Hi, happy Monday, everyone! Welcome back. (Web visitors, click here for a version of today’s newsletter that’s easier on the eyes.)

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Top News in the A.M.

Facebook has just clarified its community standards to let users know what types of posts aren’t allowed on the service.

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Maveron’s Dan Levitan: This Time Is Not “Different”

Dan Levitan, the former investment banker who founded Maveron with Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, is having a pretty good run as a venture capitalist. His 16-year-old firm has backed a long line of consumer-facing startups that have become household brands, including eBay, Groupon, Cranium, Shutterfly and Zulily, the daily deals website for moms whose late 2013 IPO transformed an early, $5 million check from Maveron into a windfall for the firm and its investors (though Zulily’s stock has more recently been sinking).

That long string of winners has convinced Maveron’s institutional backers to provide it with nearly $1 billion over the years, including a $140 million fifth fund that the firm closed last year. Still, Levitan — who has a big personality and tells the sorts of unguarded personal anecdotes that readers love and public relations pros abhor – readily admits that Maveron has lost its way a couple of times before getting back on track.

StrictlyVC talked with him last week in a fun chat, shortened here for length (and per the request of his watchful communications advisor).

You’re in Seattle, but you’ve had a team in San Francisco for a few years. Do you spend time down here, too?

I’m down at least every two weeks. Increasingly, we’ll be down there more. We’ve had some successes up here in Seattle, but as we’ve moved to a more-focused consumer-only strategy, we realize we have to be more successful in San Francisco.

A “more-focused” consumer strategy? Maveron has always been focused on consumer startups, hasn’t it?

We’ve always been consumer only, but we kind of justified [a] business-to-business-to-consumer [strategy] for the first 10 years, [meaning we’d back] products and services that sell into consumer businesses. We called it “powering consumer services,” and it was a mockery of a parody of a tragedy of a sham, so we decided to focus on consumer very narrowly and invest only in end-user consumer brands. It’s worked much better, including because we’re presented with more [of these types of startups]; we have a greater pool of companies facing similar problems, which helps our entrepreneurs; and our LPs are getting more consistent returns.

Many people think of Maveron as a Series A investor, but it also makes seed-stage bets. How do you approach both types of investments, and what size investments are you making at these very different stages?

Our seed bets are small — $100,000 to $250,000 – and we make one to two a month. Our [San Francisco-based partner] Rebecca Kaden leads the seed effort, but it’s a completely different process than our core investment effort. There are six of us on the investment team and if any two of us wants to do a seed deal, we will. It’s designed to get to know entrepreneurs and spaces we might not be familiar with, so sometimes after a day or two, we’ll say, “Fine, we’re in for $100,000.”

If we make a core investment, it’s a more focused effort. We typically write checks of $2 million to $8 million for between 15 and 25 percent of the company. [Before we invest], basically one partner has to decide that they like it and want to champion it and they get the colleague who is most appropriate to work with them on it. Then everyone on our team meets every entrepreneur we’re going to back in a Series A deal.

Does majority rule?

[Not necessarily.] Someone might like [a deal] and, after issues are pointed out, says, “I can handle it.” Ultimately, I think something that’s obvious doesn’t particularly relate to great VC returns. There have been a few times in the last 16 years when we’ve funded something that was a no-brainer and it worked well for us. But most of the time, it’s not a no-brainer. Our goal is to give people the latitude to make some non-consensus bets.

A few of Maveron’s portfolio companies have gone public in the last 18 months or so, including the sandwich chain Potbelly, Zulily, and the pet health insurance company Trupanion. What do you think of the broader trend of entrepreneurs pushing out their IPOs and staying private longer?

I think entrepreneurs are being thoughtful that as long as late-stage [investors] value their companies at or above public market prices, why not take advantage of it? I don’t think the dichotomy between late-stage and public valuations is sustainable, though. Over some period of time, that [gap], which is so stark today, will close, either because public companies become more expensive or late-stage companies [grow less so].

What are you seeing in terms of valuations?

In general, it’s a good time to be an entrepreneur. We’ve seeing valuations based much more on greed than fear, which we’ve seen before.

I’m humbled by how much we all benefit by the up cycles, but I promise that everyone who says this time is different is wrong.

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New Fundings

Asseta, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based marketplace for capital equipment and other spare parts, has raised $1 million in seed funding from Red Swan Ventures, Zpark Venture, FundersClub, Gil Penchina, Jeff Epstein, Winklevoss Capital, Sandy Kory and a new micro VC group called Mission and Market. The company has previously raised several rounds of seed funding, shows Crunchbase, including from Y Combinator, whose program it passed through in early 2013.

Audvisor, a new, Cupertino, Ca.-based smartphone app that provides users advice in the form of three-minute long audio clips from more than 100 contributors (including VC Heidi Roizen), has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from angel investors. TechCrunch has more here.

Blue Pillar, a nine-year-old, Frederick, Md.-based company that makes distributed energy asset management software, has raised $14 million in funding led by EnerTech Capital, with participation from Maryland Venture Fund and earlier backers Allos Ventures, Arsenal Venture Partners and Claremont Creek Ventures. The company has now raised roughly $25 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Cyanogen, a nearly five-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company that develops an Android-based interface for smartphones that lets users customize their devices and content, is close to an agreement on a new $110 million round of financing, reports Bloomberg. PremjiInvest, the investment vehicle of Wipro Chairman Azim Premji, will be among the investors in the new funding, say Bloomberg’s sources. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised $30 million thus far, including from Tencent Holdings, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, andBenchmark.

Daktari Diagnostics, a seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company that makes diagnostic products for clinicians and patients, has raised $15.5 million in Series D funding led by Eastern Capital and Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, with participation from earlier backers Norwich Ventures and Partners Innovation Fund. The company has now raised at least $52.1 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

Dianping, a 12-year-old, Shanghai, China-based Yelp-like review website, has raised a whopping $850 million in Series E funding from Temasek Holdings and FountainVest Partners, according to China Money Network. The news follows the January close of $700 million in Series D funding for Dianping’s biggest rival, Meituan, backed by Alibaba. (By the way, if this funding sounds familiar, it might be because we mentioned last month that the company was talking with investors.)

Glispa, a seven-year-old, Berlin-based mobile advertising company, has raised $77 million in funding from Market Tech Holdings, a U.K.-based firm that focuses on property and e-commerce investments. The round is Glipsa’s first. TechCrunch has more here.

IdentityMind Global, a six-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based online fraud prevention platform, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by the private equity firm Lakewood & Company, with participation from SBT Venture Capital, the China-based investment firm Cybernaut, and Benhamou Global Ventures.

NetBase, an 11-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based social media analytics company, has raised $24 million in Series E funding led by Spring Lake Equity Partners, with participation from earlier backers Thomvest Ventures, Altos Ventures, and WestSummit Capital. The company has now raised at least $75.6 million from investors, shows Crunchbase.

Reltio, a nearly four-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based maker of data analysis software that it describes as simple enough to be used by businesspeople, has raised $10 million in Series A funding from Crosslink Capital and .406 Ventures.

Sakti3, an eight-year-old, Ann Arbor, Michigan-based firm thats developing solid state battery technology, has raised $15 million in funding from Dyson, the British company known for its expensive and powerful vacuums. The company has now raised $28.2 million altogether, including from Khosla Ventures, General Motors Ventures, Beringea, and Itochu Technology Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

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New Funds

Obvious Ventures, the venture capital firm started by Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams, has raised $77.7 million for its inaugural fund, Obvious Ventures I, according to an SEC filing that was first flagged by TechCrunch.

