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John Doerr: The Next Big Thing

This guest post was written by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partners John Doerr, Bing Gordon, Chi-Hua Chien and Ellen Pao. We covered KP’s increase in the size of the iFund last week, and additional insights from KP’s Matt Murphy on the iPad. This post goes into a lot more detail on KP’s investments in [...]

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Tue, April 6 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Top VCs Debate Rising Startup Valuations [Video]

The venture capital valuations for still-have-that-new-car-smell startups like Quora, FourSquare, Blippy are reaching unprecedented levels, and we wanted to find out why. Top VCs Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and David Hornik came by the TechCrunch offices to debate the issue.
Four month old Blippy is worth around $38 million. Quora, still in private beta, is valued [...]

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Sun, April 4 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Fake Steve Jobs Blog Likely To Shut Down

It took a year for anyone to figure out that Forbes (now Newsweek) writer Dan Lyons was the guy behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog. Now, a couple of years later, the blog is still going strong. And it remains very, very funny.
Now Lyons’ success in writing about Steve Jobs may lead directly to [...]

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Mon, March 29 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

The Connection Between Fake Steve Jobs And Walt Mosspuppet

The rumor circulating around Silicon Valley yesterday: Walt Mosspuppet, the foul-mouthed and funny puppet version of the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, is actually the brainchild of Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, AKA Fake Steve Jobs. Lyons, says the rumor, actually writes the scripts for all of the videos, and Brian Hogg acts them out with the [...]

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Sat, March 27 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Jobs And Schmidt: We’ve Seen This Movie Before, I’m Just Not Sure Which One It Is

Earlier today, two men were spotted having coffee in Palo Alto, CA. Except these weren’t just any two men. They were the CEOs of perhaps the two most important and powerful companies in Silicon Valley right now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Big deal, you might think. After all, Schmidt used [...]

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Sat, March 27 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Mike Maples Goes Pro As A Venture Capitalist, Launches FLOODGATE

Mike Maples, one of the co-founders of Motive, has been investing “as a hobby” for the last five years under the banner of Maples Investments. Some hobby: his investments include Twitter, Digg, Chegg, Gowalla, ngmoco, Smule, Kwedit and a dozen or so other well known startups. And he’s already cashed in on a few of [...]

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Wed, March 24 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Pierre Omidyar on eBay and Pez Dispensers, Leaving the Valley and the Most Important Thing He’s Ever Done

It’s almost a cliché that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don’t go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money, they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people’s companies. But what did eBay founder Pierre Omidyar do? Moved to Honolulu where he can be found sitting [...]

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Sat, March 20 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Excelerate Labs Brings A Startup Incubator To Chicago

It seems that Y Combinator and TechStars-like incubators are popping up everywhere. BoomStartup just launched an incubator in Utah and TechStars is expanding to other cities in the U.S., as is The Founder Institute. Chicago has a new incubator that recently launched, called Excelerate Labs.
Excelerate is the brainchild of OKCupid entrepreneur Sam Yagan, [...]

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Sat, March 20 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Los Angeles Mentorship Program Launchpad LA Opens Applications For Its Second Session

Silicon Valley has long been heralded as the Mecca for startups, but it isn’t the only city in California to give rise to promising tech companies.
Los Angeles has a growing startup community, and is home to startups like DocStoc and a few much larger businesses, like MySpace and CitySearch. One program looking to [...]

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Thu, March 18 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

CODE Advisors Absolutely, Definitely Not Working With MySpace On A Spinoff

Lots of scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley that new investment bank CODE Advisors is out pitching a MySpace spinoff to potential buyers and investors. Sources include people who’ve actually been pitched.
CODE Advisor partner Quincy Smith says “We have not been engaged by News Corp. or MySpace on a sale of the company.” MySpace also contacted us [...]

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Wed, March 17 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments