Big deal: PricewaterhouseCoopers is buying Booz & Company.

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Venture Heavyweights Sit Back as Deal Sizes Soar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Fundings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New Funds

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

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

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IPOs

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

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Exits

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

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

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Data

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

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Happenings

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

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

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

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

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People

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

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

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

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

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

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Job Listings

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

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Essential Reads

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

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Detours

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

The many faces of Lou Reed.

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

Would you like to join my start-down?

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Retail Therapy

Balls of steel. Get some.

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

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

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

Google is reportedly in talks with Asian suppliers to mass produce a smartwatch.

Nextdoor, the social network for neighbors, has just raised a whopping $60 million in fresh capital. (More below in New Fundings.)

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True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan on the Series B Crunch

Late last week, I visited Jon Callaghan, a cofounder of eight-year-old True Ventures, a firm that makes seed-stage investments in companies that it can afford to back for the long haul. The firm’s string of hits includes the book recommendation site Goodreads, which raised $2.75 million and sold to Amazon this year for $150 million; 3D printing company Makerbot Industries, which raised $10 million and sold to Stratasys this year for $403 million in stock; and Automattic, the still-private parent company of WordPress. At True’s San Francisco offices, surrounded by a sea of glass windows and polished wood floors, Callaghan shared his views on a number of things, from the firm’s operations to the democratization of startup capital. We’ll feature more of that interview in StrictlyVC this week; what follows is a part of our discussion that centered on the growing shortage of Series B funding for startups.

Years ago, you told me that True only does its own follow-on rounds, meaning in companies it has already backed. Has the firm reconsidered that stance, given that fewer and fewer firms are focused on Series B size investments? You’re investing a $200 million fund. Meanwhile, it seems like an underserved market.

It’s a really interesting part of the market. We’re not building a new product for that market. It’s not in front of us right now, though I personally think about how we can solve the needs of great entrepreneurs, and that’s a big, huge problem in the ecosystem right now.

What’s creating this bottleneck, in your view? 

There are definitely too many seed-funded companies. But I think it goes back to risk. I don’t think the normal venture capital model is designed to take extremely large product/market risks. What that means is when companies get through the A [round] to the B and they still have big unanswered questions around product/market, it’s really hard for the normal industry to fund that.

What would you do that’s not being done?

You make sure that [the size of] your investments are relative to your [overall] fund [size] and you embrace the idea of investment failure as part of the model.

Other VCs will accuse you of being patronizing. They’ll say that failure and risk are very much part of their models. What are you suggesting that’s different?

Well, we’re talking about a big gap in the market – B rounds – and the reason those rounds aren’t getting funded is [the startups don’t have] enough traction.

For the most part, the industry has gravitated toward strong, traction proof points because that’s a good business. Put $5 million or $20 million into a business that’s working and write it up? That’s a fantastic business. But it’s different than taking high risks on B rounds. So to your point, I think there’s a product to be built that’s structured around taking high risk in B rounds.

If True Ventures were to do it, what would it look like?

I think there’s probably a $3 million to $5 million B round product to be built that’s sort of in the $15 million to $20 million pre [valuation] range, and in order to do that you’d need a fund large enough to have follow-on capital for each of those. You can run the math. Thirty to 40 companies [in the portfolio] would be pretty optimal.

I think it’s a really interesting slice of the industry, and it’s not rational for Sand Hill Road to come down and do it because [those investors already] have a really good model. There are some funds out there that are really well-equipped to do this and do a phenomenal job, including Foundry Group and Spark Capital — they embrace really big product and market risks. But [most] VCs will fund B and C rounds for things that have product/market fit and traction.

Those are good companies, too. But there are an awful lot of companies that get through A rounds that don’t have all of those things and shouldn’t die or go away.

New Fundings

Cyphort, a 2.5-year-old San Jose, Calif.-based cyber security business that offers its customers advanced threat monitoring and mitigation services, has closed $15.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Trinity Ventures. Previous investors Foundation Capital and Matrix Capital participated. Cyphort has raised $23.7 million to date.

eRecycling Group, a four-year-old, Irving, Texas-based recycling company that refurbishes and resells smartphones and other mobile devices, has raised $105 million in Series C funding led by previous investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner was joined by new investor Silver Lake Kraftwerk, along with other previous investors in the company, including OpenAir Equity Partners, SJF Ventures, NGEN Partners, RRE Ventures and TAP Advisors.

Magisto, two-year-old company with offices in Tel Aviv and New York, has raised $13 million from Qualcomm and SanDisk Ventures. The company helps users create videos and slideshows that can then be easily shared on social networks. The company has raised $18.5 million to date, including from Magma Venture Partners and Horizons Ventures, which also participated in its new round.

Middle Peak Medical, a Palo Alto-based medical device company that’s focused on treating mitral valve disease, has raised a fresh $3 million in funding. The money comes from BioMedinvest and Edwards Lifesciences, along with previous investors Wellington Partners, Seventure Partners, and High-Tech Gruenderfonds. (The last three invested a separate, $8.5 million in the company just five months ago in a financing that appears to have been Middle Peak’s first institutional round.)

