It’s election day. Don’t forget to vote.

How the Washington Post knows the NSA had access to internal Google and Yahoo cloud data, despite the agency’s denials.

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NEA’s Ravi Viswanathan on the Firm’s Concerns, Processes, and Next Big Fund

New Enterprise Associates may be big, but it isn’t unwieldy. Not according to the picture painted by Ravi Viswanathan, who joined NEA nine years ago from Goldman Sachs to co-head the firm’s growth equity effort. I sat down with Viswanathan last week at the expansive Sand Hill Road offices of the 35-year-old firm, which has raised $13.3 billion over its history, including $2.6 million it raised for its 14th fund last year. (It’s one of the largest funds in venture capital history.)

We chatted about where the firm has seen some of its biggest hits in recent years (think Workday, Tableau Software, Cvent); why it hasn’t made a single late-stage investment in 2013; and how the organization — which employs more than 100 people, including 12 general partners — decides on a deal. Our conversation has been edited for length.

NEA does deals of all sizes out of a single global fund. What’s its investing range?

We’ll do a $200,000 seed deal, [involving] two guys out of a Stanford class, all the way to a $50 million to $75 million check. We’ve written $100 million checks a couple of times – probably about 10 years ago, including for a semiconductor investment. But if I look at the last 10 growth deals, I’d say our sweet spot is in the neighborhood of $25 million to $50 million.

You have offices in Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., China and India. How much of your fund are you investing abroad?

We invest up to 25 percent [abroad], though in the last five years, the number is less than 20 percent, because there’s been so much going on in the U.S. and, at the same time, there have been political and economic headwinds in China and India.

How much consensus do you need to make an investment? Can you ever act autonomously?

No, ultimately everything goes to the full partnership. Some of the smaller deals may occasionally get delegated [to a smaller group] but for growth deals, because it’s bigger checks, they always go up [to the general partnership for approval].

How many votes do you need to get a deal done?

You need a quorum; you need seven or eight partners to vote on it. But usually, if there’s more than one or two no’s, the deal almost never gets done. We don’t have a hard and fast blackball rule, but if there are serious reservations, we just [back off].

As a firm, we have off-sites four times a year to spend time together, so the East Coast and West Coast knows each other really well; we’re very integrated. So if a partner calls me and says, “Here are three things that really bother me about the deal you presented,” it helps you arrive at the right decision. Of course, sometimes you have to say, “This is a great investment; we should go for it.” And we’re trusting enough of each other that if someone has that much conviction, [the others can be convinced to go along].

You’ve made 24 growth investments in recent years, but none this year because of soaring valuations. Do valuations look more reasonable at the earlier financing stages? Do you have your pick of B stage companies to fund?

Series B deals concern us. The quality deals — those that have the great syndicate, the great team — you have to pay up for them. On the flip side , people have paid up and been validated, because the Series C round has been that much higher. But broadly speaking, I think valuations are pretty rich here and in New York. In Chicago, meanwhile, we’re seeing full valuations, but they aren’t astronomical.

Among the biggest venture capital firms, more seem to be adopting an agency type model. Would we see NEA embrace the same?

We have a quasi-agency model. When we invest, rarely if ever do you get one person; you get two, three, or four people: A GP, an associate, a principal. And those folks spend a lot of time with the company. Do we have an army of biz dev people and marketing people and recruiters? No. We’ve thought about it; we know some firms are having great success with it. But we haven’t made any decisions. What’s important to us is making sure that we’re convincing [founders] with data that we’re adding value above and beyond our peers.

You raised $2.6 billion last year. When will you be back in the market, and might NEA raise an ever bigger fund the next time around?

We’ll be back in the market in 2015, plus or minus a couple of quarters. As for size, we go in with a pretty open mind, but [$2.5 billion] is the default. The question we have is: what’s the right thing for the companies and the LPs? We’ve spent a lot of years figuring out this model. But every fund is a new discussion.

New Fundings

ADial Pharmaceuticals, a six-year-old, Charlottesville, Va.-based developer of therapies for addiction diseases and disorders has raised $1.8 million from Cato BioVentures, the venture arm of the Cato Research organization.

AetherPal, a four-year-old, South Plainfield, N.J.-based company whose software enables mobile carriers to remotely access users’ smartphones for customer support issues, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates and Point Judith Capital.

Bambeco, a four-year-old, Baltimore-based company that makes home furnishings and décor for eco-conscious customers, has officially raised $4.5 million in funding led by New Atlantic Ventures, with participation from Maryland Venture Fund and numerous angel investors. (StrictlyVC reported on this funding on October 18, based on an SEC filing, so if it looks vaguely familiar…)

ContaAzul, a three-year-old, Brazil-based maker of easy-to-use SaaS accounting and invoicing software, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding led by its lead Series A backer, Ribbit Capital. Other participants in the round included Valar Ventures and existing investors Monashees Capital and Napkn Ventures.

CyPhy Works, four-year-old, Danvers, Mass.-based maker of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), has raised $7 million led by Lux Capital, with participation from General Catalyst Partners, Felicis Ventures and several undisclosed angel investors. CyPhy’s founder and CEO is Helen Greiner, one of the three founders of publicly-traded iRobot Corp.

Hinge, a 2.5-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based maker of a mobile dating app, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Great Oaks Venture Capital. Among the many other investors to participate in the funding were Social+Capital Partnership, Red Swan Ventures, 500 Startups, Eniac Ventures, Fortify Ventures, Graph Ventures, Middleland Capital, Militello Capital and angel investors.

IID, a 17-year-old, Tacoma, Wash.-based company that protects data from cyber attacks, has raised $8 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners. IID, a 65-person company that counts enterprises and government agencies among its customers, has never taken institutional funding before.

Lob, a months-old, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that calls itself the Amazon Web Services for printing (it will print and mail users’ content, as well as help developers integrate shipping and printing into their own apps), has raised $2.4 million. The money comes from a long list of angel investors, including Kevin Hale, Dalton Caldwell, Sam Altman, Joshua Schachter, and Alexis Ohanian. The company has previous raised money from Y Combinator, whose program it passed through last summer.

MediaSpike, a two-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based company that runs a marketplace for in-game product placement, has raised $5.2 million in Series A funding led by CMEA Capital. Other new participants in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, Inspovation Ventures, and individuals, including entrepreneurs Jonathan Abrams, Othman Laraki, Rick Marini and Naval Ravikant. Existing investors to also participate included 500 Startups, Google Ventures, and Raptor Capital.

Midatech, a 13-year-old, clinical-stage biotech company based in Abingdon, England, has raised $15.2 million in new funding that boosts the total amount the company has raised to $24.9 million. The financing was led by Ippon Capital SA, a Geneva-based private equity firm. Midatech is focused on cancer and diabetes treatments.

NeuroSky, a nine-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based company that sells body and mind monitoring and analysis software and hardware, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from SoftBank Corp. As part of the investment, NeuroSky is forming a strategic partnership with SoftBank Mobile Corp.

Terrajoule, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Calif.-based startup, has raised $11.5 million. The money comes from strategic investor Air Liquide, along with early investor New Enterprise Associates and individual investors who include Jim Bochnowski and Craig Winkler. Terrajoule is an energy storage and solar startup whose technology employs an old-fashioned steam engine design. Greentech Media has more on the company here.

TicTasks, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based company behind a productivity app, has raised $1.1 million, including from Kapor Capital, according to an SEC filing.

