Tag Archives: vc

Kleiner Perkins $250 Million Social Social Web Fund

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Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced they created a $250 Million dollar fund for social media startups. Find their entire release here. Per their release they want “…to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services.”. You may want to take a look at the companies they have funded so far if you believe your next venture fits into their fund. When it comes to VC’s you cannot go wrong with Kleiner Perkins. Here are four from their release:

Cafébots Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs.

Flipboard A social magazine, delivering a personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.

Jive Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users.

Lockerz A social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

Venture Capital in October

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VC in October
Of all the months this year, 2010, I was surprised by the fundings in October. There were quite a bit of interesting fundings. Interesting to me because there were a good number of fundings in the online and new media space. Here are a few and some of these are the typical online models that have been raising capital for years. Others are similar to other current and seem to be profitable business models.

October Startups
Travel Ad Networks : An advertising network that aggregates travel sites as publishers and allows advertisers to reach them.

SkillSlate : Find individuals to do your work in New York, think Angies List for New York.

Buddy Media : a social media platform and software to manage your social world.

Venture Capital
Find more vc fundings at Venture Capital Update.

Seed Investors are Making Money and Why You Care

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Seed Investors Making Money
In a press release Thomas Reuters put out entitled partially US PRIVATE EQUITY SHORT-TERM PERFORMANCE TURNS SHARPLY POSITIVE, they provide statistics on private equity investment performance. They track quarterly statistics of over 2,044 US venture capital and private equity partnerships totaling over $980 billion in capitalization. They provide 1 Yr , 3 Yr, 5 Yr, 10 Yr, and 20 Yr statistics on Early/Seed VC, Balanced VC and Later Stage VC. As a startup guy I like to see positive Early/Seed numbers. For the last year the growth was 4% for Early/Seed, even higher for the other VCs however over 20 years the highest performance is the Early/Seed VCs at 23.2% return. But why do you care?

Why You Care
You care because if these early stage funders are making money then they will invest more and attract more early stagers and seed investors, or so the theory goes. But I think it’s a pretty good theory that if 20 years of results shows the highest rate of return for VCs is early/seed stage investments then more capital will be available to pure startups in proportion to other stage companies. So keep doing what you’re doing if you are an entrepreneur because the money is out there and may be available if you need it and want it.

Beltway Startups Site for VA, MD and DC Startups

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We started a news blog entitled Beltway Startups to focus on start-ups and online businesses in the Virginia, Maryland and District of Columbia region. Online startups and events within this region are covered. Keep up to date with the regional online companies and local events, in and around Washington DC.

Take a look and join the RSS subscription list, site is here: Beltway Startups