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Exits

Balanced, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based payments platform for peer-to-peer marketplace businesses, is closing shop after failing to gain enough traction to justify further investment in the company. Balanced, a Y-Combinator alum, had raised at least $3.4 million in venture funding, including from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, CollabFund, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, actor Ashton Kutcher, and former Reddit CEOYishan Wong. TechCrunch has the story here.

MobPartner, an eight-year-old, Paris-based ad tech company, has been acquired for $58 million in cash and stock by Cheetah Mobile, a China-based software company. MobPartner reportedly raised just $3.5 million from the French venture funds Alven Capital and Newfund. TechCrunch has more here.

TheFind, a nine-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based company with a search engine that indexes products across thousands of e-commerce sites, has been acquired by Facebook for undisclosed terms. Says a post at TheFind’s site: Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you. Unfortunately, this means we will be taking our search engine offline in the next few weeks.” According to Crunchbase, the company had raised $26 million over the years from Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Cambrian Ventures.

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People

The District of Columbia has agreed to fund between 5,000 and 10,000 square feet of office space for venture capital firms on the campus of Howard University. The idea is to make it easier for startups to tap the investors for funding (as well as to attract more students to Howard, presumably). VCs interested in the space must invest in mid-to-late stage startups in Washington and be willing to make at least a three-year commitment to the space. DCInno has more here.

Oscar winning director Alex Gibney debuted a new documentary about Apple cofounder Steve Jobs at this week’s South by Southwest Festival and it does not portray him in a flattering light.

People keep asking venture capitalist Bill Gurley if he’s expecting bad things on the horizon. His answer — still — is yes. “I do think you’ll see some dead unicorns this year,” he told a crowd at the South by Southwest festival this past weekend. Fortune has more here.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers begins its case against former junior partner Ellen Pao this morning in a San Francisco courtroom. (“I think juries love a little bit of fireworks,” local employment attorney Kathleen Lucas told The Recorder on Friday. We suspect they will get them again this week.)

Business Insider takes a look at the “fabulous life” of Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, the youngest billionaire in the world.

Emily White, a former Instagram executive, has left her role as chief operating officer of Snapchat less than two years after joining the messaging startup. According to Recode, the move was precipitated by Evan Spiegel’s realization that he wants to be a more hands-on CEO. White is the third top executive to leave the company in the last two months.

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Jobs

New Science Ventures, a young, early-stage venture firm that invests in life sciences startups, is looking for an associate. The job is in New York.

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Essential Reads

Lesser and major luminaries in the tech world are demanding that tradesmen working on their homes sign nondisclosure agreements.

Why bankers are leaving finance for no-salary tech jobs.

The long story behind Gigaom’s abrupt demise.

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Detours

Eighteen reminders that Vladimir Putin doesn’t mess around.

Breathtaking timelapse videos of North America.

“I am not Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons, on ‘Game of Thrones.’ But I am your mother.”

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Retail Therapy

Golfboards!

It’s Friday the 13th! Do not let your guard down. (Unless you want to make a new friend, in which case, by all means.)

Have a terrific weekend, everyone. We’ll see you in a few days. (Pssst, web visitors, you can sign up for StrictlyVC here.)

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Top News in the A.M.

According to a new report, Spain has the fastest LTE speeds; the U.S., surprisingly, has among the slowest.

You can now shop from your wrist. (Well, soon.)

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At Ellen Pao Trial, Last-Ditch Efforts by Both Sides

We wouldn’t want to be a juror at the trial of Ellen Pao, the interim Reddit CEO who is suing her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for gender discrimination and retaliation.

While both sides have enjoyed small victories at the trial, many of the “gotcha” moments raised by each have been neutralized when provided broader context.

Remember those HR policies that Pao testified that she’d raised with executive members of Kleiner over the years, the ones she said she’d begged them to improve? We later learned that Pao never asked a single person to see an equal employment opportunity policy until she was preparing to sue Kleiner in 2012.

It was a startling admission. But guess what? Yesterday, we learned that there was no EEO policy at Kleiner until 2012 or that, if there was, Kleiner’s then COO Eric Keller couldn’t find it, as he testified yesterday. Indeed, unable to locate one, Kleiner had one created the same year. (Recode has much more on the issue here.)

How about the 700,000 pages of documents Pao was said to have amassed to use in her case against Kleiner? It all sounded less nefarious once Pao was asked about them again yesterday, explaining that most was email coming from her work account, along with a Kleiner-issued hard drive and a box of documents that included “about 100 notebooks” for work that Pao said she’d filled up over the years.

Here’s another thing: You might have read that Pao was difficult to work with. In a 2009 email exchange between Pao and her assistant, for example, the assistant told Pao she was running late because her landlord, who spoke poor English, had been in a car accident outside her house and she was acting as his translator. “It’s great that you want to be helpful to your landlord,” Pao wrote. “It would be better for me if you could come to work on time.”

Yesterday, however, the incident sounded like much ado about nothing, with Pao testifying that the assistant’s tardiness was a fleeting problem and that they enjoyed a “good working relationship.” In fact, she said, when the assistant had to later choose which of her two managers to sit near — Pao, who was moving from one part of the office to another, or partner Wen Hsieh, who was not — she chose Pao.

Keller’s day in court was just as cofounding. He testified that Pao asked for what seems like a very big payout to leave the firm before filing her lawsuit against it. “She said eight figures,” he recalled. Keller also testified to Pao’s intransigence when it came to her full cooperation with the investigator that Kleiner hired to look into complaints from both Pao and partner Trae Vassallo.

We quickly learned, however, that the investigator, Stephen Hirschfeld, states on his own site that he works “on behalf of companies” — not employees. Asked if Keller read as much, he said he didn’t remember reading that detail when he researched Hirschfeld in late 2011. “I read the site. I looked at his qualifications. I didn’t memorize the website.”

Court resumes at 10 a.m. again today. We’ll see what happens. But if there’s any crystal clear takeaway at this point in the trial, it’s that workplaces can be minefields. And that isn’t exactly a revelation, even if the case has been fascinating to watch.

New Fundings

Allergen Research Corp., a four-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based company that’s developing treatments to keep kids with food allergies from developing serious consequences, has raised $80 million from investors. Foresite Capital led the round, with participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Aisling Capital, Adage Capital, RA Capital Management, Palo Alto Investors, and earlier backer Longitude Capital. The company has now raised $97 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Bugcrowd, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose software helps companies run crowdsourced, software-bug bounty programs to track the bugs down, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Costanoa Venture Capital, with participation from Rally Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Blackbird Ventures. The company has raised $9 million to date.

Classkick, a 1.5-year-old, Chicago-based platform that enables teachers to give immediate feedback to students working on iPads, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Kapor Capital, Lightbank, and Yammer cofounder Adam Pisoni.

Eko Devices, a two-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based smartphone-enabled stethoscope company, has raised $2 million in funding led by earlier backer Founder.org, with participation from Stanford StartX and angel investors. The company has now raised $2.8 million to date.

EVEN Financial, a seven-month-old, New York-based startup that connects online lending marketplaces with borrowers and verified potential lenders, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding led by Canaan Partners, with participation from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Conversion Capital, Social Leverage, 555 Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and individuals investors.

Favor, a nearly three-year-old, Austin, Tx.-based personal delivery service whose “runners” wear blue tuxedo T-shirts and fetch and deliver goods for $5 per trip (plus 5 percent of the cost of the items and a driver tip), has raised $13 million in Series A funding. The company has now raised $17.9 million altogether, including from investor Tim Draper and Silverton Partners.

