Really, people? Senate leaders are still deadlocked over budget negotiations in Washington — and the debt ceiling deadline is just three days away.

—–

SilverRide Bets On Offline Social Networking, for the Older Set

Last month, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) unanimously approved new regulations condoning ride-sharing services like Lyft and Sidecar. But the new legal framework could also breathe new life into lesser-known companies such a SilverRide, a six-year-old company whose name may be its biggest liability.

At first glance, SilverRide sounds like an Uber for seniors, but its focus actually extends well beyond transporting the elderly. “Transportation is 20 percent of what we do,” says founder Jeff Maltz over coffee near SilverRide’s San Francisco offices. The company’s primary focus is “championing socialization for seniors.”

It’s a big market. The senior population is growing steadily. By 2030, roughly 20 percent of Americans will be 65 years or older, up from 12.5 percent today.

More important, scientists are increasingly discovering how important socialization is for the elderly. Just last month, University of Missouri researchers published findings around what happens when seniors stop driving. Among their conclusions was that seniors’ health and happiness meaningfully declined. Social connectedness also helps the immune system to work better, lowers stress hormones, and can delay memory loss, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.

SilverRide offers seniors the chance to get outside the home and interact with others. For $85 an hour, the company’s drivers will escort the elderly to shop at the grocery store, to see a movie, or to pick up grandchildren for an ice cream outing, among other things. (Seventy percent of the time, drivers join riders in their activities.) In its six-year history, it has orchestrated 150,000 rides for more than 3,500 clients.

The question is whether SilverRide – which is looking to raise $3 million to expand nationally –  is a big business.

From all outward appearances, the numbers sound good.

According to Maltz, SilverRide is profitable. Currently, the company pays $1000 to acquire a customer, and customers pay $450 a month on average for 24 months.

SilverRide’s expenses also just went down significantly. Up until now, SilverRide has used its own fleet of cars. (The company has a staff of 22 full and part-time employees to pick up seniors and take them out.) But the most recent CPUC regulations change all that. Now, SilverRide’s employees can use their own, commercially insured cars, vastly expanding the potential size of the company’s transportation fleet.

The biggest impediment to SilverRide’s growth may be convincing seniors to pay for something as intangible as an experience. SilverRide is a fairly expensive service, and there may not be a large population of elderly people who understand the service or can justify spending $450 a month on their social lives. (One-third of SilverRides’ customers call the company themselves. The other two thirds of its customers come by way of their children or other senior caregivers.) In fact, Maltz says his biggest competition is a customer’s friends and family.

SilverRide could benefit from the marketing leverage and distribution that a larger health care partner could provide. Maltz says that the company has attracted the attention of “several large health care companies” that are “engaging in pilots” with SilverRide, but he declines to be more specific.

In the meantime, VC-league help with advertising, as well as to build up an executive team, would also go a long way, suggests Maltz. “We have 400 people around the country interested in opening up regional SilverRides,” he says. “This company is ready to blast off and get out there.”

New Fundings

Nomi, year-old New York City-based startup that tracks shoppers’ mobile phones to help retail shops gather data on their activity, is close to closing a $10 million in Series B funding, reports AllThingsD. The funding is reportedly being led by new investor Accel Partners. The company’s previous investors in the company’s $3 million Series A include First Round Capital, Greycroft Partners, Forerunner Ventures and SV Angel.

Trafi, a 10-month-old startup based in Vilnius, Lithuanian, has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Practica Capital. The company’s app helps visitors and locals navigate their way around cities — whether on buses, foot, in taxis, or on bicycles — based on existing routes and real-time traffic information information. More here.

Xero, a seven-year-old online accounting software company based in Auckland, New Zealand, has raised a fresh $150 million in capital led by Valar Ventures and Matrix Partners. The company has now raised $244 million to date. Much more here.

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New Funds

Mithril Capital Management, the year-old venture firm backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, has closed its debut fund at $540 million, according to VentureWire. A report in the New York Times last year said that Mithril was starting off with $402 million, and that it counted Thiel himself as its biggest investor. Thiel cofounded Mithril with Ajay Royan, a former managing director at Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital. The firm, which aims to make bets in slightly later-stage companies, most recently invested in the mobile security software company Lookout, which raised $55 million in a round led by Deutsche Telekom.

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Exits

Activision, the world’s largest video games publisher, has bought back $8.2 billion of its own shares from Vivendi, it announced on Friday. The move makes it an independent company once again, with Vivendi now a shareholder with a 12 percent stake.

Antenna Software, a 14-year-old, Jersey City, N.J.-based mobile software company, was acquired Friday by Pegasystems, a business software company in Cambridge, Mass. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Antenna had raised $2.53 million in debt funding last month, according to an SEC filing.

Vet Therapeutics, a San Diego-based company focused on developing therapies for pet cancer and chronic conditions, has been acquired by a bigger player in the space, publicly traded biopharmaceutical company Aratana Therapeutics of Kansas City, Kan. Arantana is paying $30 million in cash, plus 625,000 shares of common stock, and an additional $3 million pay-out if Vet Therapeutics meets certain milestones by the end of next year. Vet Therapeutics investors include Innovis Investments.

Bread, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based social marketing software startup, was acquired on Friday by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. The company had raised $3.5 million in funding, including from Raptor Ventures and individual investors, such as Palantir Technologies cofounder Joe Lonsdale and Lady Gaga’s longtime manager Troy Carter.

Hackermeter, a six-month-old, Portland, Ore.-based startup that aimed to match developers with hiring companies by using code challenge portfolios, has been acquired by Pinterest for an undisclosed amount, TechCrunch reported late Friday. The company had raised money from Y Combinator; it was in the process of trying to raise an additional $750,0000 in funding, reported Techcrunch, which says its service will be shut down and that its cofounders are joining Pinterest as engineers.

Onavo, a three-year-old, Tel Aviv.-based company focused on mobile data analytics, has just been acquired by Facebook for approximately $150 million, reports Techcrunch. The company had raised $13 million from Sequoia Capital, Magma Venture Partners, Horizons Ventures, and Motorola Solutions Venture Group. Much more here.

Waywire, a 16-month-old, New York-based video startup, is being acquired by Web video distributor Magnify, itself a 7-year-old company in New York. AllThingsD is reporting that the acquisition is likely a stock deal. Waywire had raised $1.75 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, and numerous high-profile individuals, including Oprah Winfrey.

—–

People

Alberto Vilar was granted permission to attend a sold-out performance to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night. As readers may remember, Vilar founded Amerindo Investment Advisors, a San Francisco-based investment firm that was later accused of bilking investors out of $22 million. Vilar was sentenced to nine years in prison but he’s been out of bail, and living with an 11 p.m. curfew, since October of last year. Vilar’s lawyers had appealed to a Manhattan federal judge to let Vilar see Tchaikovsky’s “Eugen Onegin,” because Vilar was given free tickets by the conductor. The judge grudgingly gave him until 1:30 a.m.

Arjun Gupta, the founder of Telesoft Partners, gets featured in a New York Times story about high-end matchmaking.

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Happenings

If you’re in San Francisco, you might consider heading to a sustainability conference being hosted by The Verge. Happening at the Palace Hotel, the program kicks off at 1:30. You can check out the various tracks here.

If you’re in New York, you might be interested in O’Reilly’s Velocity engineering conference, which promises attendees a “non-stop ride into the inner workings of Web ops and performance.” It’s a three-day conference; the last scheduled talk today is at 3:30 EST.

BrainTech Israel, which is being hailed as Israel’s first international brain technology conference, also gets underway today in Tel Aviv. The conference runs two days. Here is the program.

—–

Job Listings

ff Venture Capital, the early-stage venture capital fund, is looking for an associate “intern” to work full-time or at least 30 hours a week. The job is in midtown Manhattan and the firm is accepting applications now from current or recent graduate students.

—–

Essential Reads

Jack Dorsey is doing what he can to prove that he’s more than a lucky man.

Netflix is reportedly in talks with several US cable companies with the aim of making its video streaming app available on set-top boxes.

—–

Detour

It isn’t just us. American animals are getting fatter, too.

Smelling peanut butter from a distance may become the easiest, cheapest way to test for early Alzheimer’s.

Alec Baldwin reveals his inner Charlie Rose during the debut of his new weekly talk show on MSNBC.

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Retail Therapy

It’s a little hard to get excited about a sling chair, but this is one exciting sling chair.

This craft beer is named Dave and costs $2,000. Unless Dave comes with a waterproof bag filled with $1,990 inside, we will pass.

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Andreessen Horowitz has decided to largely eschew Series A fundings, with Partner Scott Weiss telling the WSJ that, too often, consumer-facing startups are founded by “MBA types” and that helping companies that are already gaining traction will now be a much greater focus for the firm.

Last week, we argued why, then how, venture capital firms could take advantage of new general solicitation rules. Today, ff Venture Capital becomes the first institutional venture fund to do just that. (See below in New Funds.)

If Washington doesn’t get its act together today, by Monday, Washington D.C. will run out of cash to keep basic services functioning, like public libraries and trash collection.

Does Jeff Bezos Need a Wingman?

Yesterday, Bloomberg published an excerpt from a new book on Jeff Bezos that portrays the billionaire CEO of Amazon as a brilliant but ruthless dictator, one who treats workers “like expendable resources.”

Michael Maccoby, a psychoanalyst who writes about business executives and teaches leadership at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, doesn’t view Bezos’s tendencies to mistreat employees as his biggest liability, though. Rather, it’s his lack of a strong number two.

Amazon’s success has certainly been stunning. As the book points out, 20-year-old Amazon now has roughly $75 billion in annual revenue, a $140 billion market cap, and nearly 100,000 full-time and part-time employees, up 40 percent from last year. In late summer, Bezos personally acquired the Washington Post newspaper and some related properties for $250 million.

Maccoby, who has worked closely with 40 CEOs over the years but has studied many more, thinks Bezos resembles “narcissistic visionaries” like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates — with one major exception. All had a right-hand man; Bezos seemingly does not. And “that kind of personality needs to have strong partners who balance them and who complement their skills,” insists Maccoby.

Maccoby points to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who, in the company’s earlier days, could dream about the future while sidekick Steve Ballmer obsessed about Microsoft’s day-to-day operations. Maccoby also cites Steve Jobs’ relationships, first with his Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and much later with Apple executives Tim Cook and Jony Ive. And there is Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who has brought in a string of executives over the years, only to chew them up and spit them out. (Ellison’s current number two is co-president Mark Hurd.)

Asked whether Bezos might be an exception to the rule, Maccoby says, “So far, so good.” Still, he thinks Amazon’s decision to forego profits in favor of reinvestment are reminiscent of numerous endeavors throughout history, including those of, gulp, Napoleon.

It’s not necessarily an unfavorable comparison. Both enjoyed success at a young age, both rejected the established wisdom, and both took on seemingly invincible enemies and defeated them. If historians are to be believed, Napoleon – like Bezos – also had unrivaled intellectual powers and an astonishing capacity to integrate information from different disciplines.

Of course, as brilliant as Napoleon was, he eventually pushed his luck, ignoring repeated advice not to invade Russia. Says Maccoby: “Napoleon was very successful as long as he had Talleyrand as his foreign minister.” When he lost Talleyrand, he spun out of control.

“The danger with someone like Bezos is the same danger that Napoleon had,” Maccoby adds. Without enough pushback, “you can go too far.”

New Fundings

AboutOne, a three-year-old, Malvern, Pa.-based company behind an online family mangement journal platform, has raised $1.79 million in a partial raise, according to an SEC filing. The company had previous raised nearly $2 million from the Golden Seeds angel network.

Achates Power, a nine-year-old, San Diego-based developer of fuel-efficient combustion engines, has raised a $35.2 million Series C round from existing investors Sequoia Capital, RockPort Capital Partners, Madrone Capital Partners, InterWest Partners and Triangle Peak Partners.

GreenWave Reality, a five-year-old, Irvine, Calif.-based company that makes home energy management devices and related software, has raised $19 million in Series B funding led by The Westly Group, with participation from Craton Equity Partners.

Lookout, a six-year-old San Francisco-based company that makes software that protects personal devices, has raised $55 million in new funding. Deutsche Telekom led the round, which included participation from Qualcomm Ventures, Greylock Partners, Mithril Capital and previous investors Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The company has raised roughly $130 million since 2009.

Newsela, a new, New York-based site that features daily news articles from around the country, at five different reading levels, has closed $1.2 million in seed funding led by New Schools Venture Fund and Kapor Capital.

Silver Ridge Power — an Arlington, Va.-based joint venture between The AES Corporation and Riverstone Holdings that is developing and will operate numerous solar power plants — has received $103 million from Google for its Mount Signal Solar project, based in Imperial County, Calif. The plant is expected to be up and running next year, and has agreed to sell its output to the San Diego Gas & Electric Company.

Telepath, a young, U.K.-based consultancy focused making better sense of fleet management data for its customers, has raised $758,000 in seed funding from The North West Fund for Venture Capital and Enterprise Ventures.

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New Funds

Today, 5-year-old, New York-based ff Venture Capital becomes the first venture firm to embrace the new general solicitation rules. This morning, in fact, it’s announcing, quite publicly, that it’s raising between $50 million and $70 million for its third fund, ff Rose Venture Capital Fund. In a blog post, founding partner John Frankel notes that with venture capital itself “getting disrupted,” “[w]e wholeheartedly support the reinvention that comes along with it.” A spokeswoman tells me that the firm plans to use “21st century technologies” including “online media, social media channels, television, and email” to reach investors. The firm’s last fund, a $27 million vehicle called ff Silver, closed in 2010. The firm claims to have “consistently generated a gross IRR on invested capital of 30 percent.”

London has a new, $60 million, early-stage venture fund called Episode 1 (after a “Star Wars” movie, really). Episode 1 combines public and private money, so it can fund only U.K.-based startups or companies that have a significant presence in the country, but that’s the point of the fund anyway. You can read much more about it here.

Nextview Ventures, a three-year-old, Boston-based seed-stage fund is raising a second fund, according to an SEC filing, which doesn’t list a target. Nextview focuses on seed-stage, Internet-enabled startups, and has already backed roughly two dozen companies. One of its newest portfolio companies is Sunrise, a New York-based maker of a free calendar app; another is the online payment platform Plastiq, based in Boston.

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Exits

TenMarks, a five-year-old, Burlingame, Calif.-based company that produces an online math curriculum, is being acquired by Amazon, reports Techcrunch. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. TenMarks has raised $4.6 million in venture and debt financing over the years, including from Catamount Ventures and Birchmere Ventures.

Familiar, two-year-old, Seattle-based private photo and video sharing service, has been bought by Taser, a company known best for its stun guns. The company will incorporate Familiar’s technology into its software and cloud services operation, Evidence.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Familiar has raised $1.3 million from Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures and others. One of its first checks came from entrepreneur-investor brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi.