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New Funds

Apple Tree Partners, a 14-year-old, Princeton, N.J.-based venture capital firm that invests in pharmaceuticals, biotech, and healthcare services, has raised $13.5 million for an annex fund to its second fund, according to an SEC filing. The firm’s second fund, which the firm began raising in 2008, had targeted roughly $30 million, an SEC filing shows.

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IPOs

Yesterday, Twitter became the 16th pre-IPO company to boost its price range ahead of its launch this year, according to Dealogic.

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Exits

Sold, an 18-month-old, Boston-based company that aimed to simplify e-commerce by handling the shipping of goods and their payment, among other things, has been acquired by Dropbox. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sold had raised just $1.2 million from investors, including Google Ventures, Greylock Partners, Matrix Partners and Boston Seed. TechCrunch has much more on the acquisition here.

Velti, a 12-year-old, San Francisco-based company that was considered a mobile ad giant just two years ago, is selling off its mobile marketing businesses in the U.S., UK, and India to Blackstone‘s credit division GSO Capital Partners. Under terms of the deal, Velti has filed for chapter 11 while GSO has committed to provide up to $25 million to restructure the company. Velti went public in 2011 in an offering that valued the company at $800 million. By this summer, its market cap had dropped to roughly $70 million. Among its numerous problems, says Reuters: the company was “particularly hit by the meltdown in Greece and Cyprus, two countries where it wrote down more than $100 million in receivables in the second quarter ended June.”

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People

MacKenzie Bezos doesn’t think much of Brad Stone‘s new book about her husband. Posting her feedback on Amazon (of course), she writes: “‘Bezos felt…’ ‘Bezos believed….’ ‘Bezos wanted….’ ‘Bezos fixated…’ ‘Bezos worried….’ ‘Bezos was frustrated…’ ‘Bezos was consumed…’ ‘In the circuitry of Bezos’s brain, something flipped…’ When reading phrases like these, which are used in the book routinely, readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book…” (In response, Stone notes he has interviewed Bezos numerous times for articles; he also interviewed 300 other people for the book.)

Lady Gaga and her longtime manager Troy Carter are splitsville, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. The separation could negatively impact Carter as he raises a new $75 million venture capital fund, notes TechCrunch.

Anthony and Jay Robert Pritzker, brothers and heirs to the Hyatt Hotels Corp. and the Marmon Holdings’ manufacturing fortune, have turned from family feuding to deal-making.

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Happenings

It’s the first day of the GigaOm Roadmap conference in San Francisco, where you can catch Square’s Jack Dorsey and Nest’s Tony Fadell among others. Click here for more details.

It’s also day one of the App Developers Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center (which could be good for poaching). You can learn more about it here.

Kicking off tomorrow, also in San Francisco, is Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored conference, with an all-star line-up of its own that includes Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann; Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman; PayPal cofounder Max Levchin; and designer Hartmut Esslinger. You can check out the agenda here.

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Job Listings

Amazon is looking for a business development manager to zero in on the venture capital community. Specifically, says the company, the right person will help the company identify “appropriate VCs to target” and influence to use Amazons’ AWS cloud services as the basis for their portfolio companies’ infrastructure. (Sounds a little evil, doesn’t it?) Among the preferred qualifications of the job: 10 or more years in business development or strategic partnerships, and experience within the VC industry, as well as the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. The job is in San Francisco.

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Essential Reads

Silicon Valley probably needs the rest of the nation more than the rest of the nation needs Silicon Valley, argues WSJ columnist Farhad Manjoo.

The three reasons Twitter didn’t sell to Facebook.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt said yesterday that the company plans to tap into Hong Kong’s “natively entrepreneurial” culture.

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Detours

Want your employees to work harder? Try cash bonuses. They’re more effective than raises, say Harvard researchers.

A look inside the global junk trade.

The Atlantic investigates: Does Balthazar, the 16-year-old, 180-seat, New York brasserie need bathroom attendants? You bet your ass it does, says one longtime employee. Otherwise, customers “take five of [paper towels]. Nobody wants that. I give one, but if no one here, they take five.” Another common atrocity to occur when no one is monitoring the bathroom: “If there’s not somebody here, people come in, drop the paper, pee, no flushing,” whispers the employee. “Make kaka, no flushing. Very very very messy.”

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Retail Therapy

It’s nearly winter. Time for a new glencheck blazer by Gant.

This book about “unnecessary” quotation marks is a fun “read.”

We’re not sure why anyone would acquire a giant motorcycle, but we howled, looking through images of this monster sitting beside a normal-size motorbike. (We’d say it’s thoroughly American, but the bikes are actually made in Eppingen, Germany.)

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Blackberry’s CEO is out after the company’s plans to sell itself collapse.

Things are gettin’ real: Twitter just raised its expected price range from between $17 to $20 per share to $23 to $25 per share.

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Former Sequoia Partner Mark Kvamme at the Center of Controversy Again

Mark Kvamme, a former partner with Sequoia Capital, has cultivated numerous fans since moving to Ohio in early 2011. But he has also attracted critics who worry that Kvamme’s relationships with some of the state’s biggest power brokers are a little too cozy.

In the latest controversy, press reports on Friday revealed that Drive Capital, Kvamme’s new, Columbus-based venture firm, received a $50 million commitment from Ohio State University in July, despite concerns that the fund is unproven.

As of early August, Drive Capital had raised $181 million for its fund, which is targeting $300 million.

Kvamme did not respond to a request for comment over the weekend. Ohio State officials also did not respond to requests for more information over the weekend.

Records released to the Associated Press and Cleveland’s Plain Dealer newspaper on Friday show that university officials were pushing back against the school’s investment in Drive Capital until April, over concerns that the firm’s Midwest investing thesis was based on “the attractiveness of what is perceived as an underserved market” rather than proof of concept.

An email on April 5 from Ohio State’s chief investment officer, Jonathan Hook, to the school’s chief financial officer, Geoff Chatas, shows Hook told Kvamme directly that the school’s officials “did not see his fund as a good investment.” Later emails show that between April and July, when the investment was made, Kvamme and his wife, Megan, dined with then-president of the university Gordon Gee, during which time Kvamme seems to have secured a verbal commitment from Gee.

“Your thoughtful questions, insightful comments, and sense of humor always give us food for thought accompanied by the delicious meal,” Kvamme wrote Gee in an email dated May 15. “We also always come away from our dinners with more ideas on how we can make Ohio the center of innovation and creativity.”

In his email, Kvamme also asked Gee to approach other major universities for funding commitments, including the University of Michigan, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin.

Gee replied to Kvamme that he would “see how we can best get other institutions to join with us.”

Joseph Alutto, who succeeded Gee as the school’s interim president in July, had also questioned the size of the investment that Ohio State was planning to make in Drive Capital in the weeks before Alutto took his new office. Writing to Chatas in June, Alutto asked: “What is the justification for a $50 million investment rather than one in the $20-30 million range you had described as more typical? Let’s discuss.”

Several weeks later, in an email to Chatas signed by “G,” the sender wrote that he had convinced Alutto to “honor the Kvamme agreement,” adding, “We are back on solid ground. Make that happen quickly.” (The name and email address of “G” were redacted by OSU when it submitted the emails to the media.)

Venture capital is very much a relationship-driven business, of course. And surely, Kvamme looks as good a bet as any. Kvamme led Sequoia’s early investment in LinkedIn – a bet that has paid off handsomely for Sequoia’s LPs. Kvamme also borders on VC royalty. His father, Floyd, is a partner emeritus at Kleiner Perkins, and his ex-father-in-law is famed venture capitalist Pierre Lamond, long one of Sequoia Capital’s most powerful partners.