Feetz, a nearly two-year-old, Chattanooga, Tn.-based startup that makes custom footwear with 3-D printers, has raised $1.25 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Chattanooga-based JumpFund and former Reebok CEO Uli Becker. Venture Capital Dispatch has much more here.

Kura Oncology, a new, San Diego-based biopharmaceutical company, has sprung onto the scene as a fully formed public company, after raising $60 million — including from EcoR1 Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, ARCH Venture Partners, Boxer Capital, and Partner Fund Management — then completing a reverse merger. Xconomy has more here.

Liaison Technologies, a 15-year-old, Alpharetta, Ga.-based company that makes cloud-enabled data-integration and data-management products, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. The company says the round brings its total funding to $90 million.

PhaseBio Pharmaceuticals, a 13-year-old, Malvern, Pa.-based biopharmaceutical company focused on endocrine and metabolic disorders and cardiovascular disease, has raised $40 million led by AstraZeneca, with participation from earlier backers New Enterprise Associates, Hatteras Venture Partners, Johnson & Johnson, and Fletcher Spaght Ventures. The company has raised at least $104 million in funding to date, shows Crunchbase.

Quikr.com, a seven-year-old, Bangalore, India-based classifieds portal that connect buyers and sellers on their mobile phones and other online devices, is close to raising $150 million from Tiger Global Management and other investors, including Steadview Capital of Hong Kong, a source tells the WSJ.

SignalFX, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based software application monitoring company, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor CRV, with participation from earlier investor Andreessen Horowitz. The company has raised $28.5 million altogether from the two firms.

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IPOs

Aduro Biotech, a 15-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based company that’s developing an immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer, has publicly filed to raise up to $86 million in IPO. (The company had first filed confidentially in mid-December.) Aduro has raised roughly $140 million from investors over the years; some of its biggest shareholders include Morningside Ventures, which owns 37.8 percent of the company; Fidelity Investments, which owns 7.9 percent; and Johnson & Johnson, which owns 6.6 percent.

Alibaba‘s 180-day lock-up, following its blockbuster IPO last September, ends this coming Wednesday, March 18. Just a friendly reminder.

The IPO road show of GoDaddy, the 18-year-old, Scottsdale, Az.-based online service that helps people and businesses set up web sites, reportedly kicks off next week.

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Exits

2lemetry, a four-year-old, Denver-based startup whose enterprise-focused platform tracks and manages IP-enabled machines and other connected devices, has been acquired by Amazon for undisclosed terms, reports TechCrunch. 2lemetry had raised $4 million from Salesforce Ventures.

ARX, a 28-year-old, San Francisco-based digital signature company, has been acquired by longtime partner DocuSign for undisclosed terms. More here.

The Swedish streaming music company Aspiro now belongs to Jay Z, Billboard reports.

BGPmon, a provider of network and routing monitoring services, has been acquired by OpenDNS for undisclosed terms.

Lasso, a private photo-sharing and chat app cofounded by the founders of the photo and video-sharing service Photobucket, has been acquired by Photobucket for undisclosed terms. TechCrunch has the story here.

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People

Patrick Baeuerle has joined the Boston-based life sciences venture firm MPM Capital as a managing director. Baeuerle was most recently a VP and general manager at Amgen.

Apple CEO Tim Cook offered an ailing Steve Jobs his liver, according to a new biography about Jobs’s life.

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Jobs

TIAA-CREF, one of the largest U.S. asset managers, is looking to hire a senior investment analyst.

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Essential Reads

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo anoints Slack the office messaging app that may finally sink email.

Snapchat’s Discover platform is demanding very high prices for ads, and marketers are paying them. Recode has more here.

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Detours

Eight terrible things that can happen to you in outer space.

“Our business plan is that VCs will just give us money. Because this is San Francisco. And we have an idea.”

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Retail Therapy

If you’re in the market for a cigarette boat, this one looks pretty nice.

In 2012, Shan Sinha and Jeremy Roy were working at Google, admiring the fact that each conference room at its Mountain View headquarters is wired for video conferencing. The technology makes it dead simple for employees to communicate with colleagues who aren’t in the office, and the two – who’d sold their software company, DocVerse, to Google in 2010 – realized there might be a larger opportunity to provide similar, but more affordable, technology to a whole host of companies.

They got to work on their newest company, Highfive, and so far, so good. The company, whose video conferencing products include $799 high-definition cameras and mobile and desktop applications that make face-to-face connections a cinch, is beginning to pick up market share. According to Sinha, the company has landed more than 500 customers – including Zenefits, Slack, and Warby Parker — since it began shipping its devices in December.

It also just attracted $32 million in Series B funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with earlier backers like Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst that had provided the company with $13.5 million in 2013.

Investors are encouraged by the company’s traction, but it’s apparently what coming that gets them most excited, including premium features that will cost $10 per user per month and a roadmap that includes much more than videoconferencing — though Sinha is reluctant to share more right now.

“Our identity will be tied to helping people communicate much better,” he tells StrictlyVC. “But our task right now is to [sell our current technology to many more customers]. There are 25 million conference rooms in the world today and only 1 million have video conferencing. Our bet is that all will have video in them.”

As it happens, Google thinks there’s an opportunity to take its video conferencing technology to the masses, too.

In fact, shortly after Sinha and Roy began work on Highfive, Google started selling $999 Chromeboxes to businesses, saying it wants to bring video-conferencing “to any room.”

That doesn’t seem to bother Sinha, who calls Chromebox, “Google’s approach to solving enterprise problems, which is kind of halfway there.”

When customers compare the two, he adds, “we tend to win.”

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

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Top News in the A.M.

Well, this stinks. Nine-year-old Gigaom, the online tech site and events business, has abruptly shut down after becoming unable to pay its creditor, Silicon Valley Bank. The company had raised at least $22.6 million from venture investors over the years, including True Ventures, Alloy Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures, and Shea Ventures. (It never publicly disclosed how much venture debt it raised.) Gigaom founder Om Malik wrote on his personal blog last night: “It is not how you want the story of a company you founded to end . . .There will be time for postmortems, but not today.”

There was a lot of big news about the Apple Watch to emerge from the company’s big event yesterday. The biggest may be how many iPhones it’s going to sell, says BuzzFeed.

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Ellen Pao Portrays Lawsuit as Very Last Resort

Yesterday, in Ellen Pao’s first appearance on the stand in her gender discrimination case Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she once worked as a junior partner, she testified that filing suit against the firm was the culmination of many discussions with various of the firm’s senior executives over a five-year period during which she flagged issues of harassment and gender discrimination and beseeched them to change the “loosey-goosey way we dealt with issues.”

Wearing a simple, caramel-colored dress and purple blazer, Pao spoke of attempts to encourage at least four senior Kleiner executives to institute HR policies around discrimination and harassment following her affair in 2006 with her then senior colleague Ajit Nazre, who she says was “relentless” in his pursuit of her and pressured her into what would become “rocky” six-month-long relationship.

After Pao ended the affair, said Pao, Nazre began cutting her out of email chains and excluding her from meetings. For help, she turned to then general partner Ray Lane, who was Nazre’s mentor; Lane twice suggested the two have a conciliatory lunch. (Pao says she conceded, but left mid- meal after Nazre professed his love for her.) She also reached out to general partner Randy Komisar, who told her he “didn’t want to know.”

