Charlie O’Donnell may not be be loved by every last entrepreneur in New York, but they all know him -- or will. Indeed, while plenty of young venture capitalists do their share of networking to stay in the game, O’Donnell is a networking maestro in comparison. He doesn’t just make introductions, appear at conferences and attend parties; he creates the parties, organizes the communities and regularly comes up with new ways to drum up deal flow. It’s a ways from where O’Donnell thought he would be not so long ago. In the summer of 2009, O’Donnell’s startup, Path 101, was running on fumes, unable to attract Series A funding. When he ran into Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital at a popular event that O’Donnell organizes, both spotted a match. First Round had sewn up a dozen deals in New York but wanted to be better plugged in. O’Donnell -- who worked in junior roles at both General Motors Pension Fund and Union Square Ventures before starting Path 101 -- needed a job.
6 min read · 12 November 2010
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School recently produced some interesting research suggesting that people are highly likely to see someone as competent if they’ve demonstrated expertise in just one area, even if they later display incompetence elsewhere. Think of the star attorney who sails his boat into some rocks. It’s not hard to draw a line from Cuddy’s research to the media frenzy surrounding Andreessen Horowitz, the year-and-a-half old Sand Hill Road firm that almost always garners glowing reviews from the media. When Andreessen Horowitz announced last week that it had just raised a $650 million second fund -- in three weeks, no less -- dozens of news outlets published splashy features about the young firm, which is now managing nearly one billion dollars. One property, VentureBeat, has already anointed Andreessen “the King of Silicon Valley.”
3 min read · 10 November 2010
3 min read · 09 November 2010
Since AngelList emerged on the scene eight months ago, many have speculated how its founders, Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, plan to monetize the service, which vets startups for accredited investors. In June, the Journal even speculated that beyond giving the pair access to companies they might personally want to fund that AngelList helps them to “indirectly market” guides to negotiating a funding round that the two authored some time ago. Yesterday, Ravikant told me that his ambitions are unsurprisingly more substantial than selling “$10 PDFs” that they also “give away liberally.” Indeed, three years after Ravikant raised a $20 million, social media-focused fund from investors called Hit Forge, he and Nivi are looking to raise a new fund “in the range” of $40 million next year. “We’ll see how much money people throw at me,” he says with a laugh.
3 min read · 05 November 2010
Earlier this week, New York-based recruiter Paul Daversa wrote a widely read piece for Business Insider entitled: "IT'S TRUE: Top Tech Talent Is Now Leaving Silicon Valley For New York City." Daversa wrote that “for the first time in my 20 years of search, the deal flow and investment lines have begun to blur as NY has become a hot-bed for building great tech companies and leadership talent is migrating to New York.” Daversa added: “More than any time in recent history I am seeing a migration of talented engineering and operating executives leaving the Bay area and other parts of the country to lead NY companies.” Now, Jeff Markowitz, the managing partner for Heidrick & Struggle’s venture capital practice, is calling bullsh*t. offers a different opinion.
2 min read · 04 November 2010
Plenty of online wellness sites like publicly traded WebMD can answer general questions, including about the symptoms of diabetes. If, say, you need to find more specific information, like where to buy an insulin pump for your teenager in Palo Alto, you can try sites like Sequoia Capital-backed HealthCentral, which drill a bit deeper. Yet both are still part of “Health 1.0 and 2.0,” according to Ron Gutman, co-founder and CEO of Wellsphere, a health-focused informational and community site that was acquired by HealthCentral in early 2009 for an undisclosed amount. (Gutman says the purchase price was “a good sale” for Gemini Israel Funds and individual investors, who capitalized the company with $3 million in 2007.) Gutman says that it's about time to usher in "Health 3.0," and that he's doing exactly that with three-month-old HealthTap, which aims to help users and their doctors make better decisions about users’ well-being by relying on their personal data.
3 min read · 04 November 2010
Two weeks ago, billionaire Peter Thiel was savaged in a widely read Slate story that called him a “hyper-Libertarian” with an “appalling plan to pay students to quit college.” It wasn’t the first time that Thiel has been dumped on by media observers. The 42-year old—who made his first fortune as a PayPal cofounder and now oversees a New York-based hedge fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, and sits on several startups’ boards, including Facebook—has numerous interests that make him an easy target. The newest of these, and the overwhelming focus of Slate’s scorn, is the Thiel Fellowship, a program that plans to give $100,000 to 20 applicants under age 20 to “stop out of school” and pursue any entrepreneurial ambitions they might harbor.
7 min read · 03 November 2010
“I’ve thought about writing a blog. I’ve thought a lot about it, but that’s not really me,” said Mike Kwatinetz, dipping into an omelet yesterday at Bob’s Steak & Chop House, an old-school San Francisco eatery. “I can't help but feel there are better uses of my time.” The sentiment wasn’t surprising coming from Kwatinetz, who co-founded the tech-focused venture firm Azure Capital Partners in 2000 with several other former investment bankers, all of whom once reported to star banker Frank Quattrone. Azure does much the old-fashioned way. You’d never find Kwatinetz in a hoodie, for example. He uses a Blackberry. And though Azure’s deal size varies considerably
3 min read · 02 November 2010
4 min read · 29 October 2010
1 min read · 28 October 2010
