Managers

By helping employees buy stock options, the San Mateo firm allows its LPs to access companies backed by top, hard-to-access VC firms.

Now that Zoom, Slack and email are ubiquitous in the workplace, a San Francisco venture capitalist is looking for the next enterprise communications tool.

Investors miss the personal interaction, but anecdotally they say business is still taking place and deals are still getting done.

The firm looks to invest up to $10m into 10 or fewer deep tech companies in India through a rapid fire investing process.

In the wake of the covid-19 pandemic and the economic slowdown it has wrought, new managers may suffer more than larger, established funds.

The firm raised $12m for its debut fund to provide seed capital to Polish companies. It maintains it's the first seed fund in Poland that has contacts at Silicon Valley firms.

The firm, which launched a $50m fund a year ago, has also added BEA Systems co-founder Alfred Chuang as a general partner.

The covid-19 pandemic is unlike any other, but one area of business still shows signs for optimism.

VC-backed Banjo was rocked when Medium OneZero reported that co-founder and CEO Damien Patton had “participated in white supremacist groups in his youth and was involved in the shooting of a synagogue.”

Damien Steel of OMERS Ventures says teleconferencing is making fundraising more productive and helping create a human connection with entrepreneurs and investors.