charts and numbers, so here you go: The funding boom for Twitter start-ups is over.

The numbers come from research firm CB Insights, which says that $10.4 million went into “pure play”  Twitter start-ups from June 2009 to May 2010. In the previous year, that number had been $21.6 million.

Graph, as promised:

Easy enough to blame this on last spring’s “hole-filling” tempest, but there’s a natural ebb and flow to VC funding trends, too. Or if you want to be less polite about it, you can say that VCs move in herds, just like every other group of humans.

Example: For a couple of years after Google’s YouTube deal, a ton of money flowed into other Web video sites. And then it stopped.

Meanwhile, if you’re a “pure play” Twitter start-up that wants to attract more funding–or just survive, period–you are most likely trying to turn yourself into something that doesn’t depend solely on Twitter. See: Tweetdeck’s effort to incorporate feeds from every social service under the sun–Facebook, Foursquare, the yet-to-be-announced Google (GOOG) thingy, etc. TweetPhoto is doing the same thing, and changed its name to “Plixi” to underscore the change.

That said, note that even CB Insight’s data doesn’t show demand for this stuff going away altogether–the volume of deals didn’t drop in the last year.

Which makes sense, because if Twitter figures out how to make money–real money–one day, it’s going to spread it around to its partners (it will ask them for money, too, of course). So why not bet on that? And I can think of at least one pure-play Twitter start-up that will probably land a decent chunk of dough in the next few months. More on that later….

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100907/still-pitching-a-twitter-startup-to-investors-good-luck/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100730/boomtown-gets-ping-ponged-in-seattle-by-techflash/ http://allthingsd.com/20100730/boomtown-gets-ping-ponged-in-seattle-by-techflash/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:33:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=31565 On my trip to Seattle this week to attend Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting, the fine folks at the most excellent tech news site TechFlash dragooned me into a ping-pong tournament they were holding.

The Second Annual TechFlash Summer BBQ and Ping-Pong Tournament, held at the Showbox SoDo, is really a big schmoozefest for techies in the Pacific Northwest.

While a little more laid back–well, less frantic, at least–than the relentless glad-handing of Silicon Valley, it’s still the same promising start-ups, enthusiastic entrepreneurs, aggressive venture capitalists and a dousing of big company types from locals Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN) and RealNetworks (RNWK).

Except they have better coffee.

I made it through one round in the tourney, which is not that bad since I have not played ping pong for any length of time since I had braids.

(Yes, braids–and also matching ribbons. I try to erase the nightmare of it all every day.)

Here’s a video I did of the event, to which I am going back next year after some rigorous training.

I also added TechFlash’s video of the event, in which I convince the gullible editors that Walt Mossberg plays polo rather than ping pong.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100730/boomtown-gets-ping-ponged-in-seattle-by-techflash/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100510/post-legal-soap-opera-skype-ceo-josh-silverman-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20100510/post-legal-soap-opera-skype-ceo-josh-silverman-speaks/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 15:30:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28207

Late last week, BoomTown sat down with Josh SIlverman, CEO of Skype, to get an update on the popular Internet telephony company.

When we last checked in with Skype, it had turned into the “Peyton Place”–look it up, kids!–of the online telecommunications arena, with lawsuits flying, venture capitalists getting slimed and a general tone of very purple drama.

But in November, settlement of the troubles came, as I wrote:

Silicon Valley legend and now VC Marc Andreessen was making the interview rounds after the settlement between the litigation-addled co-founders of Skype and all the various people they were suing was announced this morning.

He has been tight-lipped until now, due to the morass of lawsuits.

But, as Andreessen told BoomTown in a phone interview about the aggressive legal tactics of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis that resulted in them finally seizing a stake in the Internet telephony giant by suing him and many other Silicon Valley players:

“We did not take it personally. It’s a clean sheet of paper.”

Well, it is actually a torn, stained and very worn out piece of paper, due to all the various machinations, but bygones!

Andreessen–who knows a thing or two about legal tussles, if you recall Netscape-Microsoft (MSFT)–said the real point is that it is time to focus on the business of Skype rather than fighting over who controls Skype.

“It’s really good to have everyone lined up and rowing in the same direction. We have to capitalize on the opportunity, because Skype is poised for a new wave of growth,” said Andreessen. “They have an amazing head of steam, because the logical way for voice and video communications to be conducted will be over the Web.”

