Private Equity
Get ready, personalized shopping services are coming to an online site near you. Earlier today, Santa Monica, Calif.-based ThisNext announced that it has acquired Stylehive, a collaborative beauty and fashion network. The company also launched Curatemedia, a corporate brand that will operate ThisNext and Stylehive. The acquisition of San Francisco-based Stylehive, which previously had raised about $4.3 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, follows last month's purchase of StyleFeeder by Time Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
2 min read · 01 February 2010
3 min read · 01 February 2010
2 min read · 27 January 2010
With all due respect to Malcolm Gladwell, who's latest article in The New Yorker explores the nature of entrepreneurship, a lot of factors go into making a successful entrepreneur, not just the conservative vs. risk-taking approach that he contends. In fact, I was mulling over the nature of entrepreneurship over the weekend as I reported on TopTenReviews (TTR), an Ogden, Utah-based operator of product review websites. You can read my full story about the company raising an additional $1.5 million in funding on the Reuters website. In reporting about the work of CEO and founder Jerry Ropelato and President Stan Bassett, I heard from investors Mark Solon, managing partner of Highway 12 Ventures, and Bo Peabody, managing general partner of Village Ventures. To date, the two firms have invested $7 million in the company.
2 min read · 21 January 2010
3 min read · 13 January 2010
Mark Brooks has been battling a minor cold. But when talking about health, it’s not his own that gets him fired up. Brooks, managing director of Scale Venture Partners, talked to me today about healthcare investing. Despite the sniffles, overall, I’d say he is optimistic about the industry. He admits there are challenges that lie ahead, but he says that “the fundamentals of our business is good.” And why wouldn’t he be excited about the new year? Alimera Sciences, one of two ophthalmology companies that the Foster City, Calif.-based firm has backed, is in registration for an $80 million IPO. And Brooks says he sees plenty of opportunities to find deals with good valuations. Brooks and I also chatted about health care reform and the 28th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that launches next week. Q&A after the jump...
4 min read · 07 January 2010
VC-backed RingCentral was started on a shoestring, with institutional investors arriving relatively late in the game, according to founder and CEO Vlad Shmunis. The Russian-born Shmunis previously founded RingZero Systems in 1992 to sell desktop telecommunications software. RingZero then shipped 25 million units worldwide before it was acquired by Motorola in 1998. A year later, Shmunis spun out part of the business to form RingCentral and has since raised about $24 million in VC funding from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
4 min read · 16 December 2009
2 min read · 13 December 2009
The latest VC to join the ranks of speakers at TEDx Silicon Valley on Dec. 12 at Stanford University is Peter Thiel. Thiel--who's known for co-founding PayPal, the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management and the venture firm The Foundrs Fund--however will not be discussing his investment philosophy. Chances are, he also won't talk about the New York Post, which last week wrote that Clarium is in danger of posting its second consecutive annual loss. Instead, Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook and several other companies and is rated a master by the United States Chess Federation, according to his bio, plans to talk about the Singularity Institute, an organization he funds to research artificial intelligence.
1 min read · 09 December 2009
2 min read · 07 December 2009