Pao also later told general partner John Doerr about her brief relationship with Nazre. Doerr was prepared to fire Nazre over the incident, said Pao, who added that she and Lane successfully worked together to preserve Nazre’s job at the time. But subsequent conversations with Doerr, Lane, and general partner Ted Schlein about the need for Kleiner to institute better policies to deal with such situations and prevent future problems were repeatedly ignored, she testified.

Pao, a Harvard-educated attorney who spent two years as an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore earlier in her career, also testified that she told Juliet de Baubigny, the firm’s head of human resources, that she felt Kleiner needed a related HR policy — particularly as Pao suspected Nazre of sexually harassing three administrative assistants. In response, de Baubigny told Pao she thought Nazre was a “sex addict,” recalled Pao of that exchange, adding that she was “surprised” by de Baubigny’s characterization, saying, “I thought [de Baubigny] must have additional information about the administrative assistants.”

On the stand yesterday, Pao came across as likable, including smiling on occasion as she addressed questions by her attorney, Theresa Lawless. It was an image very much at odds with the picture of Pao that Kleiner’s attorneys have sought to create as someone with “sharp elbows.”

She also seemed highly competent. Indeed, at the direction of Lawless, Pao spoke at length about the many accolades bestowed on her by Doerr during their working relationship, as well about her investing instincts. She testified yesterday, for example, that she tried convincing Kleiner to invest much earlier on in Twitter, and that her case for the company went unheeded because, according to general partner Matt Murphy, who’d previously met with Twitter, its team wasn’t business-minded. (Kleiner eventually invested in Twitter in late 2010, at a $4 billion valuation.)

Pao also testified that she convinced the partnership to back RPX, a patent technology startup that Kleiner would not have funded without her due diligence. (It would eventually go public in 2011, an otherwise terrible time for tech stocks.) She added that Doerr gave the company’s board seat to Komisar because Pao was pregnant with her daughter and as such, “I wasn’t being considered for a board seat or board observer role.”

She also said that upon her return from maternity leave, she had “many” discussions with Komisar about RPX. Said Pao, “[H]e was not involved with the company, and the [RPX] team had started to complain about him. Every time I heard a complaint, I would raise it with Randy. I wanted to try to help solve the problem.”

Unsurprisingly, Pao spent much of the day describing a very male-dominated culture at Kleiner. Pao was asked, for example, about that now infamous all-male dinner at former Vice President Al Gore’s apartment at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, where Pao also had an apartment at the time.

“It was pretty humiliating,” said Pao of seeing entrepreneurs in the building who were on their way up to the dinner. One of them was Mike McCue, the CEO and cofounder of the news aggregation app Flipboard, on whose board Pao sat at the time. “I was coming down the elevator and ran into people in the lobby . . . When I went outside I saw Mike McCue [parking] . . . and he said ‘OK I’ll see you up there,’ and I said ‘No, no, I’m not going to be part of this dinner.’”

Pao also described wanting to leave the firm in 2007 owing to the company’s culture. Following conversations with the firm’s senior partners about it, and asked by Doerr to elaborate, Pao wrote him — in email shown to the courtroom — the she’d like to see “less fear in making unpopular statements. Less risk around offending others.” She also pointed to “politics,” suggesting she’d like to see “consensus building in a way that shares information and contributes to an open process.”

Not last, Pao told Doerr she thought the partnership needed to show greater respect to entrepreneurs, regardless of whether or not the firm was interested in funding their companies.

Said Pao, “I’d seen some meetings where we were late and would make entrepreneurs late. There was [another] meeting in particular where we weren’t interested in talking about [the] specific venture and we started talking about taking some people from [the company that was in the pitch meeting] and [hiring them into another startup]. And when you’re talking about breaking up a [company in front of its founders], that just seemed very disrespectful to me.”

Pao has yet to be cross-examined by Kleiner’s legal team. She returns to the courtroom today.

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New Fundings

21 Inc., a two-year-old, San Francisco-based stealthy bitcoin startup, has raised $116 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and RRE Ventures, with participation from Yuan Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Data Collective and numerous individual investors, including PayPal cofounders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Venture Capital Dispatch has much more here.

Do, a 1.5-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that makes meeting software, has raised $2 million in seed funding, including from New Enterprise Associates, Slow Ventures, Queensbridge Venture Partners, and numerous individual investors, including Zynga founder Mark Pincus.

E8 Security, a 1.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based maker of cyber security analytics software, has raised $9.8 million in Series A funding led by March Capital Partners, with participation from Allegis Capital and The Hive.

Flashnotes, a 4.5-year-old, Boston-based online marketplace that invites students to exchange academic materials, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Barnes & Noble. The company had previously raised $11.4 million from investors, including Atlas Venture, SoftBank Capital, and Runa Capital. The WSJ has more here.

Growth Intelligence, a four-year-old, London-based startup that makes predictive marketing software, has raised $3.4 million in Series A funding from 83North, MMC Ventures, and individual investors.

Lamabang, a two-year-old, Beijing-based Chinese social network and ecommerce company for mothers and expectant mothers, has raised $100 million in Series C funding from Matrix Partners, Morningside Ventures, and Greenwoods Asset Management, reports Tech in Asia. The company has raised $130 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Onshape, a three-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based computer-aided design startup that has been operating in stealth mode, has raised $64 million in funding over the years, including from New Enterprise Associates, North Bridge Growth Equity & Venture Partners, and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. Fortune has more here.

RayVio, a four-year-old, Hayward, Ca.-based company that uses solid state UV technology for a variety of applications, including to disinfect drinking water and prevent food spoilage by eliminating bacteria, has raised $9.3 million in Series B funding, including from Applied Ventures, Augment Ventures, New Ground Ventures and Tolero Ventures. Earlier backers DCM Ventures and Capricorn Investment Group also joined the round.

SimpliVity, a five-year-old, Westborough, Ma.-based converged infrastructure company, has raised $175 million in Series D funding led by Waypoint Capital, with participation from earlier backers Accel Partners, CRV, DFJ Growth, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Meritech Capital Partners. The company has now raised $276 million altogether. ZDNet has more here.

Yallo, a nearly three-year-old, Tel Aviv-based business-to-consumer communications company, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Carmel Ventures. The Globes has more here.

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New Funds

Mercato Partners, an eight-year-old, Salt Lake City, Ut.-based growth equity firm, is targeting $175 million for a third fund, shows an SEC filing. The firm closed its second fund in 2012 with $115 million in funding. Among its highest-profile bets is Domo, a 4.5-year-old, Utah-based SaaS business founded by Josh James, who’d previously cofounded Omniture.

—–

IPOs

AltheaDx, a five-year-old, San Diego-based molecular-diagnostics company, has withdrawn its registration to go public, four months after filing it.

—–

Exits

Twitter has acquired Periscope, a startup that’s building an app for streaming video from smartphones, reports Business Insider. A source tells the outlet the deal was closed weeks ago, before a similar app, Meerkat, began to capture the imagination of Twitter users. One investor tells BI the acquisition amount was above $50 million; another says it fell between $75 million and $100 million. StrictlyVC reported on Meerkat, and the threats it faces (including from Twitter and Periscope), yesterday.

—–

People

Max Motschwiller has left the digital practice of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to become the sixth general partner with the late-stage venture firm Meritech Capital Partners, reports Fortune. At 28, Motschwiller is also the youngest partner by nearly 20 years.

Jeff Schneble has joined Wing Venture Capital as a partner from Silver Lake Partners, where he was an operating executive for more than three-and-a-half years.