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IPOs

Criteo, the eight-year-old, Paris-based performance display advertising company, announced terms for its IPO yesterday. It plans to raise $176 million by offering 7.2 million shares at a price range of $23 to $26, for a market value of roughly $1.5 billion.

Trevena, a six-year-old, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company based in King of Prussia, Pa., has filed to go public, though the number of shares and pricing terms have yet to be decided. Trevena has raised roughly $130 million from investors; its principal stockholders include Alta Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Polaris Partners, each of which own 20.8 percent of the company.

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People

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has purchased the four homes surrounding his own Palo Alto house for a collective $30 million, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Zuckerberg is leasing the homes back to their owners; he decided to purchase the properties after learning of a developer’s plans to buy one of the parcels, build a huge house atop it, then advertise its proximity to Zuckerberg.

Mike Hopkins, a Fox executive, is poised to become Hulu’s new CEO, reports Bloomberg. Hopkins would replace Andy Forsell, who has been the company’s acting CEO since March.

Vivian Schiller, chief digital officer at NBC News, is about to become Twitter‘s head of news, reports AllThingsD, though Schiller is expected to take time off in between jobs. Much more here.

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Job Listings

A Khosla Ventures-backed portfolio company in New York is looking for a director of digital marketing. Applicants should have at least 8 years of experience in digital marketing, several years of management experience, and familiarity with the ad tech industry, among other things.

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Essential Reads

A first look inside Google‘s futuristic quantum lab.

—–

Detour

The bigger the driver’s seat, the (much) higher the chances that someone will double-park their car.

The secret factor in China’s housing bubble? Mistresses!

—–

Retail Therapy

This wallet is made of buttery soft vegetable tanned bridle leather from Wickett & Craig of Pennsylvania. Is yours?

If you want to look this cool this fall, dress like a lumberjack! You heard it here first. No one has ever said it before anywhere (ever).

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Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warns lawmakers that he’ll be unable to guarantee payments to any group – whether Social Security recipients or U.S. bondholders – unless Congress approves an increase in the federal debt limit.

A Global VC Shares His World View

Mathias Schilling is the cofounder and managing partner of e.ventures, an early-stage venture firm that invests out of dedicated funds in five geographies: the U.S., Russia, Germany, Asia, and Brazil. The vantage point gives Schilling a unique perspective on how the world sees the U.S. debt crisis. During a quick chat yesterday, he told me his partners are, in a word, “confused.” We also talked about what he’s seeing around the globe.

You have these dedicated funds where you share carry. Do you sign off on deals as individual firms?

We look at every region very locally, but we [employ] different structures for different deals. Sometimes, we’ll have an investment committee where I’ll participate in the decision-making. Sometimes, we don’t get involved at all. Our mantra is to keep local teams to two to three partners so we can make decisions quickly.

Last year, you and Redpoint Ventures joined forces for your Brazil-focused venture fund, raising $130 million. What are you seeing there in late 2013?

Brazil has had many lost decades, including after 2000. So many basic [online] categories still haven’t been created and funded. There’s also a lack of capital, and entrepreneurship culture, and there’s a difficult regulatory environment. But I’m very positive on Brazil. We’re not only seeing copycats, which obviously makes sense, as large categories need to be created; we’re also seeing a lot of very high quality entrepreneurs. We’ve [backed]10 companies in the last 18 months or so, in e-commerce, financial services, advertising, travel.

Right now, it’s cooled off on a macro level, in terms of investors going there, because if you aren’t local and make a commitment to stay, it’s very difficult. It puts us in a good position there.

What can you share about the other markets you’ve entered?

Japan is an interesting market. It’s traditionally been a tough venture market – people are very hierarchical and risk averse, which is also true of Brazil and, to some extent, Germany. But on the mobile side, we’re seeing a lot of advanced things happening. Half of Android’s revenue is coming from apps being made in Japan and South Korea.

Berlin is building great critical mass; it’s cheap, exciting, and innovative. Russia is more technology driven, with a lot of very strong engineering. But it lacks general management skills.

Each is distinct, but I believe you have to go into these markets and build a commitment there and stay for the long run, because I don’t think you can stop the trend. We are globalizing.

Is entrepreneurship as widely celebrated in other parts of the world?

I think it’s cool to be an entrepreneur in most countries at this point. Everyone knows some fantastic success story of some guy who really did it. And some of these people really had to pull through to be the first [success story], so they’re great role models.

Culturally and psychologically, people don’t want to work for big companies anymore.

I gather the rest of the world is very concerned by the U.S. government right now. What are you hearing from your far-flung partners about this mess?

I think people are speechless. Honestly, they’re shrugging their shoulders. They don’t get what’s happening and why. And to some extent, it is a bigger deal elsewhere than it is here. They think it will be resolved. It has to be resolved.

New Fundings

BizBrag, a nearly three-year-old Baltimore, Md.-based platform that connects advertisers with local social networking feeds, is raising $600,000 in seed funding, according to an SEC filing. It has so far raised $200K, including from Bluewater International, an investment firm in Washington, D.C.

Blab, a two-old Seattle-based analytics company that tries to help customers understand where social media conversations are headed, has raised $342,000 in debt, according to an SEC filing that shows the company is looking for up to $2.5 million. The company has raised nearly $3.6 million to date.

City Notes, a year-old, Brooklyn, NY-based mobile city guide cofounded by former tech writer and editor Dan Frommer, is looking to raise up to $800,000 in debt, according to an SEC filing. The company’s cofounder, Mark Dorison, formerly a director of application development at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, is also listed on the filing.

CTI Towers, a wireless tower operator that is based in Franklin, Mass., has raised $30 million in debt financing, just as it has completed an acquisition of five towers from an unnamed wireless carrier for undisclosed terms. CTI Towers launched two years ago with a portfolio of roughly 800 towers that were previously owned and operated by Comcast Cable subsidiaries. It’s backed by Comcast Ventures.

Refresh, an 18-month-old, Palo Alto-based company whose mobile application delivers users an instant dossier about people based on what’s publicly available about them, has raised a $10 million Series A round from Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Foundation Capital.

Smartling, a four-year-old, New York-based startup that helps its business customers understand and interact with their global customers by helping them translate their sites, apps, and more, has raised a $24 million Series C round led by Tenaya Capital. Other investors in the round included Harmony Partners, Venrock, IDG Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures and First Round Capital. The company has raised a little more than $38 million to date.

Splice, a new, online workflow platform for music creators that lets that back up their songs, share changes and more, has raised $2.75 million in seed funding led by Union Square Ventures. Other investors in the round included True Ventures, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital and Code Advisors. Splice has an office in New York and in Santa Monica.

TempoDB, a two-year-old, Chicago-based database service for time series data — everything from measuring networking latencies to heart rates — has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners, with participation from Chicago Ventures and Divergent Ventures. TempoDB had raised roughly a million dollars in seed funding previously, including from Data Collective and TechStars.

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Fund News

Alibaba, the China-based e-commerce juggernaut is apparently getting into yet another business, acquiring a 51 percent stake in a Chinese mutual fund called THFund for more than $190 million. In summer, Alibaba’s payment service, Alipay, and THFund launched a mutual fund called Yuebao; consumers can invest in Yuebao via their Alipay accounts.

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Exits

Validity, 13-year-old San Jose, Calif., company that makes sensors used in biometric identification, is being purchased for $92.5 million in cash and stock, reports VentureBeat. The acquiring company, Synaptics, a publicly traded manufacturer of touch pads, will pay up to $255 million for Validity based on performance targets over time. Validity had raised $82 million over the years, including from TeleSoft Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Panorama Capital and individuals like Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff and famed angel investor Ram Shriram.