That’s, of course, what Silverman–who has been running Skype since it was owned by eBay (EBAY) outright–wants to focus in on now.

While the e-commerce giant still owns a 30 percent chunk, Silverman is now trying to navigate Skype back to its disruptive and innovative roots, even as big telcos and Internet giants such as Google (GOOG) continue to aggressively compete head-on with it.

He’s doing that using a range of tactics to goose the service’s growth–from cheaper rates to more features to improving ease of use. Given that video is the big focus for Skype going forward, Silverman noted that the company is looking at all kinds of new ways to share presence.

Here’s the video of my interview with Silverman, which took place in San Francisco (although Skype operations are located all over the global map, including what will soon become a larger unit in Silicon Valley):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100510/post-legal-soap-opera-skype-ceo-josh-silverman-speaks/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100510/video-boomtown-meets-five-non-sv-techie-dudes-in-10-minutes-in-boston/ http://allthingsd.com/20100510/video-boomtown-meets-five-non-sv-techie-dudes-in-10-minutes-in-boston/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 12:15:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28194 BoomTown made a trip recently to Boston, where Walt Mossberg and I talked in front of hundreds of East Coast entrepreneurs and investors at an event put on by General Catalyst Partners.

The appeal for me: Checking back in with former Excite CEO George Bell, whom I used to cover in Web 1.0–an exec who never failed to correct my grammar, even though I was chronicling the quick rise and slo-mo fall of the doomed portal.

Bell is now a venture capitalist at GCP.

Here’s the video of my interview with him, as well as reps from four start-ups I met with before the event, all of which are not based in Silicon Valley, a relief in and of itself.

The interviews, in order:

* Justin Shaffer, founder and CEO of Hot Potato, a “presence data” service, based in Brooklyn, NY.

* Paul English, co-founder and CTO of Kayak, the travel aggregator, based in Norwalk, Conn.

* Stephen Chao, co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, a how-to video content destination, based in Santa Monica, Calif.

* Dan Olschwang, president and CEO of Jumptap, a mobile advertising company, based in Cambridge, Mass.

Check it out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100510/video-boomtown-meets-five-non-sv-techie-dudes-in-10-minutes-in-boston/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100419/wsj-coms-digits-show-yahoofoursquare-silicon-valley-hiring-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20100419/wsj-coms-digits-show-yahoofoursquare-silicon-valley-hiring-and-more/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:30:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26945

Here’s a video of BoomTown’s appearance Friday on WSJ.com’s “Digits” online tech show.

In it, we discuss my post on the machinations about whether Yahoo (YHOO) can get its mitts on social geolocation phenom Foursquare or if venture capitalists will swoop in with a bag of cash.

Also on the dock: Tech hiring has returned and tricked-out buoys.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100419/wsj-coms-digits-show-yahoofoursquare-silicon-valley-hiring-and-more/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100414/what-shall-boomtown-ask-the-twits-oops-i-mean-twitter-loving-vcs-at-chirp-today/ http://allthingsd.com/20100414/what-shall-boomtown-ask-the-twits-oops-i-mean-twitter-loving-vcs-at-chirp-today/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:21:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26701

Later today at Twitter’s Chirp conference in San Francisco, BoomTown is moderating a panel titled “Investing in the Ecosystem.”

Or as I like to call it, “How Do You VCs Come Up With Those Crazy Valuations: Magic 8 Ball? Ouiji Board? Darts?”

I have a choice group of dudes–of course, they are all dudes–for the panel, all of whom have invested in a range of start-ups, including Twitter.

They include: Polaris Ventures’ Mike Hirshland, Venrock’s David Pakman, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, and Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton.

Presumably, the group of venture capitalists will give the audience the 411 on what goes into finding, feeding and nurturing the many innovative start-ups that populate the Twitterverse.

That is, until you actually try to compete with Twitter or make some dough without its sanction, wherein all the nice Whos-down-in-Whoville sweetness of the folks who run Twitter turns into the backroom at the Bada Bing with Tony Soprano and the boys.

(You can see Twitter COO Dick Costolo here, in fact, giving us his best Don Corleone in this video interview with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka.)

The tensions of late between Twitter and the many third-party developers circling it are perhaps going to add some frisson to the two-day event at the Palace of Fine Arts, which costs $469 to attend. Twitter also just announced its advertising platform plan.