Still, the investment appears to represent the largest commitment to a venture firm that Ohio State has made. Venture capital investments represented just 0.7 percent, or $21.7 million, of the $3.1 billion that the university was managing as of June 30.

The agreement is also attracting scrutiny as Gee has reportedly been seeking an investment from Kvamme. According to the emails provided to news outlets on Friday, Gee, who remains at Ohio State in an emeritus position and as a law professor, talked about soliciting a $1.5 million contribution from Kvamme to help establish a higher-education policy center.

An OSU spokeswoman told the Plain Dealer that it’s “important to note that exchanges about Mr. Kvamme as a possible donor took place well after the investment was made, and on the Center in particular, Gordon did not even know about the idea for such an institute at the time he started advocating for the investment opportunity.”

Combined with school officials’ apparent change of heart, the “huge departure” for the university has critics like Brian Rothenberg, the executive director of the public interest group ProgressOhio in Columbus, concerned.

“Mark Kvamme seems to have a very inquisitive mind and he doesn’t mind pushing the envelope, but it’s a toxic mix with public money,” says Rothenberg.

Rothenberg has been focused on Kvamme’s activities for some time. In fact, ProgressOhio is challenging the constitutionality of JobsOhio, a private nonprofit that Ohio Governor John Kasich created with Kvamme’s help in January 2011. Gee joined the board six months later.

The job, which brought Kvamme to Ohio from Silicon Valley, was expected to last just five months. But by August 2011, Kvamme had acquired an Ohio’s driver’s license, along with a farm outside Sunbury, Ohio. Apparently, he had also fallen in love. (Kvamme is now married to the daughter of a former director of the Ohio Office of Budget and Management.)

In 2011, Kvamme said he hoped to create 30,000 new Ohio jobs through JobsOhio. But from the outset, the program, which manages roughly $100 million per year in public and private money, has operated under a shroud of secrecy. (The bill that created JobsOhio states that “records created or received by JobsOhio are not public records.”)

ProgressOhio and others have characterized that lack of transparency as unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of Ohio will begin hearing oral arguments relating to the case this Wednesday.

New Fundings

Alianza, a four-year-old, Lindon, Utah-based cloud-based voice platforms company, has raised $3.5 million, according to a new SEC filing. Signal Peak Ventures is among its investors.

Campus Quad, a new, San Carlos, Calif.-based company that’s working with universities to foster greater student engagement over its mobile platform, has raised $500,000, according to an SEC filing. No investors are listed on the form, which shows the money raised came through a combination of debt, options and warrants rather than equity.

Game Play Network, a year-old, L.A.-based company that appears to be in the business of online advance-deposit wagering (a form of horse race gambling where bettors have to fund their accounts before placing bets), has raised $6.175 million as part of a $20 million fundraise, according to an SEC filing. Among the company’s investors is Santa Monica Capital Partners.

Hoopika Biotech, a two-year-old, Vienna-based biotech company focused on developing next-generation vaccines, has raised $25.7 million from new investors Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Takeda Ventures, and BioMedPartners. Previous investors Sofinnova Partners and Forbion Capital Partners also participated in the funding. The company has now raised about $35 million altogether.

InVision App, a three-year-old, New York-based company that helps its clients create interactive, Web application prototypes, has raised $11.6 million in Series A funding from Tiger Global, along with previous investor FirstMark Capital, according to an SEC filing. FirstMark had provided the company with $1.5 million in seed funding last year.

Malauzai Software, a four-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based company that makes mobile banking apps for community financial institutions, has completed $3 million in new funding. It isn’t revealing the source of the capital. Last year, Live Oak Banking Company provided the company with $2.3 million in funding.

Owlstone, a Norwalk, Conn.-company that’s commercializing a breathalyzer that can detect cancer and other diseases, has raised $772,000 as part of a $1.25 million round, according to an SEC filing. Among those listed on the filing is Thomas Finn, president of global health care at Procter & Gamble. You can learn much more about this company here.

RapidMiner, a six-year-old, Burlingame, Mass.-based predictive analytics platform, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Open Ocean Capital.

RockLive, a nearly four-year-old, San Francisco-based company that describes itself as a mobile development lab, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from baby-faced Canadian crooner Justin Bieber, according to Crunchbase. In August 2012, RockLive raised a separate $1.6 million round from investor Shervin Pishevar and boxer Floyd Mayweather among others.

Svelte Medical Systems, a six-year-old, New Providence, N.J.-based stent maker, has raised $22 million in a round led by CNF Investments and New Science Ventures. The company has raised roughly $65 million to date.

Thinfilm Electronics, an eight-year-old, Oslo, Norway-based company that produces paper-thin electronic components, has raised $24 million from Invesco Asset Management, which secured 46.7 million shares of the publicly traded company for its investment. Invesco, which acquired 13 percent of ThinFilm in a private placement earlier this month, now owns 23 percent of the company.

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New Funds

Aligned Partners Fund, a two-year-old early-stage venture capital firm led by Jodi Sherman Jahic and Susan Mason, has raised $25.9 million for its first fund, according to a new SEC filing that shows the pair began fundraising in November 2011. Prior to cofounding Aligned Partners, Jahic was the managing director of Sherman Capital Group, a San Francisco-based venture fund; she also led wireless investments at Voyager Capital and logged time earlier in her career at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture). Mason, meanwhile, spent 15 years with the early-stage firm ONSET Ventures.

NCT Ventures, a 27-year-old venture capital firm based in Columbus, Oh., is hoping to raise a new, $75 million fund, according to an SEC filing. The firm doesn’t provide much information at its site, but one of its partners is Jeff Bell, who was VP of global marketing at Microsoft from 2006 through 2008. Among its exits is Clearsaleing, an ad analytics company that raised just $3.25 million and sold for an undisclosed amount to publicly traded GSI Commerce in 2011. GSI Commerce was acquired for about $2.4 billion by eBay in early 2012.

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IPOs

In an SEC filing on Friday, Zulily, the Seattle-based flash deals site for mothers, revealed plans to go public on Nasdaq and to price its shares between $16 and $18. The company is planning to sell 6.3 million shares of class A common stock (which would amount to roughly $238 million if it prices at the high end of its range). Among Zulily’s biggest shareholders are Maveron, which owns 23.5 percent of the company; August Capital, which owns 7.4 percent; and Andreessen Horowitz, which owns 7.3 percent;

Renaissance Capital takes a look at some of the other IPOs coming up.

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People

Allen DeBevoise, the cofounder and current CEO of eight-year-old Machinima, a popular YouTube network that caters to gamers, is looking for a replacement for himself. DeBevoise says the company needs “more professional management.”

Henri Lamiraux, Apple’s Vice President of Engineering for the iOS iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch operating system, has left the company, reports Mark Gurman of 9to5mac.com.

“This is going to come off a little cocky,” warns venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, before telling reporter Liz Gannes that he has cracked the code for making startups grow.

Sequoia Capital has hired Blair Shane as its chief marketing officer, reports AllThingsD. Shane replaces Sequoia’s longtime marketing partner Mark Dempster, who says he left Sequoia to launch an “independent advisory service for founders.”(Dempster’s LinkedIn profile still shows him at Sequoia.) Previously, Shane ran marketing for the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Academy of Sciences.