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IPOs

Looks like Twitter has accidentally revealed its IPO date.

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People

Mike Gridley has joined Akkadian Ventures, a direct secondary investment firm based in San Francisco, as a managing director. Gridley was most recently a managing director at Industry Ventures in San Francisco, which he joined in 2004. Before Industry Ventures, Gridley worked as an associate at BV Capital/Bertelsmann Ventures. Akkadian Ventures founder Ben Black has much on Gridley’s new role here.

Zack Urlocker is rejoining Scale Venture Partners as an executive-in-residence. Urlocker was most recently chief operating officer at the venture-backed customer support platform company Zendesk, which he joined in December 2010. Between September 2010 until his appointment at Zendesk, he worked with ScaleVP as an EIR, evaluating new investment opportunities in data and NoSQL companies.

Gregory Silva is also joining Scale Venture Partners, as a new associate. Silva was most recently an investment banking analyst at Piper Jaffray and briefly before that, Silva worked as a financial analyst for Bayer HealthCare.

Joe Montana, the legendary San Francisco 49ers quarterback, has a new pastime in — you guessed it — technology investing.

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Happenings

If you’re in Cambridge, Mass., it isn’t too late to check out Emtech, an emerging tech conference being hosted by MIT Technology Review.

If you happen to be in Kiev, Ukraine, you might hustle over to the two-day IDCEE conference, where Alan Patricof of Greycroft Partners, Pavel Bogdanov of Almaz Capital Partners and many other investors will be speaking, mingling, and hearing startup pitches.

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Job Listings

WI Harper, a venture capital firm that focuses on early and early expansion investments in Mainland China, Taiwan and Silicon Valley, is looking for a venture capital analyst intern at its office in San Francisco’s Financial District. Applicants should have a GPA of 3.5 or higher; fluency in reading and writing English, along with speaking Mandarin, are big plusses.

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Essential Reads

Bloomberg publishes a juicy excerpt of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by its senior writer, Brad Stone. One small snippet: “The one unguarded thing about Bezos is his laugh-a pulsing, mirthful bray that he leans into while craning his neck back. He unleashes it often, even when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else. And it startles people. ‘You can’t misunderstand it,’ says Rick Dalzell, Amazon’s former chief information officer, who says Bezos often wields his laugh when others fail to meet his lofty standards. ‘It’s disarming and punishing. He’s punishing you.’”

In its S-1, Twitter says that through the “eyes of management,” the company had a profit of just over $21 million in the first six months of the year. Through an accountant’s eyes, though, Twitter actually lost just over $69 million.

Revenue from mobile ads accounted for 15 percent of Internet advertising’s $21 billion haul in the first half of this year, says the Internet Advertising Bureau. That’s more than double its market share this time last year.

——–

Detour

“Who was that muscle man who decided that he’d get more money from Amazon than from [Crown Publishing] and sold seventeen books when he’d sold six hundred thousand before? He swan dived into the pavement.”  — Legendary literary agent Andrew Wylie on Tim Ferriss, Amazon, and dealing with young writers.

Examining the word “bro.”

Check out your timid first tweet (and anyone else’s) right here.

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Retail Therapy

We can’t imagine who’d want this watch for themselves, but it would make a pretty clever parting gift for a terrible roommate or evil landlord.

If you love maple syrup and you love bourbon, you are going to love this smoked maple bourbon. (Not for pancakes.)

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Correction: Yesterday, we mistakenly reported that App Nexus cofounder and president Michael Rubenstein was leaving the company, when in fact App Nexus cofounder and CTO Michael Nolet is leaving. Rubenstein is now replacing Nolet on the board. We sincerely regret the error. 

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OMG. Apple is reportedly hosting an invitation-only event to roll out new stuff on October 22.Our lawmakers are truly unbelievable. Now they’re trying to open the government piece by piece to ease the political pressure they’re feeling.

We’re entering week two of the shutdown with no end in sight. On talk shows yesterday morning, House Speaker John Boehner rejected continued calls to reopen the government and raise the federal debt limit unless President Obama plays ball, saying, “He knows what my phone number is. All he has to do is call.” [Eye roll. Hair pull. Screams.]

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Dick Costolo’s Joke Bombs, on Twitter

Over the weekend, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo finally did something that millions of Twitter users have done before him: He tweeted a comment that’s attracting unwanted attention.

The tweet was prompted by a New York Times report that Twitter has just one woman among its top officials. The story includes comments from academic Vivek Wadwha, who ascribed Twitter’s gender imbalance to “elite arrogance” and the “same male chauvinistic thinking” that permeates Silicon Valley. Costolo took to Twitter Friday night to call Wadwha the “Carrot Top of academic sources.”

Coming from anyone else, the tweet might have been mildly amusing if a bit mean-spirited — typical Twitter fare, in short. Coming from Costolo, it was a surprising misstep. Twitter is in its quiet period. Within weeks, it will be a public company. So why not just keep quiet until then?

In shooting the messenger and not addressing the message itself, Costolo also inadvertently helped feed people’s worst perceptions of Twitter, including that it’s not always a friendly place to hang out. As Josh Constine observed in a recent TechCrunch piece, many users already avoid or abandon Twitter because of its competitive undertones and the pressure they feel to be “thought leaders.”

Half a day after Costolo published his tweet, one such thought leader, the blogger-entrepreneur Anil Dash, decided to challenge him on it. Tweeting to his 477,525 followers, Dash said that he was “sorely disappointed to see @dickc respond defensively to criticisms of industry sexism. Why not just lead, as Twitter does on free speech?”

After a few defensive exchanges with Dash and others on the topic, Costolo suggested that he’s very mindful of the gender issue at Twitter, tweeting: “I *think* I have an acute understanding of the topic & host of related issues. Of course, proof is in deeds.”  (In a display of deference to Costolo that has also become de rigueur among Twitter’s most astute users, Dash “favorited” each of Costolo’s responses before responding to them.)

Whether there will be lingering damage from Costolo’s tweet remains to be seen. Plenty of people have lost their jobs over less, but Twitter doesn’t seem inclined to ditch its star CEO any time soon.

As for Carrot Top, a comic long known for his red hair and his use of props, no one yet knows how he feels about being dragged into the conversation. His publicity team didn’t respond to questions sent to them yesterday morning.

It’s worth noting that Costolo himself once tried to be a stand-up comic, an effort that led to zero job offers, as he shared during an on-stage interview in May. “It was one part of [my career] strategy,” he’d said, as the crowd erupted with laughter.

New Fundings

ERN, a two-year-old, London-based “big data” company focused on helping its banking customers create loyalty programs, has raised $1 million from undisclosed sources, bringing the total amount of capital raised by the company to date to $5.6 million.

Fastacash, a two-year-old, Singapore-based social payments platform, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Jungle Ventures, Spring Singapore, and Spring SEEDS Capital.

Lark, a three-year-old, Mountain View., Calif.-based maker of a smart wristband and app, has raised $3.1 million of a $3.6 million round of funding, according to an SEC filing. According to TechCrunch, which spied the filing on Friday, Lark has previously raised $1 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, CrunchFund and others.

Loom, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s taking on Apple’s iCloud as a better storage solution, has raised $1.4 million from Google Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Tencent and numerous angel investors among others.

