These days, it's hard enough to hold on to a high-paying position, let alone find one. But at least you can make a lasting impression at your next networking gathering by handing out a card that's both biodegradable and edible. What am I talking about? Why, Meat Cards, a concept that pairs two unlikely elements: beef jerky and lasers (used for searing on your contact information). Sound crazy? Maybe even fantastical? Oh, meat cards are both, but as their creators point out, if you can get your hands on them, meat cards will retain their value even "after the econopocalypse."
1 min read · 28 April 2009
Kelly Porter, a managing director at Woodside Capital Fund in Palo Alto, may not have a brand name in the venture industry, but he may own one of the nicest houses -- at least, until he manages to sell it. Porter, who focuses on media, consumer software and enterprise software startups, bought his 30,000-square-foot Tudor mansion -- nestled on nearly eight acres in Los Altos Hills -- back in 1999 for $5 million. Now, as the LA Times reports, he’s trying to sell it for $38 million, down from its summer listing price of $45 million. (He and his ex-wife apparently poured tens of millions of dollars into the estate’s renovation.) He’s not lowering the listing price again, either, says his agent, though Porter is willing to “consider less,” she says.
2 min read · 27 April 2009
According to our colleagues at Reuters, money manager Invesco and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross have just committed $1 billion to buy some of the so-called toxic bank loans and securities that are part of the government's new Public-Private Investment Program.
1 min read · 27 April 2009
NYT DealBook is reporting on a juicy one: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the storied Silicon Valley law firm, may be kept from defending a client owing to alleged conflicts of interest, including an ownership position in that client. At the heart of the clash is Yehoshua Segal, a former executive at the New York-based, venture-backed data management startup Varonis Systems, which Segal began suing for $10 million late last year. Segal says he was wrongly terminated after he blew the whistle on a number of compliance issues at Varonis, including securities violations -- a claim Varonis denies.
1 min read · 27 April 2009
2 min read · 25 April 2009
2 min read · 24 April 2009
Joanna Rees -- whose San Francisco-based firm, VSP Capital, famously imploded several years ago -- was never a shrinking violet, and apparently, she still craves the spotlight. After what she considered unfair treatment by the media as VSP was crumbling -- she invited her married boyfriend into the firm as a partner without disclosing the relationship to VSP's other partners; three of VSP's general partners subsequently resigned; and the firm's LPs voted to pull the plug on its third and last fund -- she tells VentureBeat's Matt Marshall that she now has her eye on the SF mayor’s office. If Rees is serious about running for mayor of San Francisco, I say: good luck. But my suspicion is that Rees's sit-down with Marshall, who remarks that Rees's career "shows remarkable persistence and grit," is largely a publicity stunt intended to clear her name in Silicon Valley.
2 min read · 24 April 2009
2 min read · 23 April 2009
Zango just went kaput, 10 years after launching to provide users with free downloads of games, music and other content in exchange for the ability to serve them ads when they surfed the Web. In an emotional blog post, Ken Smith, who cofounded Bellevue, Wash.-based Zango with his brother and two of their friends, characterized the shut-down as a “fire sale" of its assets to the search startup Blinkx. Perhaps the flameout is a fitting end, considering the company's somewhat checkered history. Critics long argued that the startup’s software was both hard to remove and sneaky, tricking users into installing it when they downloaded other free software. In fact, the company, originally called 180Solutions (in 2006, it merged with fellow spyware startup Hotbar, another spyware startup) wound up settling at least two lawsuits, one brought by
1 min read · 22 April 2009
Pretty much since its 2007 founding, event-sharing site Socializr has been at war with 11-year-old Evite, which remains popular with users despite few upgrades since the being acquired by IAC in 2001. For example, just months after Socializr was launched by Jonathan Abrams -- also the creator of social-networking site Friendster -- Evite sent the San Francisco-based startup a letter threatening to sue it for copyright infringement. Not only was letter was ''completely absurd,'' as Abrams told me at the time, but soon after, he wrote a scathing 2,500 diatribe against Evite explicating why -- an attack that was picked up by numerous media outlets and that is still available here.
2 min read · 22 April 2009