Fab‘s creative director and co-founder, Bradford Shellhammer is out the door of the seemingly beleaguered company. On his personal blog, he writes that he has “an explorer’s heart. And I don’t sit still. And I want to make other things in this world.”

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Data

Aileen Lee, the former Kleiner Perkins partner turned cofounder of Cowboy Ventures, asked her team to to examine some venture numbers dating back to 2003, and she published their findings on TechCrunch this past weekend. Among their conclusions: Over the last decade, 39 companies have sprung into existence that are now valued at $1 billion by either public market or private investors; enterprise-oriented billion-dollar companies have delivered much higher returns on investment than consumer-facing giants; and there’s very little educational diversity among the billion-dollar companies’ cofounders. Lee’s data suggests the “vast majority” of all cofounders went to “selective” universities, with Stanford leading the pack.

Worth noting, there’s already plenty of disagreement over Lee’s findings. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson weighs in here with his own observations.

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Happenings

It’s a big week for conferences, beginning with Defrag 2013, a three-day conference that’s kicking off this morning in Broomfield, Colo. (It’s been likened to a small-scale TED event.) Today’s line-up looks interesting, with “life business coach” Jerry Colonna and venture capitalist Brad Feld speaking on the emotional challenges of entrepreneurship. You can learn more here.

Getting underway tomorrow with the help of featured speaker Jack Dorsey is the GigaOm Roadmap conference in San Francisco. Click here for more details.

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Job Listings

Square, the mobile payments company, is looking for a business associate in San Francisco. The job is described as a hybrid of planning and sales strategy. Ideally, says the company, candidates will have worked for a top-tier management consultancy, investment bank or in a similar capacity at another firm and will feel comfortable interacting with senior management on a regular basis.

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Essential Reads

Bill Gates on the Internet’s limits: “I certainly love the IT thing,” he tells the Financial Times. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.”

Mobile-phone based hearing aids could become a big deal in health technology. Here’s a snapshot of what’s happening.

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Detours

We love this conversation between Alec Baldwin and Dick Cavett at New York’s “21” Club.

Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have created a very simple way of assessing how well your body functions compared with how well it should work, given your age. If you dare, you can try it out here.

In defiance of standing desks, a writer — like Marcel Proust and Mark Twain before him — lies down to work.

Harrison Ford begs his agents for sweet mercy.

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Retail Therapy

Flip-flops for Burning Man.

A shampoo that startup geeks will appreciate.

The $225 Clairisonic brush, for your face. Hey, why stop with your hair?

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Please feel free to send us any and all story suggestions (anonymous or otherwise) by clicking here. If you’re interested in advertising in our email newsletter, please click here. To sign up for the newsletter, visit strictlyvc.com.

Tech giants are bolstering their defenses against snooping. The government “blew it,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a conference this fall.

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Elon Musk: People Need “Things That Are Inspiring”

This week, the Web Summit conference in Ireland managed to attract some very big names, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who was interviewed yesterday as part of the event’s closing ceremonies.

The billionaire entrepreneur wasn’t alone on stage; venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar was among the guests. But Musk was clearly the main attraction. (As a leather-clad Musk strode to his seat, the James Bond theme resounded throughout the hall, and every smartphone in the audience shot up into the air to take pictures.) Here’s some of what Musk had to say during the panel, which was moderated by Storyful founder and CEO Mark Little:

On whether it’s a “great time to be alive as a creator”:

“I don’t think you could ask for a better time in history. I think people sometimes forget that. Realistically, when else would you want to be alive?”

On why, while running two billion-dollar companies, he would bother to fly to Ireland for Web Summit:  

“I understand there’s going to be a great party tonight,” said Musk (convincingly).

Asked about his “lightbulb moment” as a teenager: 

“It was more like when I was 21,” said Musk. “When I was a teenager, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I liked playing video games and I liked writing software. So I thought maybe I’ll write [software professionally]; that seemed like a pretty fun thing. And then when I was in college, I started thinking about, ‘Well, what’s going to most affect the world?’ Actually, I thought there were five things that would most affect the world, three of which I thought would definitely be positive things to solve, two of which [were] a slight question mark. As it happens, I was able to get involved in all three of those things: the Internet, sustainable energy, and space.” [Alas, Little didn’t ask about the two other things.]

On why Musk didn’t simply start another e-commerce company after co-founding PayPal: 

“The thing that motivated me there was I kept expecting that there would be a manned mission to Mars. That was the continuation of the dream of Apollo. We went to the moon. Then there was supposed to be a base on the moon; there were supposed to be space hotels. There were going to be missions to Mars. And year after year, that stuff didn’t happen. At first, I thought [that] maybe people [had] lost the will to do that, and I came up with the idea of this mission to Mars to kind of get people excited about that stuff again. But I came to the conclusion that I was actually wrong about that assumption, and there’s plenty of will. But it’s really about making sure there’s a way. If people think there’s a way to do it without bankrupting the economy, I think there’s plenty of will.”

On all the attention he receives versus SpaceX: 

“We’ve got an awesome team at SpaceX. There’s way too much attention paid to me, and that’s not right. People want to identify with an individual, and so that’s naturally what occurs, but there’s a super-talented group at SpaceX who make it happen.”

Musk was also asked about his vision for the future of humanity and space exploration in particular:

“I think it would be really great to have a base on Mars, and ultimately to be making steady progress towards making it a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. I think that’s the most powerful thing we can do to ensure the long term survival of civilization. And it’s just a very exciting future, I think, if you imagine a future where we’re exploring the stars, and we’re a multi-planet species, and the scope and scale of society is that much greater.

“I find that view of the future really exciting and inspiring, and there need to be things that are inspiring. There are lots of problems on Earth, and there always will be, but there need to be things that are inspiring, that make you want to get out of bed in the morning. Having a bright future in space is one of those things.”

[By the way, for European readers eager to get their hands on a Model S sedan, Musk said Tesla “should have the right-hand version in production in March” and he estimated that the car will be available to purchase by “late March [or] April.”]

New Fundings

6Wunderkinder, a three-year-old, Berlin-based startup behind a popular task management app called Wunderlist, has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital, reports TechCrunch. Previous investors Atomico and Earlybird also participated in the funding. Wunderlist has about six million users; it has raised $34.9 million to date.

Ador, formerly known as Lockerz, has raised $9 million in a round that appears to be targeting $25 million, according to an SEC filing that was flagged yesterday by AllThingsD. Lockerz, a four-year-old, Pittsburgh-based social commerce network, had raised nearly $80 million as of this time last year, including from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Liberty Media, Live Nation and DAG Ventures. Lockerz is still operational, the company told AllThingsD, but most of its capital will now be invested in Ador, a new shoppable digital magazine.

Alector, a six-month-old, San Francisco-based biotech company dedicated to the discovery and development of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A financing. The money comes from Polaris Venture Partners and OrbiMed Advisors. (Xconomy has a nice write-up about the company here.)

Boyibang, a year-old, Beijing-based company that has created a diabetes management app and platform, has secured 4.5 million yuan ($733,974) of angel investment from Ameba Capital and Wu Jiong, the executive director of the online doctor-appointment platform Guahao.

Circle Internet Financial, a months-old, Boston-based bitcoin startup started by Brightcove founder Jeremy Allaire, has raised $9 million in funding from Accel Partners; Accel’s Jim Breyer, who invested some of his own money in the deal; and General Catalyst Partners. Lizette Chapman of Dow Jones notes that it’s the largest bitcoin funding on record.

