Blumberg Capital, founded in 1991 by investor David Blumberg, has just closed its fifth early-stage venture fund with $225 million, a vehicle that Blumberg says was oversubscribed — he planned to raise $200 million — and that has already been used to invest in 16 startups around the world (the firm has small offices in […]
Chamath Palihapitiya is coming to Disrupt
Retail investors love him. Venture capitalists envy him. But pretty much everyone writing checks these days is paying attention to Chamath Palihapitiya, whose star has been on the rise since the outset of his career at an early online media player called Winamp that was acquired by AOL. Indeed, over the last 20 years, Palihapitiya […]
Two years after launching, Inspired Capital has closed its second fund with $281 million
Inspired Capital, the New York-based early-stage venture firm that was founded in 2019 by entrepreneurs Alexa von Tobel and Penny Pritzker, is today announcing the close of their second fund with $281 million in capital commitments, an amount that brings the firm’s total assets under management to nearly half a billion dollars. (Inspired raised $200 […]
Tesla should say something
Last weekend, a reader wrote to this editor, politely asking why tech companies should speak up about the abortion law that Texas passed last week. “What does American Airlines have to do with abortion?” said the reader, suggesting that companies can’t possibly cater to both pro-abortion and anti-abortion advocates and that asking them to take […]
Some of the biggest names in private equity think this go-go market has another year or two (at least)
Earlier today, as part of a private event, this editor was afforded the opportunity to talk with some of the biggest names in the world of private equity, including Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein; Bain Capital co-chair Steve Pagliuca; Jean Salata, the CEO and founding partner of Baring Private Equity Asia; and Sheila Patel, the vice […]
Sequoia’s Pat Grady says it isn’t clear startups “should be accelerating” right now — here’s why
Earlier today, we joined friend and former colleague Jon Fortt of CNBC in interviewing partner Pat Grady of Sequoia Capital, and it proved a wide-ranging conversation. You can check out the video below, but we thought there were some highlights worth pulling out for some of you, including as it pertains to the current market, […]
Talking shop with Twitter’s recent head of corp dev — and now VC — Seksom Suriyapa
Seksom Suriyapa was seemingly destined to land at a venture firm. A Stanford Law graduate, he worked at two blue-chip investment banks before joining the cybersecurity company McAfee as a senior corp dev employee, later logging six years at the human resources software company SuccessFactors and, in 2018, landing at Twitter, where he headed up […]
For VCs, the game right now is musical chairs
In many ways, there has never been a better time to be a venture capitalist. Nearly everyone in the industry is raking in money, either through long-awaited exits or because more capital flooding into the industry has meant more money in management fees — and sometimes both. Still, a growing number of early-stage investors are […]
Subscription-based Bright Cellars lands more funding to personalize its wines
Bright Cellars, a six-year-old, Milwaukee, Wis.-based subscription-based wine seller has, like many upstarts, evolved over time. While it once sent its club members third-party wines that fit their particular profiles, Bright Cellars says it’s now amassing enough data about its customers through its “palate” quizzes that it no longer sells wines made by other brands. […]
This Sequoia- and Henry Kravis-backed prediction market wants to turn opinions into money
More than 15 years ago, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which was acquired by Nasdaq in 2008, and another since-sold exchange called HedgeStreet, both announced they intended to offer something called event contracts to investors. The idea was to allow people to bet “yes” or “no” on questions about future events that were structured as all-or-nothing […]