—–

Essential Reads

Researchers working with the CIA have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to The Intercept.

A team of Google researchers has demonstrated an unexpected problem with electromagnetic leakage caused by many transistors packed onto a single memory chip: hackers can use it to corrupt portions of some laptops’ memory, and even to bypass the security protections of those computers.

—–

Detours

How not to raise a narcissist.

What a handshake smells like.

—–

Retail Therapy

Emergency nap kit. (We won’t tell anyone.)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome back! Hope you had a terrific weekend. (Web visitors, save your eyes: Here’s an easier-to-read version of this morning’s email.)

—–

Top News in the A.M.

It’s Apple‘s first big event of the year today, and everyone is buzzing about what to expect.

The CIA embarked on a sweeping restructuring Friday that will create 10 new centers that significantly expand its focus on digital espionage.

Ellen Pao takes the stand today in her case against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

—–

As Meerkat Heads to Austin, a Looming Question: Will It Last?

South by Southwest kicks off in Austin this coming Friday. Judging by its enthusiastic embrace by users, Meerkat — an iOS platform enabling users to stream live videos over Twitter — looks to be anointed the Next Big Thing at the festival, too.

The nine-week-old app began as a side project by the Israeli startup Life On Air, and much of its appeal centers on allowing anyone who sees a tweet about a live Meerkat broadcast to follow along and comment on it. Meerkat has generated so much buzz since its February 27 rollout, in fact, that Twitter is reportedly talking with another live streaming app called Perioscope about an acquisition.

It’s no wonder. While Meerkat has plenty of predecessors in live broadcasting online — from Qik to uStream to Google’s Hangouts on Air — by simply appearing in Twitter users’ feeds, Meerkat has managed to change the game. As writer-analyst Ben Thompson noted at a San Francisco dinner last week, “I almost find Meerkat more compelling from a Twitter perspective than a Meerkat one. It really just gets at how being native for video – being in the stream – is important.”

No one yet knows, of course, if Meerkat will turn into anything. Twitter could kick it off its platform. Prospective users, frustrated by frequent crashes, could abandon it. Through its commenting feature, Meerkat could also suffer the same kind of abusive behavior that has plagued other popular social networking apps. (That’s saying nothing of its business model, or lack of one.)

Back home in Israel, not everyone appears to be cheering for its success, either. Last week, StrictlyVC talked with Mike Feldman, a Hong Kong-based consultant who advises on cross-border technology investments from China to Israel, and who has helped a rival of Meerkat — four-year-old, Tel Aviv-based Mobli — raise capital from investors. (The company has garnered $86 million across four rounds so far. Life on Air has meanwhile raised $3.6 million.)

From Feldman’s perspective, Mobli – an Instagram-like platform that last year introduced live broadcasting from within the Mobli app – has more staying power, even if it isn’t as much on the radar of Silicon Valley’s illuminati. For one thing, he says, it already has 25 million users, including across South America and Russia.

To the degree that it has succeeded, it has done so without the help of Silicon Valley’s hype machine, too, Feldman says, noting that Mobli’s unconventional roster of investors includes Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim and tennis star Serena Willlams.

“I think there’s just some companies — maybe you call them the Product Hunt type companies — that get backing among the twittering VCs in Silicon Valley,” Feldman continues. “But to those of us half a world away, what happens there doesn’t necessarily represent the world as a whole. Meerkat is totally integrated with Twitter, so it’s been drawing the same kind of people who use Twitter. But the vast majority of people are not using Twitter.”

Whether or not that’s true — Twitter has gone so far as to cut off employee access to its metrics — Meerkat’s creator, Ben Rubin, doesn’t sound like someone who expects Meerkat to become the next Twitter, whose own star took off at the South by Southwest Festival in 2007. At least, he appears to know to hope for the best but expect the worst.

“People get excited by the novelty of live streaming, but it wears off,” he told GigaOm last week. “I’ve seen my product go through word of mouth before and I’ve seen it wear off. I know what that feels like in a week.”

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New Fundings

Blippar, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based image-recognition platform that uses augmented reality technology, has raised $45 million in Series A funding from undisclosed investors. According to Crunchbase, the company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Qualcomm Ventures. More here.

Carbylan Therapeutics, a 10-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based company developing an injectable treatment for osteoarthritis pain, has raised $4 million in debt. Late last year, the company filed for a $93 million IPO, with plans to hit the market in early February; it later decided to postpone its offering. The company has raised $35 million altogether; its venture backers include InterWest Partners, Vivo Ventures, and Alta Partners.

CoverHound, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based online insurance marketplace, has raised $14 million in Series B funding from Core Innovation Capital, Route 66 Ventures, Thomas Lehrman, Tugboat Ventures and American Family Ventures, along with earlier backers RRE Ventures, Blumberg Capital, and Bullpen Capital. The company has now raised $23.4 million altogether.

LiquiGlide, a 2.5-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based company whose coating technology allows it to engineer slippery surfaces for liquids and viscous materials like gels and pastes, has raised $7 million in funding from Roadmap Capital, a Toronto-based investment firm. More here.

Photobucket, a 12-year-old, Denver-based image and video hosting site, has raised $3.6 million in new funding, the company confirms to TechCrunch. The additional capital is reportedly part of an $8 million round that’s still in progress. Photobucket was sold in 2007 to Fox Interactive Media for $250 million, then sold again in 2009 for $60 million to a Seattle-based imaging startup called Ontela. The merged company kept the Photobucket brand.

Quixey, a 5.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based mobile search startup, has raised $60 million in new funding led earlier backer Alibaba Group, with participation from Goldman Sachs, GGV Capital, and SoftBank Capital. The company has now raised $134.9 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

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New Funds

Navitas Capital, a five-year-old, L.A-based venture firm investing in energy and other technologies used by so-called intelligent buildings, is targeting $4 million for its second seed-stage fund, shows an SEC filing. The firm had earlier raised a $1.5 million seed fund. Among its investments is Building Robotics, a software company that enables office workers to control the temperature at their office work stations, and Gridium, a smart meter data analytics company.

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IPOs

Good Technology, a 19-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based mobile device management company, reported in an updated IPO filing on Thursday that it continues to narrow its losses while growing its revenue. (Some recent layoffs have presumably helped.) Good, which has raised funding from pretty much every firm in Silicon Valley over the years, filed to go public in May of last year. Silicon Valley Business Journal has more here.

Social Finance, the four-year-old, San Francisco-based online-lending platform known as SoFi, is planning an IPO that would value the company at a whopping $3.5 billion, sources tell Bloomberg. The company may raise $500 million this year, Bloomberg adds. SoFi has already raised $766 million from investors, including a $200 million round that closed in January. More here.

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Exits

Appfluent Technology, a 10-year-old, Rockville, Md.-based company that makes data analytics software, has been acquired by Attunity, a publicly traded company. Appfluent had raised at least $4.1 million, from Updata Partners and The New Markets Growth Fund.

CyActive, a two-year-old, Be’er Sheva, Israel-based “predictive” cyber security company, has been acquired by PayPal for what ZDNet’s sources say is at least $60 million. According to Crunchbase, CyActive had raised one, undisclosed round of funding from Siemens Venture Capital in the form of a convertible note. More here.

Stitch, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based sales productivity software company, has been acquired by SugarCRM, which is reportedly shutting down the service. According to Crunchbase, Stitch had raised $3.3 million from investors, including Freestyle Capital, SoftTech VC, Google Ventures and Foundation Capital. SugarCRM, an 11-year-old, Cupertino, Ca.-based maker of customer relationship management software, has raised $104 million from investors over the years, shows Crunchbase. Its backers include DFJ, New Enterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs, and Walden Venture Capital.