Cloudnine, a six-year-old, Bangalore-based outfit that runs a handful of specialty maternity-care hospitals, has raised $16.1 million led by Sequoia Capital. The capital will be used to set up 10 new facilities over the next two years. Existing investor Matrix Partners also participated in the round.

Contego Fraud Solutions, a two-year-old, Oxfordshire, England- based startup whose software product provides due diligence and risk analysis on people and companies, has raised £900k from London Business Angel Investors and Rainbow Seed Fund. The company has raised a prior £350k in February 2012 from Cass Entrepreneurship Fund, bringing its total funding to date to around $1.9 million.

Kumu Networks, a two-year-old, Santa Clara, Calif.-based company whose technology aims to double the capacity of any wireless network, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Third Point Ventures. Previous investors NEA and Khosla Ventures also participated in the round. The company has raised $25 million to date.

Nanocomp Technologies, a nine-year-old, Merrimack, N.H.-based nanomaterials company, has landed a $6 million venture loan facility led by Horizon Technology Finance Corporation. Nanocomp raised an equity round of at least $7.7 million last year, according to an SEC filing that suggested the company was looking to raise $25 million. CEI Community Ventures is among its backers, along with numerous angels.

Nomorerack, a three-year-old, New York-based online e-commerce company that sells discounted items in a variety of categories, has raised $40 million in Series B funding from Oak Investment Partners and HTV Industries. The company raised a $12 million Series A round roughly one year ago led by Asian e-commerce giant G-Market.

Svelte Medical Systems, a seven-year-old, Providence, R.I.-based company that develops balloon expandable stents, has raised $22 million in fresh funding led by CNF Investments and New Science Ventures, which were joined by previous investors. The company has raised roughly $65 million to date.

TabTale, a three-year-old, Tel Aviv-based maker of interactive children’s books and games, has raised $12 million in funding led by Qualcomm Ventures and return backer Magma Venture Partners. Vintage Investment Ventures and numerous individual investors also participated in the funding. The company has raised $13.5 million to date.

Unitrends Software, a 24-year-old, Columbia, S.C.-based company that makes data protection software, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Insight Venture Partners. The company has raised at least $20 million in the past, according to Crunchbase, including a $9 million round closed in 2008 that included The Aurora Funds, The Trelys Funds, Paladin Capital Group, and Harbert Venture Partners.

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New Funds

Benchmark is raising a new fund in the neighborhood of its last $425 million vehicle, reports Reuters. “Benchmark is committed to maintaining a laser focus on early-stage investing,” general partner Bill Gurley said in an emailed statement to the outlet. The firm’s current fund, its seventh, closed in 2011.

MentorTech Ventures, a seed- and early-stage venture capital fund that invests in companies that are part of the University of Pennsylvania ecosystem, has raised $24.2 million toward its newest fund, according to a new SEC filing. The firm has been raising the capital for the past couple of years, the filing shows, and it appears to be targeting $35 million altogether. So far, 61 accredited investors have participated in the fundraise.

North Bridge Venture Partners, the Waltham, Mass.-based firm that first dipped its toe into growth-stage investing in 2006, has raised a new, $581.6 million growth-stage fund. An SEC form filed yesterday shows that the firm began fundraising in July. North Bridge issued a release about the fund late last week; in it the firm noted that its growth equity unit is now managing $1.1 billion altogether.

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IPOs

China’s 58.com, the country’s equivalent of Craigslist, saw its shares soar yesterday on its first day of trading on the NYSE. It priced its initial offering of 11 million shares at $17 million; the shares ended the day at $24.12, up 41 percent. The company is profitable. In the first half of 2013, it reported net income of $300,000 on sales of $58 million. Its biggest shareholders are Nihao China Corporation (which owns 22.3 percent of the company), WP X Asia Online Investment Holdings (which owns 25.8 percent), SB Asia Investment Fund (which owns 20.5 percent), and DCM (which owns 16.6 percent).

Chegg, the eight-year-old, Santa Clara, Calif-based textbook rental company, said in a new filing yesterday that it hopes to raise up to $172.5 million in its IPO by pricing its stock at $9.50 to $11.50 a share. (It would give the company a roughly $900 million valuation.) Chegg has raised nearly $200 million from investors over the years; its biggest shareholders include Foundation Capital (it owns 6.5 percent), Gabriel Ventures (it owns 10.3 percent), Insight Venture Partners (it owns 14.3 percent) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which owns 11.7 percent). Chegg first filed to go public in August. It’s expected to go public in a couple of weeks.

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Data

The research group CB Insights has released its newest report on what’s happening with seed-stage investments. You can find the full report here. Some highlights: Of the 762 U.S.-based tech companies that received seed funding between April and September 2012, 34 percent have received follow-on funding. Meanwhile, the follow-on rate for seed investments made between 2009 and 2012 was 40 percent (so things may be cooling off slightly).

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People

Larry Ellison and other Oracle executives just saw their pay packages rejected as bloated and out of sync with the company’s performance by shareholders.

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Job Listings

Yelp is looking to hire a business development senior manager to help build relationships across the industry’s international communities and negotiate strategic partnerships worldwide. This position splits time between Yelp’s San Francisco headquarters and its London offices and involves extensive international travel. Among other requirements, candidates need to have at least seven years of experience in international business development, product, consulting or finance.

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Essential Reads

Despite Harvard Management Company’s reputation as a great investor, it is not a great investor.

There are right now 24 venture-backed companies with valuations of $1 billion or more, and roughly 70 percent of them are based in either Silicon Valley or San Francisco, says data provider Pitchbook. The Silicon Valley Business Journal has more on the story here.

Soon, you’ll no longer have to turn off your iPhone/iPad/MacBook Pro/Kindle Fire/travel-size hair straightener as soon as you board a plane. Yesterday, the FAA revealed that by year end, fliers generally should be allowed to use tablets, e-readers and other gadgets during all phases of their flights.

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Detours

In defense of teenagers who take selfies at funerals.

Banksy ends his monthlong “Better Out Than In” New York show in understated fashion.

The New Yorker takes a look at what makes people cheat.

How to tell scary stories: Advice from the co-creator of “American Horror Story.”

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Retail Therapy

This is cool — the Phantom II Vision flying camera, which streams real-time video to your mobile devices. Now you can spy into your neighbors’ second-floor windows, too.

Ledge pants. Coffee, juice, wine, and water will slide right off this fabric, which is made of “elastane content” and other materials it’s probably best not to contemplate.

Beautiful, luxurious leather pouches, for all that paperwork you’re always carrying around. Oh? You never carry around paper anymore? Valentino does not care. Valentino will make beautiful pouches despite you and your “smart” tablets and other electronic gizmos.

Please feel free to send us any and all story suggestions (anonymous or otherwise) by clicking here. If you’re interested in advertising in our email newsletter, please click here. To sign up for the newsletter, visit strictlyvc.com.

The NSA has been covertly tapping the private networks of Yahoo and Google to gather information from hundreds of millions of user accounts, says the Washington Post. The NSA has fired back, calling the report inaccurate, but isn’t offering much of a defense (yet).

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True Ventures on Spotting Winning Teams

Since its 2005 founding, San Francisco-based True Ventures has been making seed-stage bets on startups, with an eye toward plugging up to $10 million into those that break out.

