1 min read · 05 May 2009
1 min read · 04 May 2009
Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes recently joined VC firm General Catalyst Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence, and today tells Xconomy a little more about what that one-week-a-month role entails. Interestingly, it's not just about what Hughes calls "typical EIR stuff, talking to a lot of smart people, asking questions, assimilating their ideas, learning, and so forth." He's also being sent to top colleges around the country to press the flesh -- and gather intel for General Catalyst. So far, Hughes has visited Columbia, Yale, and MIT in search of what he describes as “personal interactions with smart students who have good ideas.”
1 min read · 04 May 2009
1 min read · 04 May 2009
2 min read · 01 May 2009
1 min read · 01 May 2009
2 min read · 01 May 2009
Last summer, legendary entrepreneur Dave Duffield predicted that his newest startup, Workday, could become the second coming of PeopleSoft -- a company Duffield founded and grudgingly sold to Oracle in January 2005 for $10.3 billion. Whether or not that proves true, Workday -- an enterprise resource planning company that delivers its software online -- has been gaining traction fast. It now has 340 employees and roughly 80 customers, including numerous Fortune 500 companies like Chiquita Brands and Flextronics (workforces of 23,000 employees and 150,000 employees, respectively). More, investors have wholeheartedly bought into Duffield’s vision. In addition to several past, mostly undisclosed, rounds of funding totaling $75 million -- money from Greylock Ventures and Duffield himself -- the company has just raised an additional $75 million in a Series E round led by New Enterprise Associates, which chipped in just north of $45 million. Duffield and Greylock contributed the rest.
5 min read · 29 April 2009
Earlier this month, I wrote a short post about the startup ReputationDefender, whose mission it is to obliterate damaging online information about its clients, who pay it on a month-to-month or yearly basis. (I reported that the company, which had raised a $2.6 million Series A last fall, has expanded that offering and is raising $5.3 million instead.) The unfortunately reality, however, is that the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup and its sundry competitive peers are powerless to do much more than contact offending Internet sites and ask that they play ball. The point gets underscored in a current Newsweek piece about the Catsouras family of Orange County. The Catsourases lost one of their four beautiful daughters to a gruesome car accident in 2006. The daughter, who’d become mentally unstable and taken cocaine the night before the accident, was nearly decapitated when she steered her father’s Porsche, stolen from the garage, into a concrete toll booth.
2 min read · 28 April 2009
1 min read · 28 April 2009