VCCircle, a 10-year-old, Noida, India-based media company whose news sites include VCCircle.com and Techcircle.in, has been acquired by News Corp. for undisclosed terms. The deal represents News Corp’s third, recent investment in India. News Corp. also invested $30 million in the real estate sales platform PropTiger last November and acquired the online financial planning company Bigdecisions in December.

Veenome, a four-year-old, Arlington, Va.-based service that analyzes online video to reduce fraud, eliminate objectionable material and more, has been acquired by Integral Ad Science, a company whose technology aims to direct the right viewers to the right ads. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. According to TechCrunch, Veenome had raised at least $2.5 million from investors, including Stardust Venture Partners, India Venture Partners, and Piedmont Investment Advisors. Integral Ad Science has raised nearly $50 million from investors, including August Capital, Atlas Venture, Pelion Venture Partners, and Founder Collective.

—–

People

The investment company of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has met with Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel about “future potential business cooperation,” it announced in a somewhat strange statement yesterday that didn’t elaborate further. More here.

The team at Formation 8 is breathing a little easier this week. According to TechCrunch, the firm has been removed as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in January against firm cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who is being sued by a former girlfriend.

Stephen Hirschfeld, an attorney hired by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers to investigate allegations of discrimination against the firm, testified last week that partner Trae Vassallo had run the numbers on both male and female partners and, according to her calculations, the women came out ahead of the men in multiple measures of profitability, despite that the men forecasted higher revenues for their investments than the women. More here.

Robert Kalin, who “came up with the idea for Etsy, raised its first batches of venture capital, and was its chief executive officer during its formative years” before being “unceremoniously pushed out in 2011,” is not on Etsy’s S-1, meaning he owns less than 5 percent of the company he founded, notes Bloomberg.

Longtime tech writer Steven Levy takes readers behind Marissa Mayer’s SpinCo, a “company that does nothing but hold Chinese Internet stock and keep investors off her back.”

Meanwhile, Business Insider reports that Yahoo’s Mayer has been quietly firing people on a weekly basis.

Jeff Shotts has joined the note-taking app developer Evernote as its first CFO, suggesting the company aims to go public soon. Shotts was most recently the president and CFO of the online fashion retailer ModCloth. Earlier in his career, he was a VP at Logitech and a senior director at eBay.

—–

Essential Reads

College campuses have no idea what to do about the anonymous messaging app Yik Yak.

—–

Detours

Fourteen Facebook hacks you need right now.

Oxytocin just keeps getting more intriguing.

A home with retractable walls that let the sun shine in.

—–

Retail Therapy

The Aero 8, with “mohair soft-top and rear opening clam-shell boot.” They had us at “mohair.”

Happy Friday, everyone! Hope you have a most wonderful weekend and we’ll see you back here in a few days.:) (Psst, web visitors, here’s an easier-to-read version of this morning’s newsletter.)

—–

Top News in the A.M.

The Dow Jones Industrial average is about to welcome Apple, and to say good-bye to AT&T.

A host of the biggest companies in the world, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, have filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court stating that all couples should share the right to marry.

Do not forget: Today, it’s Take Your Action Figure to Work Day, according to someone named Randall Ham.

—–

Ben Thompson on What Xiaomi Gets Just Right

Ben Thompson, a Taipei, Taiwan-based writer with a sharp understanding of consumer tech, has attracted a loyal and growing base of readers to his one-man media company, Stratechery. Thompson has also become something of a thought leader in Silicon Valley over the last year, largely because of the perspective he enjoys from his perch halfway across the world.

Last night, at a San Francisco dinner hosted by the venture firm GGV Capital, Thompson — who’s in the U.S. for an Apple event this Monday — shared some of his thoughts with investors and entrepreneurs as they sipped wine and enjoyed a series of carefully prepared Cantonese dishes.

Among the topics raised was five-year-old Xiaomi, the fast-rising Chinese company that became the top player in China’s competitive smartphone market last summer, and the world’s third-largest phone maker. Thompson didn’t address the long-term prospects for Xiaomi, which raised $1.1 billion in funding at a stunning $45 billion valuation in December. But he did talk at some length about why he thinks it shouldn’t be underestimated. From his comments last night, edited lightly for clarity:

“Whether [I’m ‘long Xiaomi’] is a separate question from why I think the company is interesting.

Xiaomi is very highly valued right now, but they’re a company that a lot needs to go right for them to succeed. Then again, in 2012, if you said a lot would need to go right for them to get to X by 2015 — well, a lot did go right. They’ve executed very impressively to date.

Why they’re interesting as a company is that tech companies get so caught up in scale, and the efficiencies that come with them, that they tend to treat entire markets the same. Not Apple, which has demonstrated that you can definitely segment markets, [and not Xiaomi, which has done the same].

If you view the whole world as one market, you have this view that on one end, you have people who really love technology and will spend a lot on their phone, and you give them the highest-end sort of thing. And [you think that at the other end of the spectrum], you have someone who just doesn’t care, who walks into the AT&T store and buys whatever they’re told to buy and they get some crappy knock-off phone or whatever it might be.

But too many tech companies treat that [latter] person the same as the person in the developing country who is also buying a cheap phone. Yet they’re exactly the opposite. If you’re a young person and you’re interested in technology but you don’t have much money, you’re very different from someone who will just walk into a store [with no agenda]. What Xiaomi did was treat that person [like a sophisticated buyer]. ‘You want something that’s super customizable that you can dig into, and we’re going to meet you at a price point that’s approachable for you.’

It’s no wonder they just obliterated these other phone companies that are offering a knock-off of last year’s model at a low price. Like, which would you rather buy? A phone from a company that’s giving you what you want, or last year’s Samsung?

The low-income market is different, but it’s the same in that there are also geeks there who want something interesting and there are people who don’t care there.

I kind of feel like tech in general is too much in love with scale when often what’s interesting is at the margins — identifying a niche and serving it and figuring out how to scale it later. Too many companies think about scale from day one, and they end up making a mediocre product that tries to serve everyone and does it very poorly.”

New Fundings

Evidation Health, a new, Menlo Park, Ca.-based data and analytics company that aims to quantify and validate the savings created by digital health tools, has raised $6.2 million in Series A funding led by GE Ventures, with participation from Asset Management Ventures and Rock Health. Xconomy has more here.

Namely, a three-year-old, New York-based HR software company, has raised $11 million in funding led by Matrix Partners, with participation from earlier backers True Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Greenspring Global Partners, and Vayner/RSE. The company has now raised $32.8 million altogether.

Nexus eWater, a 15-year-old, Canberra, Australia-based developer of a home water recycler, has raised $2.1 million in Series A funding led by Thomas Reeves Hitchner, a former GP with QuestMark Partners. Other participants in the round include ANU Connect Ventures, Sydney Angels, and the Sydney SideCar Fund.

Studypool, a year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based online marketplace that connects students with tutors on a per question basis, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from 500 Startups, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and numerous individual investors, including Fabrice Grinda. TechCrunch has more here.

Swiftype, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that builds customizable search software for websites and apps, has raised $13 million in Series B funding led by earlier investor New Enterprise Associates. The company has now raised $22.2 million to date, including from Data Collective, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ignition Partners and Y Combinator program.