The firm’s strategy has worked with aplomb. True was the first investor in WordPress parent Automattic — one of the tech industry’s hottest private companies. True also wrote early, small checks to the video ad network Brightroll and the wearable device maker Fitbit, companies that have gone on to raise tens of millions of dollars from eager follow-on investors. I recently caught up with cofounder Jon Callaghan to discuss True’s model, how to know when a startup is souring, and what kinds of companies the firm is backing right now. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length.

True typically gets 20 percent of a company in return for a fairly small first check of $1 million to $2 million. How do you do it?

We’re investing a $200 million fund, so $1 million checks are half of one percent of the fund. If you think about that allocation, it lets us take on an incredible amount of risk. When things work, we have a large enough fund that we can support [the best investments] with $5 million or $10 million – and we do have $10 million in lots of companies. [With] our best companies, we’re the largest shareholder on the lowest cost basis because we were in there on day one.

Some of your founders have enjoyed success before and could presumably sell 20 percent of their company for a bigger check. Why don’t they?

We wouldn’t be doing them any favors by putting too much money in too soon. We’re actually much more aligned by saying, “Here’s $1 million to $2 million to take you through the next 18 to 24 months [to see if your idea works]. Is that worth 20 percent to you?” And it is. It’s a pretty good trade.

When you write a bigger check, you also start bumping into loss aversion. You really don’t want to lose that first check. If you’re in too heavy in the beginning, it’s really scary for any investor. And the last thing that any creative founder needs is a nervous investor.

True has now backed 120 companies. When do you know that you have a great team on your hands, and when do you know a startup is going south?

We like to see a constant thread through [founders’] experiences, meaning that when we hear their story, it’s really clear why they’re doing a particular company. We backed [former Wired editor] Chris Anderson [who founded the unmanned aerial vehicle company 3D Robotics last year] knowing there were a number of threads that led him to his company: his fascination with innovation; his kids’ curiosity in hacking Legos with remote control airplanes; and finally, just knowing that there’s nothing else in the world he’d rather be doing – and this is someone who could be doing anything.

When it comes to the downside, there are a lot of easy tells. Communication gets weird between a founder and the rest of the team. Things just don’t add up. When teams are in flow, you can see it and feel it. Their offices are alive with energy. Those are the good ones. If you spend time at a company and there’s not that energy, then you kind of have to say, “What’s going on here?” It’s usually because some basic stuff is missing. People aren’t on board the mission, or the founder or someone else took the product in a direction that isn’t really resonating with the rest of the team, or the team kind of didn’t have the trust required to get together in the beginning.

True first went after consumer Web companies, then SaaS companies, then infrastructure companies. What does your newest crop of portfolio companies look like?

We think this wave of software and mobile innovation will disrupt very large existing businesses. Hair color is one of two consumer packaged goods companies that we’ve done. In robotics, we’ve funded many interesting and wearable robotics companies that haven’t yet been announced. We now have one of the largest device and wearable portfolios that no one knows about. We also think the car industry, where there’s clearly a huge software opportunity, is really interesting.

It’s a big, scary market, and traditionally you might say, “What? You want to sell to automakers?” But we think there’s a really brilliant team doing something very bold and audacious, and we can and want to take a ton of risk with that first check.

(To read a previously published segment of our chat with Callaghan, on the “Series B Crunch,” click here.) 

New Fundings

Lawdingo, a 22-month-old, San Francisco-based subscription service that connects people with attorneys who make themselves available by phone, has raised a fresh $690,000 in funding. The company, a graduate of the Y Combinator program, received the capital from Atsany Capital, Altair Capital, and numerous individual investors, including Nathaniel Stevens, Kartik Hosanagar, and Gene Alston.

LoopPay, a months-old, Woburn, Mass.-based company that’s working on a mobile payments platform, has raised $5.8 million of a $10.3 million offering, according to an SEC filing. The company has simultaneously been running a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.

Musement, a year-old, Milan, Italy-based startup that providers users with information and ticketing services to museums, theater events, and even archaeological sites around Italy, has raised $950,000 in seed funding from 360 Capital Partners and Italian Angels for Growth.

PathoGenetix, a 16-year-old, Woburn, Mass.-based company that’s trying to commercialize some efforts around its genome sequence scanning technology, has raised $10 million in Series C funding. The round was financed by previous investors, including Ascension Health Ventures, Excel Venture Management and HealthCare Ventures. PathoGenetix last raised money in 2011, in an $11.5 million Series B round.

Revenew, a startup in Palatine, Ill. that has developed an online distributed marketing platform used largely by manufacturers, has raised $5 billion in Series B funding. The round was led by Allos Ventures, with TGap Ventures and Illinois Ventures also participating.

Runnable, a new, Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that wants to make it easier to discover and reuse code snippets, has raised $2 million in seed funding from Sierra Ventures. Also joining in the round were Resolute VC, AngelPad, 500 Startups, and numerous individual investors, including Hiten Shah, cofounder of the analytics company KISSmetrics.

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New Funds

One of Israel’s newest venture funds appears to be raising fresh capital, possibly for a sidecar vehicle. Back in June, TechCrunch reported that Benchmark’s Michael Eisenberg and Genesis Partners’ Eden Shochat had joined forces to create a new, early-stage firm in Tel Aviv called Aleph. (According to an SEC filing, they raised $140 million for the effort this summer.) A new filing shows the duo has raised an additional $11.1 million of what is listed as a $14 million target

Kaiwu Capital, a China-based early-stage venture capital firm that last year set out to raise its first fund with a target of $150 million, is two-thirds of the way there, judging by a new SEC filing, which shows the fund has so far raised $98 million. The fund is also now called Kaiwu Walden Capital, suggesting that it’s now affiliated with the global venture firm Walden International. (In related news, the WSJ reports that venture activity in China is finally picking up, after a sluggish first half of the year.)

Montage Capital, an early-stage firm focused on investing in financial services, e-commerce, and resources like energy, food and water companies that are between their angel and Series A rounds, has raised $8 million in funding, according to a new SEC filing that shows the fund’s target as $25 million. Montage, based in Menlo Park, Calif., was founded by Todd Kimmel, who was most recently a general partner at Mayfield Fund, which he joined in 2009. Before Mayfield, Kimmel worked as a principal at Advanced Technology Ventures.

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IPOs

At least two very eager analysts have initiated coverage of Twitter‘s IPO with “buy” ratings.

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Exits

Aggregate Knowledge, an eight-year-old, San Mateo, Calif.-based analytics firm, has been acquired by the 18-year-old telecom services firm Neustar for $119 million in cash and stock. Neustar was seemingly interested the audience segmentation and campaign planning services of Aggregate Knowledge, among other things. (Ad Age has a good write-up about the deal.) Aggregate Knowledge had raised about $64 million over the years, including from First Round Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, OVP Venture Partners and Foundation Capital.

Avado, a three-year-old, Seattle-based maker of patient relationship management software, has been acquired by the publicly traded online health information provider WebMD. The price of the acquisition wasn’t publicly disclosed but TechCrunch sources say that Avado was purchased for an amount “in the $20 million to $30 million range.” Avado had raised just $1 million earlier this year, including from The Partnership Fund for New York City and healthcare-focused angel investors, including Andy Palmer.

ServiceMesh, a five-year-old, Austin-based cloud services management company, has been acquired by the publicly traded IT management company Computer Sciences Corp (CSC), in Falls Church, Va. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. ServiceMesh had raised $15 million from Ignition Partners in 2011.

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Data

The National Venture Capital Association and Cambridge Associates are releasing some new data through June 30 of this year, and they note that recent returns have boosted numbers across the 1-, 3-, 5-, 10- and 20-year horizons. They still don’t look great when compared with major public indices but it’s something! Click here to learn more.