MongoDB, a six-year-old, New York-based data management company, has raised $150 million from new investors Altimeter Capital, Salesforce.com and T. Rowe Price. The firms were joined by existing investors Intel Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Red Hat and Sequoia Capital. To date, MongoDB has raised roughly $230 million from investors.

Silk, a year-old, Amsterdam-based Web data-crunching platform designed for so-called knowledge workers, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding, led by New Enterprise Associates and Atomico. The company has previously raised $435,000, including from Atomico.

Swoon Editions, a two-year-old, London-based company, has raised $1.93 million in new funding from Index Ventures, Octopus Investments and angel investors. The company, formerly known as Decoholic, is a platform for handcrafted furniture makers to sell their wares.

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Exits

Lexmark International of Lexington, Ky., has acquired the healthcare software company Pacsgear, whose technology helps customers manage and share medical images, as well as integrate them with their picture archives and electronic medical records. The 13-year-old, Pleasanton, Calif.-based company was purchased for $54 million in cash and will be folded into the Lexmark subsidiary Perceptive Software.

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IPOs

Potbelly Sandwich Shop, the sandwich chain, saw its shares, priced at $14, soar during their first day of public trading on Friday, closing at $30.77, or up 120 percent for the day. The company’s biggest shareholders are Maveron, American Securities, Oak Investment Partners, Oxford Capital Group, and Benchmark Capital, whose pre-IPO stakes were 28.2 percent, 12.9 percent, 12.2 percent, 7.9 percent, and 7.7 percent, respectively.

GlycoMimetics, a 10-year-old, Gaithersburg, Md.-based clinical-stage biotech company that is developing treatments for orphan diseases, filed to go public on Friday. The company’s biggest shareholder is New Enterprise Associates, which owns 75.2 percent of the company. Genzyme Corporation owns another 11.6 percent. The company is looking to raise up to $86 million.

Mavenir Systems, an eight-year-old, Richardson, Tx.-based company focused on mobile communications infrastructure, filed to go public on Friday in an effort to raise around $85 million. Its biggest shareholders include North Bridge Venture Partners, Austin Ventures, Alloy Ventures, August Capital, and Cisco Systems, which own 24.5 percent, 23.1 percent, 17.1 percent, 16.3 percent, and 10.9 percent of Mavenir, respectively.

Karyopharm Therapeutics, a four-year-old, Newton, Mass.-based cancer drug company, also filed to go public on Friday. Karyopharm’s biggest shareholders include Chione, Ltd., which Karyopharm’s CEO has described as a Cyprus-based investment vehicle for an unnamed individual. Chione owns 46.8 percent of the company. Other major shareholders include Plio Limited, which owns 14.6 percent, Foresight Capital, which owns 9.4 percent, and Delphi Ventures, which owns 8.2 percent. Karyopharm is looking to raise $80 million.

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People

Jeff Haughton, a 15-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, who rose through the ranks to become co-head of Goldman’s Global Financial Technology group, has left to join 12-year-old FT Partners, a boutique bank in San Francisco that focuses exclusively on financial services and technology. Haughton’s title is managing director.

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Happenings

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Starting today in New York, the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the US Israel Business Council will be partnering for a few days to present 14 Israel-based startups to early-stage investors. More information here.

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Job Listings

Earlier this year, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s investment arm, Vulcan Capital, opened a new office in Palo Alto. Now, it’s looking to hire an associate director to help manage the team’s existing investments and support and identify other investment opportunities. Candidates have to have a tech background and/or investment management experience at a venture capital firm or a related business. Abhishek Agrawal, a former principal at General Atlantic, heads up the office.

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Essential Reads

You’ll probably never read a better story than this about the iPhone.

In San Francisco, entrepreneurship operates on a “much more campaign-based model, where you’re going to crush it for a few years and then be absent for a while,” venture capitalist Roy Bahat tells New Yorker writer Nathan Heller, in this newest examination of the city’s ballooning power.

New York isn’t done with Airbnb. The state’s attorney general has now subpoenaed data about all Airbnb hosts within New York to determine how many are violating New York law, and Airbnb is supposed to turn over the data today, reports The Verge.

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Detour

How realistic is “Homeland”? When it comes to Carrie, pretty realistic, actually, says a former CIA agent, weighing in on last night’s episode.

The broken lives of Fukushima in pictures.

“It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Mother*#%#ers.”

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Retail Therapy

For the cultural anthropologist in your life, here’s an attractive book that documents the fashion, food, and interiors of airlines in different countries across the years.

Check out this very elaborate chart designed to help you find beer based on what you already like. (If you’re really serious about beer, you can order a framed copy for 90 smackers.)

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It’s going to be all Twitter all day (and probably all month), so let’s jump right into it. Here’s Twitter’s S-1, made publicly available for the first time yesterday. Here’s its letter to investors, and here’s the best piece I’ve read about its upcoming offering so far.

Speaking of Twitter, what follows is a feature on one of Twitter’s early investors (Institutional Venture Partners, aka IVP) that I’d promised a couple of days ago. IVP doesn’t qualify as one of Twitter’s “principal shareholders,” unlike Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, DST Global and Rizvi Traverse Management, all of which own at least 5 percent of the company. But IVP did co-lead Twitter’s $35 million Series C round in January 2009, so it’s probably safe to say that if Twitter’s public offering does well, IVP will make out handsomely, too.

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The Rise of Old-Fashioned IVP

When Twitter goes public shortly, you can bet it will be a proud moment for Institutional Venture Partners. But it will be icing on the cake for its investors. Already, 95 of IVP’s 300 portfolio companies have gone public, and IVP’s 32-year internal rate of return (dating back to its 1980 founding) is a stunning 43.2 percent.

Interestingly, IVP has pulled off this hat trick by operating in as proudly an old-fashioned manner as possible.

Unlike many of its peers on Sand Hill Road, for example, IVP’s walls aren’t filled with contemporary art but rather dotted by the same, framed antique prints and maps of Santa Clara Country that have hung there for years.

By design, IVP doesn’t have celebrity investors. Its oldest partner is Norm Fogelsong, a former programmer at Hewlett Packard who joined IVP in 1989 and has remained virtually unknown outside of venture capital circles ever since.

IVP also eschews the popular wisdom that operators make the best venture capitalists. In a recent sit-down, Fogelsong calls venture an “apprenticeship business that you learn over time.” In fact, unlike many firms that cycle their associates out the door after a few years, IVP sends them off to business school, then brings them back and promotes them.

“Assembling a multi-generational team is one of the secrets to our success,” says Todd Chaffee, the IVP general partner who has largely assembled IVP’s current team of six general partners — along with its bench of associates, principals and vice presidents. “It gives us different eyes on every deal, and combines the energy and hustle from the younger team with the experience and insights of the older people.”

Yet there are other ways in which IVP has distinguished itself from the pack.

Though its investments used to run the gamut, the firm decided in 2000 to focus on one area almost exclusively: later-stage companies with between $10 million and $100 million in revenue. Likely, the move has paid off better than the firm could have imagined. During the go-go dot com era, emerging companies with between $10 million and $30 million in revenue could go public with the help of a boutique bank. But today’s companies need revenue in the $100 million range to go public, meaning they often need late-stage capital from firms like IVP.

More, unlike some industry peers that have collected billions of dollars from their limited partners in recent years, IVP has grown steadily, its fund sizes slowly expanding as its commitments to later-stage companies have grown. Over its last five funds, IVP has raised $225 million, $300 million, $600 million, $750 million, and $1 billion, a sum it closed on last year.