Trucker Path, a 1.5-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based startup whose mobile platform helps shippers find available spaces on trucks, has raised $1.5 million in early-stage funding from Renren, the Chinese social-networking company. The company has raised $3 million to date.

Visually, a four-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based startup whose platform for data visualization and infographics connects designers with clients to create content, has raised $3.3 million in new funding led by Crosslink Ventures, with participation from 500 Startups, Mitch Kapor Foundation, and SoftTech VC. All were previous investors. The company has now raised $15.7 million altogether.

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New Funds

G20 Ventures, a new Boston-based venture firm founded by former Advanced Technology Ventures veterans Bob Hower and Bill Wiberg, has closed its debut fund with $63.3 million. Boston Business Journal has more here.

Sandwich Video, Silicon Valley’s favorite corporate video maker, has launched a new venture called Sandwich Fund. Created in concert with Detroit-based Ludlow Ventures, the idea is to front the full costs of a Sandwich Video, which typically costs $100,000, in exchange for $100,000 in equity. “It’s certainly not going to be every client that we do a video for — maybe 10 per year if everything goes well,” Sandwich founder Adam Lisagor tells Forbes. “But there’s going to be 10 companies where it’s a slam dunk.”

Speedinvest, a four-year-old, Austria-based venture firm focused on early-stage European startups, has held a first close on its second fund with 58 million euros ($63 million). Partner Marcel van der Heijden tells StrictlyVC the firm expects the fund to eventually close with more than $100 million — a pretty substantial step up from its 10 million euro debut fund. Among the firm’s four exits to date is Wikidocs, acquired by Atlassian last fall. Speedinvest has two partners in Silicon Valley: van der Heijden and Erik Bovee.

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IPOs

There have been 26 IPOs priced so far this year, a -38 percent change from last year.

—–

People

AltSchool, a budding network of schools backed by Andreessen Horowitz and others, has announced a slew of high-profile hires, including CTO Bharat Mediratta, who was previously Google’s Distinguished Engineer in charge of the Google homepage and search results experience; Michael Ginty, previously head of global security at Uber, who has been hired as AltSchool’s head of safety; Susan Yoon, who joins the company as its VP of finance from the ad tech company Rocket Fuel, where she was VP of corporate development; and Rajiv Bhatia, a former studio GM at Zynga who is now AltSchool’s VP of product. StrictlyVC talked with AltSchool founder (and former Googler) Max Ventilla in January about ballooning demand for AltSchool’s personalized learning approach.

Some key players in the gender discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers were cast in an unflattering light yesterday during testimony from an outside lawyer who was hired as an investigator by the firm. More here.

—–

Job Listings

The Omidyar Network is looking to fill a senior position to help with its impact investing. The job is in Washington, D.C.

Twitter is looking to add a manager to its newly formed “business insights” unit. The job is in San Francisco.

—–

Data

Dropbox’s most recent, reported valuation of $10 billion is irrational, argues CB Insights. Here’s its case against it.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch looks at the “trillion-dollar gold mine” that is alternative lending.

—–

Essential Reads

In a lab shut off from communication with the outside world, Apple has given some companies special early access to Apple Watch. More here.

“Shazam is already a verb. We want to expand the universe of what you can Shazam.”

In an Uber, as with a cab, it’s not always the driver who’s the threat.

—–

Detours

It’s true. This is a good ad.

Fifteen stunning entries from Smithsonian Magazine’s annual photo contest.

A dozen real-life places that may or may not be supervillian lairs.

—–

Retail Therapy

Design your dream Apple Watch.

Anonabox.

Happy Thursday, everyone! Hope it’s off to a great start.

Thanks, by the way, to the many of you who nabbed tickets yesterday to our second INSIDER Series event, coming up May 13 in San Francisco. It’s going to be great. If you happened to miss our announcement about it, the details are here and tickets are here.

—–

Top News in the A.M.

Just one week after the U.S. government voted to enforce net neutrality, the European Union is considering the opposite: permitting Internet providers to create a tiered Internet service with paid fast lanes.

Apple, which has seen stagnating iPad sales, will delay making a larger-screened version of the tablet, sources tell Bloomberg.

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At Zetta, a Next-Gen Partnership

It used to be that institutional investors wanted to see a long and fruitful relationship between VCs looking to create a new fund together. These “emerging managers” would need that established chemistry to take on entrenched firms, went the conventional wisdom.

If that thinking persists, LPs made an exception for Zetta Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based early-stage firm that specializes in data analytics startups and closed its debut fund with $60 million last month.

The firm pairs veteran venture investor Mark Gorenberg, long of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, with Ash Fontana, a former banking analyst and entrepreneur who most recently worked at AngelList, where he launched online investing and created the first startup index fund to enable the platform’s users to invest in a basket of nascent startups.

The two “met through a friend” says Fontana, adding that “we live across the road from each other, too, as it turns out.”

Of course, there’s much more to the partnership, new as it is by traditional standards. The two have strong ideas about the future of data analytics for one thing, says Fontana. They also have highly complementary networks. Says Fontana, “Mark has fantastic deal flow with entrepreneurs like Josh James,” who cofounded the successful web analytics company Omniture before creating the business intelligence company Domo in late 2010. The company, which Gorenberg backed in 2011, has since raised $250 million from investors.

Fontana, meanwhile, has deal flow from the thousands of entrepreneurs he’s been interacting with at AngelList in recent years, he notes.

He also knows better than almost anyone how to sift through and capitalize on AngelList’s various products, including its jobs platform, which features more than 150,000 candidates, and its company search tool. (“Simply tagging your customers” on the platform can send a widespread message to interested parties and drive sales, Fontana says.)

As for whether the duo will elbow any of Zetta’s deals onto AngelList’s Syndicates platform for the purpose of gathering additional co-investors, that’s not necessarily likely right now, both say. “We’ll be more of a traditional fund focused on the analytics space,” says Gorenberg, “meaning we’ll mostly be the largest shareholder, though we’ll also be leaning toward the idea of syndicating with others. We want to play well with the industry.”

Gorenberg points to the Zetta portfolio company EventBoard in Salt Lake City, Ut., which is trying to reinvent the way meetings are run and facilities should be designed. Zetta led the two-year-old company’s $1.5 million seed round last year, but it brought plenty of other investors into the fold, including Josh James.

In another of its eight investments to date, Lucid, an 11-year-old, Oakland, Ca.-based company whose operating systems make commercial buildings more efficient, Formation 8 led the company’s Series B. That was just fine with Zetta, too. “They wanted an analytics-focused fund for the syndicate and invited us in,” says Gorenberg.

Gorenberg talks at length of the advantages of smaller, more focused fund, in fact, arguing they give VCs “exceptional” deal flow and allow them to add more value to companies than larger funds that are often “more reactive” to opportunities that come through the door.

Asked about the spate of data-focused funds already up and running — IA Ventures and Data Collective among them — Gorenberg says he doesn’t see them as a threat, nor think Zetta is perceived as one.

“This is such a massive space. There’s room for all three of us and more focused funds to do extremely well.”

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New Fundings

Aura Biosciences, an eight-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based developer of treatments of rare cancers of the eye, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by Advent Life Sciences, with participation from Chiesi Ventures, Ysios Capital, and Alexandria Venture Investments. Earlier backers, including LI-COR Biosciences and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer, also joined the round. The company has now raised $34 million altogether, shows Crunchbase.

First Insight, an eight-year-old, Sewickley, Pa.-based predictive analytics platform that helps retailers and manufacturers identify winning new products and optimize their entry prices, has raised $14 million in Series B funding led by Updata Partners. The company has now raised $23.4 million altogether, shows Crunchable.