There’s a new report out from UC Hastings law professor Robin Feldman, who surveyed roughly 200 VCs and their portfolio companies about patent assertion entities (PAEs). Law.com covers the news, but some highlights include that more than half of the VCs and 40 percent of the portfolio companies interviewed said the costs of defending against PAEs’ demands typically exceed $100,000. As for timing, Only 11 percent of companies surveyed said they were approached over alleged patent infringement within a year of their first round of funding. Nearly a third said they were approached before receiving any funding at all.

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Happenings

It’s Halloween! Enjoy it.

You might also want to check out the second day of Web Summit, in Cork, Ireland. If you don’t happen to strolling around Cork, you can catch some of the higher-profile presentations — including interviews with Atomico’s Niklas Zennström, DropBox CEO Drew Houston, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk —  via a live stream at the Web Summit site.

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People

Tassos Gianakakos is the new CEO of MyoKardia, a year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s developing therapies for genetic heart disease. Until now, the company has been led by interim CEO Charles Homcy, a venture partner at Third Rock Ventures, which invested $38 million in MyoKardia in a Series A round in September 2012. Gianakakos was most recently a senior VP and the chief business officer of the publicly traded biopharmaceutical company MAP Pharmaceuticals (since acquired by Allergan for $1 billion).

Actor and tech startup investor Ashton Kutcher has yet another new role: as a product engineer at Lenovo. It’s no joke.

It’s official. Star venture capitalist Michael Moritz received his knighthood from Queen Elizabeth yesterday at Buckingham Palace.

Yancey Strickler, a cofounder of the five-year-old, popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter, has been appointed as its chief executive, reports GigaOm. Meanwhile, cofounder Perry Chen, the company’s CEO until now, becomes its chairman.

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Job Listings

Pinterest is looking for a partner operations manager to grow the number of businesses on the platform (and to recruit a team toward that end). Requirements include 10 years of experience in a related field, a love of both strategic and tactical work, and management experience.

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Essential Reads

Faced with inaction at the federal level, states are rushing to create privacy laws, creating a patchwork of rules that Internet companies will have to avoid overstepping.

A Google Glass wearer was ticketed yesterday for driving while wearing Google Glass, but laws around the head-mounted computers are far from clear.

Facebook released its third quarter numbers yesterday. The upshot, says AllThingsD: Marketers love us — teens, slightly less so.

Twitter was sued yesterday for $124 million by two financial advisers who say the company had them organize a private sale of its shares to stoke interest in its IPO, then canceled it.

Can tweeting make you smarter?

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Detours

Awkward Halloween photos.

These two win for best Halloween costumes ever.

Meet the guy who drove across the U.S. in a record 28 hours and 50 minutes.

In recognition of Movember, Esquire brings you the world’s longest moustache. This cookie duster began life 30 years ago and is now so long that its wearer has to wrap it around his neck several times before stuffing the rest of it deep into his turban. It’s a lot of work, but apparently, it is worth it. Says the man: “For me, the moustache is everything.”

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Retail Therapy

Trongs and Dip Cups, for when you really want to eat, but you don’t want to touch your food like some lousy commoner.

Brilliant. Kohler makes a $200 showerhead with a Bluetooth-compatible speaker. Now we just need to get our Queen playlist queued up.

Please feel free to send us any and all story suggestions (anonymous or otherwise) by clicking here. If you’re interested in advertising in our email newsletter, please click here. To sign up for the newsletter, visit strictlyvc.com.

Big deal: PricewaterhouseCoopers is buying Booz & Company.

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Venture Heavyweights Sit Back as Deal Sizes Soar

It’s been a banner week for a number of Internet companies.

Last Wednesday, social network Pinterest acknowledged closing on a $225 million round that valued the company at $3.8 billion. Shortly thereafter, AllThingsD reported that Snapchat, the messaging app, is now weighing a $200 million investment round that would value the company at $3.5 billion. And just yesterday, NextDoor, a social network for neighbors, raised $60 million in fresh capital.

But the reality is that some of today’s biggest venture heavyweights have pulled back dramatically on late-stage deals.

Two weeks ago, during a visit to Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen told me his firm has “done almost no growth investments in the last year and a half.”

Yesterday, Ravi Viswanathan, who co-heads New Enterprise Associates’ Technology Venture Growth Equity effort, told me much the same. “If you chart our growth equity investing over the last few years, it’s been very lumpy,” said Viswanathan. “Last year, I think we did four or five growth deals. This year, I don’t think we did any.”

That’s saying something for a firm that is right now investing a $2.6 billion fund that it raised just a year ago.

Andreessen attributes his firm’s reluctance to chase big deals to an influx of “hot money.” The partnership is “way behind on growth [as an allocation of our third fund],” Andreessen told me, “and that’s after being way ahead on growth in 2010 and 2011, because so many investors have come in crossed over into late stage and a lot of hedge funds have crossed over, which is traditionally a sign of hot times, hot money.” He added, “What we’re trying to do is be patient. We have plenty of firepower. We’re just going to let the hot money do the high valuation things while it’s in the market. We’ll effectively sell into that.”

That’s not to say later-stage deals don’t have their champions right now. At this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference, venture capitalist Bill Gurley of Benchmark told the outlet that “a global reality is that some of these companies have systems, they have networks in them, that cause early leads to always play out with really huge platforms.” People “laugh or write silly articles about the notion of a pre-revenue company having a very high valuation,” added Gurley.  But “if you talk to some of the smartest investors on Wall Street, or go talk to guys like Lee Fixel or Scott Shleifer at Tiger, they’re looking for these types of things. They’re looking for things that can become really, really big.”

Still, Viswanathan’s concerns sound very similar to Andreessen’s when I ask him why NEA has pulled back so markedly from later stage investments.

“It’s an amazing tech IPO market, and that drives growth,” Viswanathan observed. “But I’d say the growth deals we saw last year [were] elite companies getting high valuations. There are still great opportunities out there. But right now, it feels like there are high valuations even for the lesser-quality companies.”

New Fundings

9Lenses, a three-year-old, Sterling, Va.-based company that makes cloud-based survey and analytics software for enterprises, has received $1.1 million in Series A funding to add to the $3 million the company closed on earlier this fall. The funding comes from Icon Venture Partners. 9Lenses earlier investors were Kinetic Ventures and CEB.

Altia Systems, a two-year-old, Cupertino, Calif.-based company that makes video and Web collaboration software, has raised new funding from Naya Ventures, a two-year-old venture fund specializing in mobile and cloud companies in the U.S. and India. Altia isn’t breaking out the amount of Naya’s investment but says it has raised $6.7 million to date.

Brighter, a two-year-old, Santa Monica, Calif.-based company whose online marketplace is used to connect people with new dentists, has raised $15 million in Series C funding led by Tenaya Capital. Previous investors Mayfield Fund and Benchmark also participated. The company has raised $28 million to date.

Calithera Biosciences, a 3.5-year-old, South San Francisco, Calif.-based biotech company that develops cancer therapies, has closed $35 million in Series D financing. Adage Capital Partners led the round, with participation from Longwood Fund, Morgenthaler Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures and Delphi Ventures. The company has raised roughly $90 million to date.

