It’s not every blog that receives a testimonial in the form of a half haiku from Marc Andreessen. One notable exception is Futuristic Play, the two-year-old blog of viral marketing whiz Andrew Chen, about which Andreessen has written, “Marc read Andrew, good blog.” Andreessen isn’t alone. Chen has a small but powerful, and growing, following in Silicon Valley thanks to the smart essays he typically posts once or twice a week. Indeed, other fans include Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, who says at Chen's site that there's "no one who knows more about" the latest methods "for building and retaining Web 2.0 audiences" and Jared Kopf, the CEO and founder of ad network Adroll, who calls the blog "unmissable." Chen is capitalizing on the momentum, too. To wit, Chen, once an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures and previously the director of product marketing at the behavioral targeting startup Revenue Science (now Audience Science), is hard at work on his own “new stealth consumer Internet
5 min read · 28 July 2009
Over the weekend, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington suggested that Lightspeed’s new $15 million investment in Ning -- whose online platform invites people to create their own social networks -- boils down to one word: Marketing. Lightspeed needed a sexy social networking startup to add to its portfolio, he wrote, adding: “Do they expect to see a big return on the investment? Almost certainly not. But they also haven’t put their money at extreme risk. They likely have a liquidation preference that lets them get their $15 million out of the company before others can take part of the pie. So effectively, they just bought themselves a bunch of marketing with their limited partners’ money…LPs don’t really mind.”
3 min read · 28 July 2009
8 min read · 28 July 2009
1 min read · 24 July 2009
1 min read · 24 July 2009
As many readers already know, billionaire Jim Clark pretty much gave the Valley the heave-ho after cofounding Silicon Graphics, Netscape, MyCFO and some other companies during the go-go dot.com years a decade ago. Clark first headed to Florida to develop luxury condos in Miami, a move that he "wouldn't do again." He now spends a fair amount of his time in Sydney, Australia, where among his newest properties is an $8 milliion waterfront apartment that he and his Australian supermodel wife Kristy Hinze closed on this week, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Recently, Clark, who'd returned to the Valley to accept an award, emailed with the San Jose Mercury News about that period of his life, as well as what's right and not so right with the tech world today. He told reporter Scott Duke Harris that among the reasons he left California in 1999 was that he'd "tired of starting companies," as well as that he "didn't want to be a conventional venture capitalist because I have always held that occupation in low regard, even though some of my very good friends are VCs." The reason, he said: "They take too much ownership for what they bring to the business."
2 min read · 23 July 2009
Shiv Singh is a vice president and the Global Social Media Lead for Razorfish, one of the world’s biggest interactive agencies and home to a long line of Fortune 500 clients, including Levis, McDonalds, Starwood Hotels and Victoria’s Secret. Yesterday, before Singh caught a plane out of his headquarters in New York, we discussed how Razorfish's customers are approaching the explosive growth of social media and the new class of influencers born of the boom. Singh also shared some of his most recent data discoveries with me, what new techniques companies are using to boost customer engagement across social media, and why he thinks Twitter has some growing up to do.
7 min read · 23 July 2009
Since taking the helm of Yahoo in January, CEO Carol Bartz has been consolidating management of the company’s sundry product groups, shaving excess costs (including laying off 700 more employees in the second quarter), and otherwise directing resources to support those properties that have consistently performed the best, like Yahoo Mail. Indeed, just this morning, Yahoo unveiled a new homepage that is already receiving rave reviews for a revamped design that includes more personalized features, along with embedded widgets of third parties like Facebook and MySpace that will enable users to enjoy the Web without leaving Yahoo. Now, peHUB has learned from multiple sources that as part of Bartz’s drive to dismantle non-core assets, Yahoo is also trying to shed both HotJobs, which Yahoo acquired for $436 million in cash and stock back in 2001, and Yahoo Small Business, which helps customers get their small businesses online by providing them with everything from domain registration to site monitoring to promotional tools.
3 min read · 22 July 2009
Yeesh. The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) has had one rough year. According to newly-released information, assets under management at the nation's largest public pension dropped a breathtaking 23.4% between June 30, 2008 and June 30, 2009 -- its steepest-ever year-over-year decline. Moreover, its private equity portfolio lost 31.4% of its value, with a value of $23 billion through March 31 (PE performance is a laggard). In a statement, CalPERS' new(ish) chief investment officer Joe Dear called the results unsurprising. "It is about what we expected given the collapse of markets across the globe,” he said. “The good news is we have the opportunity to capture future returns because of our long-term investment horizon. The System has
2 min read · 21 July 2009
Last fall, we reported that Vinod Khosla was in talks with CalPERS to raise up to $640 million to help finance his predilection for capital-intensive clean technologies. Tonight, Forbes reports that Khosla is about to announce not one but two new funds backed by outside investors, including a $250 million number for early-stage investments and a $750 million fund for later-stage deals. According to the magazine, one fund has closed already and the other will be finalized soon, possibly within days. Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder, superstar venture capitalist and, in recent years, alternative energy advocate, has been investing out of his own pocket since forming Khosla Ventures in 2004. The firm has backed roughly 80 companies across a range of stages, most in clean tech.
2 min read · 21 July 2009