Geofeedia, a 3.5-year-old, Chicago-based company whose software enables location-based analysis of social media, has raised $3 million in Series A4 funding led by earlier backer Hyde Park Venture Partners, with participation of earlier individual investors, including former ExactTarget CMO Tim Kopp. The company has now raised $6.8 million altogether.

HoneyBook, a nearly two-year-old, San Francisco-based invite-only service for event professionals, has raised $22 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Aleph and Hillsven. The company has now raised $32 million altogether.

Macrolide Pharmaceuticals, a year-old, Newton, Ma.-based company that’s developing antibiotics to treat life-threatening bacterial infections, has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Novartis Venture Fund,Gurnet Point Capital, Roche Ventures, and SROne. BioPortfolio hasmore here.

OneDrop, a new, New York-based diabetes management platform, has raised $1 million in seed funding from investors Jason Calcanis and other angel backers. The company’s founder is Jeff Dachis, who earlier in his career cofounded the digital marketing company Razorfish. More here.

Refinery29, an 11-year-old, New York-based fashion and lifestyle site for women, is seeking up to $50 million in new funding, reports Fortune, which says the capital would mostly come from strategic investors, including existing shareholder Hearst Corporation. The company has raised roughly $30 million to date, shows Crunchbase. Its backers include Stripes Group, Lead Edge Capital, Floodgate, First Round Capital, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures.

Salesfusion, an eight-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based company that sells marketing-automation software, has raised $5 million from earlier backers. The company has now raised $18.5 million altogether, including from Hallett Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, and BLH Venture Partners.

Stance, a 4.5-year-old, L.A.-based company that sells high-end socks through select retailers and plans to expand into undergarments, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by August Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from earlier backers Menlo Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Sherpa Ventures, Science, and Mercato Partners. The company had previously raised $36 million. Venture Capital Dispatch takes a nice look at the company — and the broader market in which it’s competing — here.

TerraLUX, a 12-year-old, Longmont, Co.-based company that installs light-emitting diode lamps in a variety of commercial settings, has raised $11 million in growth funding led by EnerTech Capital, with participation from Generation Investment Management, Crawley Ventures, Emerald Technology Ventures, GC&H Investments, and its founder, Anthony Catalano. The company has now raised $44.9 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Tricida, a two-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based company that’s focused on developing therapies for complications of kidney disease, has closed $30 million in Series B funding led by OrbiMed Advisors, with Limulus Venture Partners and Sibling Capital Ventures participating. All had backed the company previously. To date, Tricida has raised $44.5 million.

TriLumina, a four-year-old, Albuquerque, N.M.-based company that’s developing sensing technology for use by self-driving cars, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led by Stage 1 Ventures, with participation from earlier backers Cottonwood Technology Fund and Sun Mountain Capital. The company has raised $10 million to date.

Vanhawks, a 4.5-year-old, Toronto-based company that has developed a sleek, “connected,” carbon fibre bicycle, has raised $1.6 million from Real Ventures and various angel investors. The company had also raised more than $820,000 on Kickstarter last year.

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New Funds

SaaS Capital, a 2.5-year-old, Cincinnati, Oh.-based investment firm that provides debt financing to software-as-a-service companies, has closed its second fund with $58 million. Its debut fund closed at $22.5 million. GeekWire has more here.

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IPOs

Etsy, the 10-year-old, Brooklyn-based online marketplace that specializes in crafts and other items, has filed to go public. It’s become a “significant business,” notes the New York Times, with $195.6 million in sales last year, up 56 percent from the previous year, and nearly 700 employees, most of them based in Brooklyn. Etsy has raised roughly $100 million over the years. Some of its biggest outside shareholders include Accel Partners, which owns 27 percent of the company; Union Square Ventures, which own 15.2 percent; Index Ventures, which owns 12.8 percent; and Tiger Global Management, which owns 7.3 percent.

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Exits

AlchemyAPI, a 10-year-old, Denver-based artificial intelligence software company, has been acquired by IBM for undisclosed terms. The company looks to have raised just $2 million from an outside investor, Access Venture Partners, in 2013.

eXelate, an eight-year-old, New York-based data and technology company that helps digital advertisers better target online advertising, has been acquired by the measurement giant Nielsen for undisclosed terms that WSJ sources peg at $200 million. The company had raised $32 million in venture funding from investors, including Carmel Ventures, Menlo Ventures, NewSpring Capital, and Trident Capital.

FitStar, a nearly three-year-old, San Francisco-based personal training app with a small but high-profile user base, has been acquired by the fitness hardware maker Fitbit. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. FitStar had raised $5 million from investors, including Mesa Ventures, Floodgate, Trinity Ventures, Google Ventures, and Advancit Capital.

Quandoo, a 2.5-year-old, Berlin-based restaurant reservation service that competes with OpenTable, is being acquired by Recruit, a 52-year-old, Japan-based conglomerate, for 27.11 billion yen ($219 million). Quandoo had raised $39.5 million from investors, including Piton Capital, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Sixt Family, and Texas Atlantic Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

SocketPlane, a year-old, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based software-defined networking startup that was seemingly bootstrapped, has been acquired by Docker, a San Francisco-based open-source engine for lightweight app deployment. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Docker has raised $55 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang. GigaOm has more here.

Subspace, a two-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based company that helps employees securely collaborate from any device, has been acquired by Box. No financial terms were disclosed. More here.

SuppreMol, a 13-year-old, Munich-based biopharmaceutical company, has been acquired by Baxter International for about 200 million euros. The company had raised roughly $38 million from investors, including Bayern Kapital, BioMedPartners, Santo Holding, and FCP Biotech Holding.

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People

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen said earlier this week that his luxury yacht and underseas exploration vessel, Octopus, has discovered the wreck of Japan’s biggest World War II battleship, Musashi, off the coast of the Philippines. More here. (Business Insider has more on the yacht itself here.)

Confluence Capital, a two-year-old, Minneapolis, Mn.-based early stage firm, has rebranded itself as Matchstick Ventures and also added a couple of new advisory board members. Seth Levine is a cofounder of Foundry Group. Joy Lindsay is the president of StarTec Investments and the newly created Sofia Fund.

When Wen Hsieh, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, took the stand yesterday in the high-profile trial of former partner Ellen Pao, he “seemed to represent everything Ellen Pao was not,” writes The Recorder. More here.

Two former and four current Twitter execs, all women, announced a new investment group yesterday called #Angels. They’ll be investing together and apart, but lending their collective expertise in product development, partnerships, fundraising, acquisitions, internationalization, platforms, media, legal, corporate governance and policy to the startups they work with. (One catch: those companies can’t compete with or potentially be acquired by Twitter.) More here.

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Job Listings

Foursquare, the location-based recommendations and social networking company, is looking for a director of business development. The job is in New York.

Teledoc, a venture-backed telehealth services company, is looking for a director of business development. The job is also in New York.

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Essential Reads

The backstory of Meerkat, a side project that’s taking off — at least for now.

Aspiro, the dangerously unprofitable Swedish parent company of streaming services Tidal and WiMP, is seemingly trying to wring more money out of Jay Z, a month after the famed rapper put in a $56 million offer to buy the company. (To that, we say, good luck.)

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Detours

One twin exercises, the other doesn’t.

Hermit crabs upgrading their homes.

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Retail Therapy

Smartwatches for kids.

21.3-feet of total luxury. Oh, yeeeaaah.