IfOnly, a 22-month-old, San Francisco-based startup that raises money for charity by enlisting experts in cooking, sports and entertainment to offer “life-enriching experiences,” has raised $12 million in funding. The company had earlier raised $3 million. Its backers include New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, American Express Ventures, and Allen & Co., along with numerous high-profile operators. Among them are Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Nextdoor founder Nirav Tolia, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

Jibe, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based company that makes cloud-based recruiting software, has secured a $4 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank just eight months after raising a $10 million, Series B round that was led by Longworth Venture Partners and included Polaris Partners, Lerer Ventures, DFJ Gotham, and Thrive Capital. The company has raised around $17 million in equity altogether.

Layer, a seven-month-old, San Francisco-based company that promises to help developers build messaging, voice, and video into their apps in minutes, has raised $6 million from a syndicate of investors that includes Greycroft Partners, Data Collective, CrunchFund, e.ventures, FUEL Capital, and SV Angel. The young company had earlier raised $1.5 million from many of the same investors.

Pixlee, an 18-month-old San Francisco-based company that helps brands create user-generated advertising campaigns (using photos and videos produced by customers) has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. The company’s backers include Andreessen Horowitz, XSeed Capital, Rothenberg Ventures, angel investor Ariel Polar and Mark Gorenberg, a longtime managing director at the venture firm Hummer Winblad.

Qliance Medical, a seven-year-old, Seattle-based company that operates health clinics, has raised $5.5 million, according to an SEC filing that was flagged by Geekwire. Qliance already counts Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, comedian Drew Carey, Second Avenue Partners, New Atlantic Ventures, and Clear Fir Partners among its investors. This newest round of funding appears to bring Qliance’s total funding to date to roughly $32 million.

Rockabox, a five-year-old, London-based startup that offers targeted video distribution and engagement software to brands, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Notion Capital. Existing investors Frog Capital and fourteen17 also participated in the round.

Securus Medical Group, a two-year-old, Cleveland, Oh.-based medical device company, has raised $6.5 million in Series B financing. New investor 3X5 Special Opportunity Fund led the round with participation from RiverVest Venture Partners and the University of Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups program. Securus is developing clinical tools to monitor core body temperature within body cavities.

Trustev, a year-old, Cork, Ireland-based company focused on online identity verification, has raised $3 million in seed funding from Greycroft Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, ACT Venture Capital, Enterprise Ireland, and Wayra.

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New Funds

Akkadian Ventures, a San Francisco-based firm that purchases stock in private companies from entrepreneurs, early employees and angel investors, appears to be raising more capital, judging by two new SEC filings. Akkadian Entrepreneurs III, LP doesn’t list a target but officially began fundraising two weeks ago and has closed on $3.12 million, according to its Form D. A separate filing, for Akkadian Holdings III, LP, shows that Akkadian has raised a separate $2.75 million pool. Last year, the firm raised a $22 million fund.

The life-sciences focused firm venBio — a private equity and venture capital outfit that invests across early- to late-stage companies, as well as in spin-outs, PIPEs, and mezzanine deals — appears to be raising a fresh $60 million, according to an SEC filing. The firm, which has offices in San Francisco and New York, began fundraising for its current vehicle in 2010, according to its Form D. It closed on $177 million last year; its latest filing lists its new target as $237 million.

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IPOs

How much do investors love ad tech? We might learn more today when Criteo, the French ad retargeting company begins trading its American Depositary Shares (ADS) on the Nasdaq under the “CRTO” ticker. Early indications are that it will do just fine. On Monday, Criteo sold 8.08 million ADS, up from a previously planned 7.2 million shares; it also raised its expected price range to $27 and $29 per share from its previous $23 to $26 per share range. 

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Exits

Perka, a 2.5-year-old, Portland, Ore.-based creator of mobile loyalty programs for small- and mid-size businesses, has been acquired by the e-commerce and payment processing company First Data Corp. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Perka will continue to operate autonomously for now. TechCrunch has a good overview of what First Data is aiming to do with Perka, along with another recent acquisition, the mobile payments startup Clover. First Data is itself owned by the private equity firm KKR.

Soluto, a five-year-old Tel Aviv-based company whose software helps manage PCs and other devices remotely, has been acquired for $100 million by Asurion Corporation, reports Globes. Asurion, based in Nashville, Tenn., sells insurance for phone and other electronic devices. Soluto’s founders own at least 20 percent of the company, reports Globes. Other investors, who’d given the company $18 million over the years, include Index Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Giza Venture Capital, Proxima Ventures, and CrunchFund.

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Data

Pitchbook has released its fourth-quarter venture capital valuations and trends report. Among the report’s most interesting findings: Median pre-money valuations are at a ten-year high. Valuations for seed and Series D or later rounds shot up 100 percent and 116 percent, respectively, between 2009 and the third quarter of this year. And the number of venture deals that included liquidation participation (both capped and uncapped) has fallen from 71 percent in 2008 to less than 35 percent over the first three quarters of this year. You can download the full report here.

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Happenings

It’s not too late to descend on the three-day ARM TechCon 2013 conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the Bay Area, where 5,000 hardware and software engineers will ostensibly be milling around later today. Here’s more information.

The second day of VentureBeat‘s GamesBeat conference gets underway today in Redwood City, south of San Francisco. You can click here for more details.

RSA is also into the second day of its Europe 2013 conference in Amsterdam. Here are the details.

And kicking off today in Dublin, Ireland: Web Summit, a two-day conference that features no end of big industry names, including Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell, Box cofounder and CEO Aaron Levie, and Kevin Rose of Google Ventures. You can learn much more about what’s happening and when here.

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People

Steve Jobs‘s childhood home on Crist Drive in Los Altos — a one-story ranch where Jobs built the first Apple computers, aided by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Jobs’s younger sister Patricia — has been added to a list of historic Los Altos properties, reports the SJ Merc. You can read more about it here.

Arthur Johnson is joining the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz as an operating partner focused on corporate development, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack. Johnson was most recently the COO of Cisco’s WebEx group. Before Cisco, Johnson held biz dev positions at Rocket Lawyer and Intuit.

Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of the investment firm The Social+Capital Partnership, owns the equivalent of $5 million in bitcoin. He wants to triple his holdings, too, reports TechCrunch.

Kanye West cozies up to yet another tech entrepreneur: Tony Hsieh of Zappos and Las Vegas’s Downtown Project. (How long before West launches his own venture capital fund?)

Tom Wheeler, a longtime wireless industry lobbyist who in 2005 became a managing director at the venture capital firm Core Capital in Washington, D.C., has a new job. Yesterday, he was confirmed to be the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

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Job Listings

Facebook is looking for a business development manager to join the company’s Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. The ideal candidate is “obsessed with technology, social media and business strategy” and has at least six years of related business development experience at an Internet or other tech company. You can apply here.

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Essential Reads

Twitter pulls a Facebook, adding photos and videos to users’ Twitter streams, largely in order to attract and accommodate more advertising.

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Detours

Strategies for getting kids to fluently speak more than one language.

The many faces of Lou Reed.

Seventy-five years ago today, one million American thought aliens had invaded earth.

Would you like to join my start-down?

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Retail Therapy

Balls of steel. Get some.

Vinyl Me, Please. It’s a new record club founded by DJs who will send you a new release or vintage vinyl album; a limited edition piece of art inspired by the album; a weekly, curated playlist tailored expressly to your taste; and a cocktail pairing for your listening pleasure — all for $23 a month. Sign us up! (H/T: Huckleberry.)

Introducing Bongo, a Bluetooth speaker made of bamboo and hemp cloth. Ideal for lovers of retro design and actor Woody Harrelson.

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