The money still adds up. Three billion dollars of the $4 billion that IVP has raised in its entire history has poured in over the last 13 years. But Fogelsong shrugs off any suggestion that it could jeopardize IVP’s continued ability to deliver big returns. “If you’re going to be a late-stage investor, investing $30 million at a time, you can’t do that with a $100 million fund.”

Which raises one final point. IVP makes just 10 to 12 investments annually, each chosen from the pool of roughly 2,000 companies it sees each year. Pacing itself means turning down some attractive deals. But sounding every bit the Stanford engineering student he once was, Fogelsong says the “idea is to make three to five times our money in three to five years, for a 41 percent internal rate of return. We don’t care how much of a company we own. What we want is to get our capital deployed properly in the best companies at a proper valuation.”

Fogelsong shoots me a confident smile. “We have a very tight, well-defined investment strategy,” he says.

It’s not not flashy. It’s not novel. Very plainly, though, it works.

New Fundings

9Slides, a two-year-old, Redmond, Wa.-based company that makes online presentation software, is raising $1 million in debt, according to an SEC filing. Earlier this year, the company raised $500,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups and individual investors, including Terrapass co-founders Karl Ulrich and Tom Miner.

Gobstopper, a year-old, San Francisco-based company whose e-learning tools help educators create questions and quizzes within the text of a digitized assignment, has raised $1.5 million in a round led by Relay Ventures, according to an SEC filing.

Koality, a year-old, San Francisco-based company whose tools helps engineers test their products, has raised $1.8 million in seed funding led by Founders Fund. Other investors in the round include Webb Investment Network, Index Ventures, UJ Ventures, Felicis Ventures and numerous angel investors.

SimplyInsured, a year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based company that helps consumers and businesses review competing health insurance plans to estimate their out-of-pocket costs, has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator, along with a line of individual investors.

ZoomCar, an India-based car rental company, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by Empire Angels of New York. Other investors in the round include Funders Club, Basset Investment Group and Lady Barbara Judge, the former SEC commissioner. The company has raised $1.6 million to date, including from former Treasury secretary Larry Summers.

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Exits

Cue, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes a personal assistant app, has been acquired by Apple for between $40 million and $60 million, reports TechCrunch. The company had raised $4.7 million from Sequoia Capital, Lerer Ventures, Index Ventures, and SV Angel among others.

AdReady, a seven-year-old, Seattle-based online advertising company that had raised $17.8 million over the years, has been acquired by CPXi, a digital media holding company. Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed, though the companies said that AdReady will operate as an independent division of CPXi. AdReady’s investors include Madrona Venture Group, Bain Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

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IPOs

Goldman Sachs has jumped to the top of the U.S. technology media and Internet IPO rankings this year, with Morgan Stanley second, says Bloomberg.

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People

OnDeck, a six-year-old, small business lender with offices in New York, Virginia and Colorado, has named Aimee Fearon as VP of financial planning and analysis, and Lorna Hagen as VP of people operations. Fearon comes to Ondeck from Clear  Channel Media and Entertainment, where she was VP of finance; Hagen joins from  where she served as VP of finance. And, prior to joining OnDeck, Hagen was at Ann Inc., the parent company of Ann Taylor and Loft, where she was VP of human resources.ANN INC., where she served as VP of Human Resources. Ondeck has raised more than $100 million over the years, including from RRE Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SAP Ventures, and Institutional Venture Partners.

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Job Listings

Comcast Ventures, the venture arm of Comcast Corporation, is looking for an an associate in New York City. You can learn more here.

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Essential Reads

Vanity Fair’s New Establishment is out and it’s boringly predictable as always yet impossible not to read. In one interesting twist, Vanity Fair threw Zynga founder Mark Pincus overboard this year but included his wife, Ali Pincus, cofounder of the online home marketplace One Kings Lane. Pincus, writes Vanity Fair, “has long played second fiddle in the tech press to her husband.” Expect that to change if One Kings Lane eventually stages a more successful IPO.

When Twitter goes public, one of the biggest winners will be 47-year-old financier Suhail Rizvi, who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his picture from the Internet, says Reuters.

Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reports on a very interesting detail in Twitter’s filing. Though cofounder Evan Williams relinquished day-to-day control of Twitter two years ago, he managed to hold on to all the voting rights associated with the shares owned by cofounder Jack Dorsey. (Dorsey, readers likely recall, was pushed out of the company in 2008, but rejoined it the same month that Williams left.)

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Detour

Your status updates give away your gender and, for the most part, your age, according to the largest ever study of language use and personality by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

Here’s a fascinating look at the extensive help that American pig breeders provide to visiting farmers from China, where the average person consume 86 pounds of pork per year.

Behind Siri, there is a real woman. This is that woman.

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Retail Therapy

You might feel a little like you’re wearing clown shoes, but running experts say these Hoka One Ones are great for absorbing shock.

We just finished this collection of short stories and highly recommend it. (So does the New York Times.)

Finally(!), an ice scraper for the car owner who means business.

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Steve Ballmer is out; now three top Microsoft shareholders want Bill Gates to scoot along, too.

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Todd Chaffee on IVP’s Twitter Stake: Fred Wilson was “Instrumental”

Any day now, it’s expected that Twitter will make its IPO filing public, revealing exactly who owns what.

No one yet knows Institutional Venture Partners’s stake in Twitter, but based on the $35 million Series C round for the company that IVP led in January 2009, it’s clear the Sand Hill Road firm will generate a world-class return on its investment.

Yesterday, as part of a longer conversation, Chaffee shared the story of how that Twitter funding came together. It’s a good reminder of the importance of relationships in this business:

“One of the things we’re always doing is surveying the landscape for breakout companies, where they’re starting to gain traction…and their users and other metrics are starting to track up.  Twitter was classic case of company just starting to break out. 

One variable for us is: What could this be in terms of potential? An early-stage company can be interesting and getting some traction, but when you run the profile, [you realize it has the potential] of making 3x to 5x your return, [which isn’t a compelling enough exception for IVP, which specializes in later-stage companies that already have meaningful revenue]. 

Twitter fit our criteria [of being able to deliver a much bigger return]. And we had a view into that, so we called [early Twitter investor] Fred [Wilson] and asked if the Twitter guys would see us. 

‘We’re not raising money right now,’ Fred told us. ‘Go away.’ But we’re co-investors [with Union Square Ventures] in Comscore [which tracks Web and mobile usage]. And so [after another plea or two] Fred asked if the Twitter guys would see us, telling them, ‘Just meet with them, and when you’re ready to raise, [IVP] will be there.’ 

So we had them come in [to our office] on a Monday in early January 2009, and when we heard them describe the company as the ‘pulse of the planet’ — those were their words — we could see this was much more than a microblogging service. Ev Williams and Biz Stone are sharp guys. Some entrepreneurs have a vision that’s clearly infectious and much bigger than everyone realizes, and [that was the case here], so it was pretty straightforward. In fact, you could see everyone around the table, thinking, This one could really go. Meanwhile, they [thought] IVP was asking all the right questions, [that we could] see opportunities and threats more clearly than anyone else, and they told Fred that they could see IVP as a partner.

It was a hot deal for us, so we scrambled the jets and the next day I went up there [to San Francisco from Menlo Park] with [IVP colleagues] Dennis [Phelps] and Jules [Maltz] for a day of due diligence. This was a Tuesday. Wednesday night, I had dinner with Ev Williams. On Thursday, he was calling our CEOs to see what it’s like to work with IVP. And by Friday, we had a term sheet.

