Controversial people review startup Unvarnished is ushering transparency into the workplace, but it may have trouble catching up to Glassdoor.com. The fast-growing user-generated site -- to which visitors anonymously cough up one piece of valuable information, like their salary, to access the site’s other data -- was launched just 21 months ago and already claims more than two million unique visitors each month. Glassdoor also says that more than one million contributions have been made about 80,000 organizations, including the U.S. Secret Service. The site includes, for example, 1,544 contributions from Google employees who’ve posted how much engineering positions at the search giant pay ($98K to $125K) to what product marketing
6 min read · 23 April 2010
Mark Zuckerberg yesterday announced that Facebook wants developers to help it turn the Web into an overarching social graph, one in which people “like” sites outside of Facebook, log-on to most sites via their Facebook identity and use Facebook chat anytime, anywhere, via a plug-in “social bar" that it hopes to splash across the Internet. Like much of the world, popular media and news blogger, Jeff Jarvis -- who's also an angel investor, startup adviser and associate professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism -- is trying to make sense of those plans. He was nice enough to share with me the fact that Facebook's plan troubles him -- even while he's not entirely sure why yet. “I wrote a Google fanboy book last year ,” he said. “I’m not afraid of big companies. But Facebook’s direction right now makes me uncomfortable.”
3 min read · 22 April 2010
Eleven years after swinging open its doors, San Francisco-based Blueprint Ventures is officially winding down. It will not make any new investments, although its partners will continue to manage existing portfolio companies (albeit as a part-time job). "The firm had a fantastic run,” says co-founder Bart Schachter. Pointing to broader trends at play, he adds that “early-stage venture, as an asset class, has suffered, and unfortunately many LPs no longer think about relative returns but absolute returns.” Blueprint, which focused on IP spinouts, is among dozens of other venture firms that raised their most recent funds during the dotcom days and failed to attract sufficient LP interest to assemble newer vehicles.
2 min read · 22 April 2010
5 min read · 20 April 2010
2 min read · 20 April 2010
In addition to a newly released early-stage startup survey published by Silicon Valley Bank, SVB released a Silicon Valley CEO survey today, in which 153 executives, representing $1.7 trillion in annual revenue, answered questions about their biggest challenges and concerns right now. Near the top of the list, at number four, is the massively dysfunctional California state government. Other interesting data points: CEOs’ top concern continues to be housing costs for their employees. Valley CEOs strongly support increasing motor vehicle fees and gasoline taxes while wanting to see a reduction in corporate and personal income taxes. Local executives also want to see fewer state dollars dedicated to prisons, they aren’t fans of most of the
1 min read · 19 April 2010
1 min read · 19 April 2010
Thanks, Wall Street Journal, for this rare glimpse into the interior of one of the world's most luxe yachts. Designed by Phillipe Starck, the $300 million "A" is rife with enough mirrors, Baccarat crystal, and silverleaf to have made Liberace blush, but the greatest extravagance aboard the 394-foot colossus-- and the greatest eccentricity -- may be the room lined exclusively with stingray hides. (Really.) Melnichenko, for anyone who cares, is the billionaire chair of Russia's largest fertilizer producer, EuroChem. Video after the jump.
1 min read · 16 April 2010
Pascal Levensohn always has been a particularly thoughtful VC, so it's no surprise that he's approaching the wind-down of his 15-year-old firm with a reasoned explanation. After the jump you can read a note authored by Levensohn this morning, and sent to peHUB. Not cited is whether or not the decision had to do with LP reaction to a possible fourth fund, which was rumored to have been in the works. San Francisco-based Levensohn Venture Partners is a San Francisco-based firm that has made early-stage investments in the digital media, security and demand-side cleantech space.
3 min read · 16 April 2010
2 min read · 16 April 2010
