SodaHead said last night that the firm is switching from its Q&A focus to become a “social newspaper” site. I asked Jason Feffer, the firm’s CEO, three quick questions about the switch, and thought I’d share it here: Why the switch to the new “social newspaper” idea? SodaHead.com evolved into the best place on the [...]
Most of the technology community in Los Angeles is familiar with the Twiistup events, which mixes startups, entrepreneurs, investors, and others in what has been a fashionable and casual environment — last time, in a private hangar in Santa Monica in “Blade Runner” style decor. Francisco Dao, the new producer of the event, tells me [...]
In all the effort that governments go to promote their cities and states as friendly for business, the one item which seems to get overlooked: quality of life. I was pondering this while reading the saga of New Enterprise Associates, one of the more well known VCs, which is pulling its offices out of Baltimore [...]
One of the key themes you hear covering the venture capital and startup industry here, is the importance of matching your startup venture with the goals and interests of the sources of capital you talk with. In addition to matching the industry interests of a VC with what your firm does, another important aspect is [...]
Here’s an interesting data point in terms of Southern California’s position over Silicon Valley in terms of the clean technology industry: this interactive map of “green businesses” in California created by the Environmental Defense Fund shows that LA has 398 companies, San Diego has 202 companies, compared with 173 companies in Santa Clara County and [...]
How many possible VC-backed IPOs are still in the pipeline this year, after two successful offerings (OpenTable and SolarWinds) broke the IPO drought? VentureWire has handicapped the seven, possible venture-backed IPOs in the pipeline, and finds just one in Southern California– Thousand Oaks-based Nexsan. Disk-storage-systems maker Nexsan also has doubled its revenue over the last three years, [...]
Here’s a fun one — the Computer History Museum up in Mountain View has just posted the original Apple IPO docs and Mac business plan. The docs come courtesy of early Apple employee Dan Kottke, as well as Apple investor and former Chairman/CEO Mike Markulla. I got one of my very first summer jobs in [...]
It’s always interesting to me to watch the investment activity as summer swings into gear; it’s usually a telling indicator of how things will pan out for the remainder of the year. In busy years (the past two years, for example) — deal flow hardly paused at all, VCs were so busy they seemed to [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