Eventually, that news broke, and it brought everyone out of the weeds to outbid us. We asked [Williams and Stone], ‘Who do you like best of these groups?’ and they said Benchmark [Capital], so we dialed Benchmark into the deal.

Fred was absolutely instrumental. Because Ev and Biz hadn’t done this many times, I [feel] like Fred was the one who really opened the door for us and said [to them], ‘Let’s do the IVP deal.’”

(Look for the inside story behind IVP’s rise to the top — and how the firm plans to stay there — on Friday.)

New Fundings

Algolia, a year-old, Paris-based company focused on helping developers to make their apps or sites smarter through its search technology, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital and Alven Capital.

CardFlight, an 18-month-old, New York- based company that enables developers to integrate in-person card payments into their own app, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding led by ff Venture Capital. The round also included Payment Ventures, Apostolos Apostolakis, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Plug & Play Ventures, and Great Oaks Venture Capital.

Estify, a  graduate of Amplify LA’s business accelerator that produces software for the auto collision industry, has raised an $800,000 round of seed capital, led by ff Venture Capital, with participation from Romulus Capital, REES Capital and Amplify LA.

Listia, a four-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based online trading marketplace, has raised $9 million led by General Catalyst Partners. The company had previously raised $2 million in seed funding, including Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Y Combinator and individuals such as Max Levchin.

Quantopian, a year-old, Boston-based company that’s building an algorithmic trading platform for browsers, has raised a $6.7 million Series A round from Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital. In January, the company announced it had raised a seed round of $2.1 million from Spark Capital.

Sefaira, a four-year-old, U.K.-based company that makes cloud-based efficiency software that helps architects design higher-performing buildings, has raised $2 million in debt from Silicon Valley Bank. The company has previously raised $18 million in equity from Braemar Energy Ventures, Chrysalix, and the Hermes GPE Environmental Innovation Fund.

Tackk, a year-old, Cleveland, Oh.-based company that makes an online content creation and sharing tool, has raised $1.2 million in new funding led by ff Venture Capital, which was joined by several existing investors, including Hatch Partners and Drummond Road Capital.

Telogis, a 13-year-old company, Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company whose software tracks commercial vehicles, has raised $93 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company plans to go public next year.

Wrike, a seven-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based maker of collaboration software, has closed $10 million in Series A financing from Bain Capital Ventures. Wrike had raised $1 million in seed funding last year from TMT Financing.

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New Funds

SAP Ventures, a group spun out of the enterprise software giant in 2010, has raised $650 million for a direct investment fund, with the money coming from SAP and SAP Ventures’ executives. The firm has also created 10-person biz dev team intended to help its portfolio companies grow. SAP Ventures has been managing its first direct investment fund, a $353 million fund, since 2011; it also manages a $405 million fund of funds that owns stakes in other venture capital funds, including August Capital.

Peer Venture Partners, a Sand Hill Road firm with an exceedingly low profile (and bare-bones site), has just raised $36.6 million for its fourth fund, according to an SEC filing that lists the total offering amount as “indefinite.” Listed on the filing are Jared Hutchings and Mark Campbell, who previously helped manage University Venture Fund, the University of Utah’s student-run fund.

Emerald Ocean Capital Group, a Newport Beach, Calif. firm, is the process of raising a $10 million venture fund for marijuana startups. Dudes.

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People

Foundation Capital has a new EIR: Mitali Pattnaik, a former product and marketing lead at Twitter and Google has joined the firm to focus on building a new, consumer-focused companies. Foundation says Pattnaik is exploring “several areas of interest,” including education, mobile and collaborative consumption.

Jim Orlando is the newest managing director at OMERS Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of the OMERS pension plan. In the role, Orlando — who was most recently a managing director at OMERS Private Equity and has worked previously at Bell Canada and Battery Ventures — will be responsible for leading tech, media, and telecommunications investments in North America.

Mohammad Sabah, the former manager of data science and analytics at Facebook, is joining venture-backed Identified as its “chief data officer.” Identified, in San Francisco, transforms social data from Facebook into intelligence for consumers and enterprises. Since its fall 2010 founding, it has raised $22.5 million, including from Transmedia Capital, Capricorn Investment Group and a long list of individuals, such as Alexander Tamas, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Bill and Tim Draper.

MG Siegler, a partner at Google Ventures, is among a growing number of venture capitalists who is now spearheading an AngelList syndicate.

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Exits

41st Parameter, a nine-year-old, Scottsdale, Az.-based company that produces fraud detection and prevention software, is being acquired for $324 million by the global information services company Experian. Over the years, the company had raised roughly $38 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Jafco Ventures, and Norwest Venture Partners, among others.

Yahoo is acquiring Hitpost, a South San Francisco-based company whose apps allow sports fans to connect and compete. The three-year-old company had raised roughly $2 million from investors, including RRE Ventures, Floodgate, and numerous angel investors. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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IPOs

The government shutdown won’t delay Twitter’s public offering. Here’s why.

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Job Listings

Singularity University, an elite Silicon Valley think tank, is launching a new venture fund and it’s looking for a managing partner for that fund. To apply, you’ll need previous experience with early-stage fund management, some board service, and an MBA. If you happen to have experience investing internationally, all the better.

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Essential Reads

New York Magazine profiles Tumblr founder David Karp. Said one source to the magazine of Tumblr’s sale to Yahoo: “It was the biggest game of chicken I’ve ever seen in a startup. Literally months away from bankruptcy, and he manages to find an angel in Marissa Mayer.”‘

Eek. Authorities and Internet-security experts say tens of thousands of dubious websites are popping up across the Internet.

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Detour

What it’s like to sell your company to Google: “Desks, laptops, no servers, here’s the intranet, figure it out.”

Truly amazing feats of facial hair.

Banksy is hosting a “show” on the streets of New York this month. Details are here.

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Retail Therapy

Time to say goodbye to that back-breaking rucksack you’ve been lugging along on your bike ride, and say hello to these cool, custom-made bicycle bags.

Happy socks! Who couldn’t use a pair of these?

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The government has shut down, meaning 800,000 federal workers will be furloughed, and another million employees will be asked to work without pay.

For you history buffs with some extra time on your hands today, here’s a recounting of every previous government shutdown, along with how they ended.

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The Case for Objective Ratings on AngelList

Last week, AngelList, the hugely popular platform that connects entrepreneurs with accredited investors, introduced what many have heralded as a game-changing new twist to its business. Called its Syndicate program, AngelList now allows angel investors to syndicate investments themselves, work for which they will receive carry. (An angel who syndicates a deal will earn 15 percent of any upside, while AngelList will collect 5 percent.)

If some of these syndicates involve the same groups of investors, and those groups morph into venture funds, don’t be surprised. As some angels have said on social media since AngelList announced its new program, it might allow many of the “best” angels to strengthen their brands and, potentially, move up the investing food chain.

And there’s no reason why angels shouldn’t be able to extract more leverage from their investments, particularly if they’re willing to manage a big syndicate or serve on a company’s board.

Still, while the syndicate program seems like a well-considered start, AngelList might think about providing some public accounting of the track records of its various syndicate leaders. As the gossip site Valleywag pointed out in its inimitable way yesterday, without a structure that manages to disclose something about the investors’ IRRs, the program seems likely to degenerate into a popularity contest. Much of AngelList’s matchmaking still rests on “social proof,” which isn’t quite the same thing as cash on cash returns.

Last week, for example, author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss raised $350,000 for a logistics startup called Shyp in 53 minutes. Ferriss’ fundraising prowess is impressive, and nobody is prejudging Shyp, but it’s hard not to be skeptical about investments that are closed in less than an hour.

