venture capitalists

Voices

The New Rules of Raising Cash

Pui-Wing Tam, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on April 14, 2011 at 12:00 am PT

Raising money for start-ups is relatively easy in Silicon Valley these days. But longtime entrepreneurs and venture capitalists say it is still nowhere near as simple as it was in 1999 and 2000, when a cash flood fueled the dot-com bubble.

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Web Start-Ups Get Upper Hand Over Investors

Pui-Wing Tam and Amir Efrati, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal in News on March 10, 2011 at 5:00 am PT

As venture capitalists scramble to get a piece of Silicon Valley’s new Web boom, entrepreneurs like Aaron Levie are finding they have the upper hand. Mr. Levie, 26 years old, founded online storage provider Box.net in 2005. While his 140-person Palo Alto, Calif., company has money in the bank, Mr. Levie saw the Web investing environment heat up recently, driven by interest in fast-growing start-ups such as Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc.

Will Secretary of State Clinton's "Internet Freedom Agenda" Finally Get Traction?

Kara Swisher in News on February 16, 2011 at 7:09 am PT

Yesterday, in a major policy speech in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the Internet bandwagon again, unveiling a $25 million government investment for entrepreneurs to allow dissidents to thwart “thugs, hackers and censors.” Since that’s about the amount a third-string social photo-sharing site gets while walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., from venture capitalists with bags of money to spend, let me just say the money is, well, underwhelming. Clinton’s speech, thankfully, was much better.

Venture Capitalists Actually (Slightly) More Active Than Angels on AngelList

Liz Gannes in Social on February 15, 2011 at 5:00 am PT

AngelList ran the numbers this week and found that venture capitalists, including many top firms, are actually more active than angels on its year-old service.

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Why Andreessen Horowitz Models Itself After a Hollywood Talent Agency

Deborah Gage, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on January 22, 2011 at 2:02 pm PT

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have raised nearly a billion dollars in the 18 months since they founded their Silicon Valley venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, even though they’ve never been venture capitalists before.

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The Incredible Shrinking Information-Technology Industry

Scott Austin, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on April 19, 2010 at 1:57 pm PT

The information-technology industry, which produced some of the world’s largest tech companies and spawned Silicon Valley, continues to lose favor with venture capitalists. Tech giants like Apple, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle and Sun Microsystems all benefited in their early days from venture capital.

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Venture Capital's Most Trafficked Web Sites

Scott Austin, Lead Editor, Venture Capital Dispatch, The Wall Street Journal in News on February 3, 2010 at 7:30 am PT

Venture capitalists often invest in start-ups whose business models are dependent on Internet traffic, or in companies whose technology is geared toward delivering those eyeballs. But how good are VC firms at bringing in their own Web site traffic?

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Cisco Acquired Most Start-Ups in Decade, but Oracle King in ’09

Scott Austin, Lead Editor, Venture Capital Dispatch in News on January 5, 2010 at 4:37 pm PT

Cisco Systems Inc. is king of the “oughts,” at least when it comes to acquisitions of venture-backed companies. According to statistics compiled by venture industry tracker VentureSource, the networking company acquired 48 venture-backed companies from 2000 to 2009, by far the most of any company, despite a notable drop in activity the past two years.