Private Equity
There are few companies quite like General Electric. After all, it's not standard to employ 1,200 PhDs and have a hand in every aspect of energy from generation to transmission to lightbulbs? GE has also been active in investing alongside venture capitalists in promising startups, backing 33 companies over the past five years, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). Among the more notable is A123 Systems, the battery maker that recently filed to go public. It's easy to understand why GE would be excited about the company, especially if you talk with Kevin Skillern, the managing director of GE's venture capital operations. Kevin Skillern, managing director of GE's venture capital operations, last week spoke at VCJ's Financing the Cleantech Vision event in Palo Alto last week. He talked about how best to approach his corporate parent, and was kind enough to send over his notes, which you can get after the jump.
1 min read · 01 July 2009
Apple CEO Steve Jobs lives at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a swank part of downtown Memphis in a yellow house with white trim and a pool in the backyard. Or maybe he doesn’t. One thing is now for certain, he was in Tennessee for a liver transplant. The Wall Street Journal has the story. We first reported that the Apple CEO was there on April 15. Like everything associated with the world’s most-secretive CEO, his whereabouts in the week Apple reports earnings have the air of mystery you’d expect to see in an episode of The X-Files. His location is so secret, in fact, Apple’s public relations team doesn’t even know where he is. “I don’t have that information,” Steve Dowling told me two months ago. “Steve is on a medical leave of absence and there’s nothing further to say.”
3 min read · 20 June 2009
I spent hours studying vocabulary flash cards when I was in high school. Words, writing and reading were never my strong suit and I needed to beef up my SAT verbal score in a hurry. In a world of free web applications and content creators relying on eyeballs and advertising to pay the bills, VocabSushi has come up with a service that I could imagine paying for. I'm not the only one who would likely fork over for an improvement on flash cards. There's a constant captive audience of more than 1.5 million high schoolers who take the SAT and PSAT each year. Company founder Jeff Novich is looking to raise an angel round to accelerate his growth and add learning modules to the startup's existing offerings, he says--but he's not looking too hard (Disclosure: I went to grad school with Jeff).
1 min read · 17 June 2009
4 min read · 10 June 2009
1 min read · 20 May 2009
1 min read · 15 May 2009
With the temperature here in Los Angeles set to stay above 80 degrees for the rest of the week, it’s time again for me to turn cast an eye to my shelves for some good summer reading. The books of summer should be a departure from one’s regular reading routine, a vacation from the mundane. For me, that means no business or tech books. Fiction is a good place to start, but it can’t be too dense. A weighty title might lead people to think you were mentally unprepared when they find you asleep in a deck chair next to the pool, book
3 min read · 13 May 2009
Lots of chatter last week about music startup Imeem getting another round of financing, but few details. One of the reasons the company may not be talking about it is that the fundraising is ongoing. The company has raised $2.3 million of a $6.5 million round, according to a regulatory filing. The company launched its fundraising push on April 22, documents show. No idea if Sequoia has re-upped or not. Imeem was not listed on the firm's "Greensheet" email as a follow-on investment in May.
1 min read · 11 May 2009
2 min read · 06 May 2009
3 min read · 25 April 2009