The first day is all talk, from Costolo, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, co-founder Biz Stone and others. The second day is 24-hour hackathon.

For those not there, Twitter will be streaming the event live with the help of Justin.tv.

And, of course, there will be tweets–lots and lots of tweets.

[Sticker image courtesy of Zazzle.com]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100414/what-shall-boomtown-ask-the-twits-oops-i-mean-twitter-loving-vcs-at-chirp-today/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100407/bebo-not-worth-a-pail-of-spit-to-aol-this-comes-as-a-shock-to-exactly-hmm-no-one/ http://allthingsd.com/20100407/bebo-not-worth-a-pail-of-spit-to-aol-this-comes-as-a-shock-to-exactly-hmm-no-one/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:20:34 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26259

Almost from the minute former AOL head Randy Falco handed over a giant bag of cash to Joanna Shields, the awfully clever chief money charmer of once darling social networking site Bebo, it was clear it was not going to end well.

Essentially, AOL (AOL)–then a unit of Time Warner (TWX)–had forked over $850 million to corner the market on teen girls in the United Kingdom.

Of course, all those girls are now using Facebook.

It was, sorry to say, the peak of the social networking lunacy of early Web 2.0, which is now being bookended by another series of wackadoodle fundings for start-ups by venture capitalists insecurely prompted not to miss the next big thing.

Not much changes. As I wrote about the Bebo deal two years ago in a post titled, “Bebo: By the (Not So Big) Numbers”:

What’s AOL getting for its $850 million in cash to purchase social-networking site, Bebo?

A very attractive social-networking service and a very experienced exec who has been running it.

But, perhaps more importantly for those who focus on pesky numbers, not a whole lot of revenue and negligible profits, judging financial information I got a gander at, courtesy of sources at several companies that looked at funding or buying Bebo.

And the rest of the overall outlook for Bebo? A small but growing business, with nice user engagement with strong page views and minutes spent per session, but little traction beyond Britain and Ireland, and too small a presence in the critical U.S. market.

That was the best AOL got from the deal, as it turned out, as the asset declined and Shields was shuffled out of AOL by new CEO Tim Armstrong (ironically, she’s now running a big chunk of international sales for winner-took-all Facebook).

Now comes the final shoe dropping, with AOL admitting in a filing the glaringly obvious–that it was evaluating strategic alternatives with respect to Bebo, which could include a sale or shutdown of Bebo in 2010.

In a message shared with employees today, the company noted:

The strategy we set in May 2009 leverages our core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning us for the next phase of growth of the Internet. As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success. Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.

AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010.

Quicker translation: Bebo is a dog and it bites.

But the experience is one that will soon be forgotten with the next careless gorging of VC funding.

Not be lost on anyone should be the sudden departure of Jay Adelson as CEO of Digg this past week from the social news site, yet another example of hot going cold in the eyes of Silicon Valley.

At one time Digg and Bebo could do no wrong. Now, no right.

In actuality, neither characterization is correct, but it matters little. In the warped tech perception game, Bebo is apparently dead and it’s time to bury the corpse and move on.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100407/bebo-not-worth-a-pail-of-spit-to-aol-this-comes-as-a-shock-to-exactly-hmm-no-one/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100322/accel-partners-kevin-efrusy/ http://allthingsd.com/20100322/accel-partners-kevin-efrusy/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:17:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25849

BoomTown runs into venture capitalists all the time in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and usually tries to run the other way.

Not so last week, when I enjoyed a lovely lunch and chat with Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy.

Perhaps that’s because Efrusy, who joined the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm in 2003 (the outfit now best known as Facebook’s VC), has actually been an entrepreneur rather than just an entrepreneurial pundit like too many of his ilk.

He launched Corio, a software-as-a-service start-up that went public, and was CEO of IronPlanet, an online e-commerce marketplace for heavy equipment.

(There was also a stint at consultant Bain & Company, which I am willing to overlook.)

A Stanford University multi-grad with a master’s in electrical engineering, Efrusy is actually named on the Accel Web site as the “source” of the firm’s investment in Facebook.

And he has led Accel’s funding of both consumer and enterprise start-ups, such as social group-buying site Groupon and SpringSource, the cloud-computing unit acquired by VMware (VMW) for $420 million recently.

Here’s the video interview I did with Efrusy about the investment market in both these areas, as well as the overall mood in VC land:

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