Most VCs wouldn’t wish their fundraising process on their worst enemy, but it does help them demonstrate their qualifications and commitment to the investment process to both their investors and their fellow partners. Through vetting their PPMs with Cambridge Associates, undergoing lengthy and arduous roadshows with family offices and pension funds, and sacrificing a large amount of their own capital – typically 3 percent – in order to launch their funds, venture investors let it all hang out. (Yes, there are top-tier funds that are able to raise funds by picking up the phone a few times, but that’s the exception not the norm.) By the time a firm has raised a fund, they have left a trail of evidence testifying to the work they will put into an investment. Can the same be said of Ferriss?

Obviously, AngelList doesn’t need to replicate the venture business – it’s large enough as it is. But in the interests of both entrepreneurs and the syndicates themselves, it might be time for AngelList to adopt an objective ratings process, one that would provide everyone with more insight into an investor’s qualifications than just his or her Klout score. It would make an already promising program even better.

New Fundings

Cydan, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company focused on de-risking compounds with therapeutic and commercial potential, has raised $10 million in new financing from Lundbeckfond Ventures and Bay City Capital. Existing investors NEA and Alexandria Venture Investments also participated.

Dataguise, a seven-year-old company based in Fremont, Calif., has raised $13 million in Series B funding led by Toba Capital, which was joined by undisclosed investors. The company, a maker of data security intelligence and protection software, received a $7.3 million Series A round of financing in 2011, including from tech investor Herb Madan.

HelloFresh — a two-year-old, Berlin-based meal planning startup that invites users to choose from its online recipes, after which it delivers them the ingredients they need — has raised $7.5 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Phenomenon VC of Russia and included Vorwerk Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, Investment AB Kinnevik and Rocket Internet. To date, the company has raised $17.5 million altogether.

MokiMobility, an 18-month-old, Salt Lake City, Utah-based company whose cloud-based software helps secure, monitor and otherwise manage mobile devices, has raised $6.6 million in funding from EPIC Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, Allegis Capital and Plus550.

OMsignal, a two-year-old, Montreal-based company that makes apparel designed to track a wearer’s biometrics, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from new investor Mistral Venture Partners, whose managing director, Code Cubitt, has joined the board. OMsignal raised $1 million in seed funding earlier this year from Real Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, and David Cohen.

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New Funds

Three Crescendo Ventures partners who quietly raised at least $10.5 million for a new fund last year appear to be in the market again. Under the new brand Decathalon Alpha, John Borchers, David Spreng and Wayne Cantwell — all longtime GPs at Crescendo in Palo Alto, Calif. — are looking to raise a $150 million fund. They’ve so far secured $12.9 million toward that end, too, says a new SEC filing. (Interestingly, the form lists their location as Park City, Utah. I’ve asked for more information, and I’ll write more about their effort as I learn more.)

Miramar Digital Ventures, a four-year-old venture capital firm based in Corona Del Mar, Calif., is looking to raise up to $50 million for a new fund, according to an SEC filing. The form lists two partners: Bruce Hallett, who cofounded the firm and was previously managing partner of the Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison Orange County office, and Sherman Atkinson, who joined the firm two years ago and was previously was a CEO-in-Residence with Austin Ventures and before that, COO of Intermix Media. According to the filing, the firm has yet to begin raising capital for the new fund.

Endeavor Global, a New York-based nonprofit organization that selects, mentors and “accelerates” people who it identifies as “high-impact entrepreneurs” has filed a form with the SEC, outlining its plans to raise $50 million dollars in donated capital to further support the entrepreneurs with which it works. (The idea is to plug any returns into the rounds of future entrepreneurs.) The filing lists just $1.275 million in capital raised so far, but according to numerous reports and Endeavor’s own site, numerous supporters have already pledged $1 million to the new fund, including Michael Ahearn, chairman of True North Venture Partners; Edgar Bronfman, Jr, the former chairman of Warner Music Group; Michael Cline, a managing partner of Accretive LLC; Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Greylock Partners; and eBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar.

Altimeter Capital, the Boston-based investment firm run by travel entrepreneur Brad Gerstner, is raising a $15 million special purpose vehicle, according to an SEC filing, which reflects that the funds have yet to be raised. In late July, Gerstner, who has raised roughly $600 million since 2008 to take long and short positions in mostly public companies, also began raising a $75 million venture fund.

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People

 

More job cuts are forthcoming at Fab.com, its CEO hints in one of those awful emailed memos to employees.

Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban is finally going to trial over regulators’ claims that he engaged in insider trading nine years ago, in a case that many consider to be a huge gamble by the SEC.

Brad Feld and his partners at Foundry Group have decided to stop reading articles about AngelList’s new syndicate program and form a syndicate for themselves to see how it goes.

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Exits

Apparently, not even Debra Chrapaty could save the cloud computing and storage services company Nirvanix, which has shut down. I interviewed Chrapaty earlier this year when she left her post as the CIO of Zynga to join six-year-old Nirvanix as its fifth CEO. Chrapaty is a respected contact of Khosla Ventures, which had invested a $25 million round in Nirvanix in May of 2012 and, in an apparent effort to turn around the company, installed Chrapaty as the company’s executive chairwoman last November, before elevating her to chief executive in March. Nirvanix, founded in 2007, had raised $70 million over five rounds of funding, including from Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures.

Power2Switch, a Chicago-based company whose free service helps consumers shop and compare electricity providers online, has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by competitor Choose Energy of Plano, Texas. Power2Switch launched out of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2010 and had raised $1.3 million, including from New World Ventures and Hyde Park Angels. Choose Energy, founded in 2005, raised a $4 million Series A earlier this year from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Stephens Capital Partners.

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IPOs

Fully 26 venture-backed IPOs raised $2.7 billion during the third quarter of this year, a 13 percent increase from the second quarter and an 11 percent increase, by dollars according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. The quarter also marked the first consecutive quarter since 2004 that we’ve seen 20 or more venture-backed IPOs. More here.

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Job Listings

GE is looking for a managing director in its San Ramon, Calif., office to be “primarily responsible for sourcing, planning, and leading strategic investments and/or acquisitions on behalf of GE Software & Analytics.” To be considered, you’ll need a degree in science, tech, engineering, math or finance; at least 15 years of experience in software engineering, tech startups, corporate development, etc; and at least five years of venture or M&A experience.

Rusnano, a company owned by the government of Russia and aimed at commercializing developments in nanotechnology, is looking for a senior analyst in its Menlo Park, Calif. office. The analyst will be “responsible for the company’s institutional investment management platform” and the job requires a couple of years of “strong analytical and quantitative background.” Previous nanotech experience isn’t mandatory but preferred.

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Essential Reads

A Stanford mole (or one of Clinkle’s investors) has leaked the startup’s $25 million secret.

Assuming this is the “new normal,” Salon observes that “for those not lucky enough to have catered foodie gourmet lunches in brand-new downtown office complexes, the new normal sucks.”

What techies should know about the government shutdown.

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Detour

Need energy at the office? Skip the coffee and call your mom.

It’s official. Baseball is dominated by randomness.

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Retail Therapy

The Ralph Lauren “Polo Bear” sweater makes its return to the men’s department, though we cannot recommend wearing it on a date, in your car, at the gym, in the office, or even on a relaxing constitutional around your own home at nighttime. Trust us.

This 500-piece Breaking Bad Lego Lab is fantastic and not much more expensive than that Ninjago Lego set you bought your nephew last winter! Complete with meth-cooking outfit. Extra body parts sold separately.

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