Nextdoor, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco company that creates private social neighborhood nextworks to residents can keep each other up to date on the latest happenings, has landed a $60 million round of fresh funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Tiger Global Management. Comcast Ventures, a new investor, along with previous investors Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, and Shasta Ventures, also participated in the round, which brings Nextdoor’s total financing to approximately $100 million.

OpenBay, a young, Cambridge, Mass.-based online service and mobile app for booking automotive repairs, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, reports Boston Business Journal. Others of OpenBay backers include Boston Seed Capital, Stage 1 Ventures, and numerous angel investors, including Andy Palmer, Jim Pallotta, and Jit Saxena.

Paxata, a 22-month-old, Redwood City, Calif.-based data analysis startup, has raised $8 million in Series B funding led by Accel Partners. Walden Riverwood — a new tech-focused venture capital fund that was cofounded by Walden international founder Lip Bu Tan  — has also backed Paxata.

PeopleMatter, a four-year-old, North Charleston, S.C.-based workforce management platform that’s focused on the service industry, has raised $16 million in Series E funding. The round was led by StarVest Partners, and included the company’s earlier investors C&B Capital, Harbert Venture Partners, Intersouth Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Noro-Moseley Partners and Scale Venture Partners. PeopleMatter has raised $63.4 million to date.

Q Factor Communications, a 20-month-old, Waltham, Mass.-based startup focused on seamlessly delivering media-rich content over wireless devices, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding from Sigma Prime Ventures and Venrock.

Rumble Entertainment, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Calif.-based maker of free, multiplatform games, has raised $15 million led by the Korean gaming company Nexon. TriplePoint Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Google Ventures also participated in the round. Rumble was formed by veterans of games makers Playdom, Zynga, Activision Blizzard, and Electronic Arts and just released its first game in beta, called KingsRoad. The company has now raised just short of $40 million altogether.

Snapverse, a young, Boston-based company whose iPhone app songs allows users to create 20-second-long music videos to songs by popular artists, has raised more than $4 million, including from John Hannan, co-founder of New York-based private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Snapverse also announced in a release this morning that it has signed a deal to license music from Universal Music Group, Warner Brothers and Sony Music Entertainment.

Stratoscale, a Herzeliya, Israel-based company that’s building a new virtualization technology meant to improve the performance of data centers, has raised $10 million in Series A funding from Battery Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. VentureBeat profiled the company here.

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Fund News

Norwest Venture Partners appears to be crushing it in 2013. The WSJ’s Deborah Gage has more.

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IPOs

Tableau Software is gearing up for a secondary offering, according to this SEC filing. Tableau staged a very successful IPO in May. The shares opened at $47 (after being priced at $31); today, they are trading at $67.

Trading pre-IPO shares gets trickier.

Twitter‘s IPO is highly anticipated, but other billion-dollar IPOs this year should take a teeny bit of the pressure off, notes Dealbook.

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Exits

NextBio, a nine-year-old, Santa Clara, Calif.-based company whose software platform allows life science researchers to discover and share phenotypic and genomic across public and proprietary data, is being acquired by Illumina, a publicly traded manufacturer of DNA sequencing machines. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Virtela, a 13-year-old Denver-based cloud-computing company, is being acquired by Japan’s NTT Communications Corp. for approximately $525 million. NTT is buying Virtela at the same time that it’s spending $350 million for a 80 percent stake in 13-year-old, Sacramento, Calif.-based RagingWire Data Centers, which operates massive data centers in the Sacramento region and in Virginia. Norwest Venture Partners was the earliest and largest investor in Virtela; RagingWire had raised $230 million in debt funding just last month. Reuters reports that NTT is trying to ramp up its overseas networks through acquisitions.

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Happenings

Ad Age is hosting its first-ever Data Conference in New York City today. You can check out the agenda here.

VentureBeat‘s GamesBeat conference gets underway today in Redwood City, Calif., about 30 miles south of San Francisco. Click here to survey the agenda.

RSA is kicking of its Europe 2013 conference in Amsterdam today. Among its speakers: Amit Yoran, an RSA exec who was previously the CEO of NetWitness (which RSA acquired in 2011) and before that (briefly), the head of the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Here are the details.

TechCrunch Europe continues. You can find coverage here.

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People

Speaking of the TechCrunch Europe conference, during a panel discussion yesterday, venture capitalist Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital called Berlin the world’s next great global startup hub, not for the first time. (Cohler also referred to himself and his Benchmark colleagues as “artisans.” StrictlyVC has since imagined Cohler sitting at his workbench, poring over business plans with a set of handmade tools.)

Skype executive Mark Gillett is off to head up “value creation” at Silver Lake, reports AllThingsD.

Thanks for a job well done? Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has hired his divorce lawyer as the company’s top attorney.

Performer Kanye West is apparently planning to sue YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley for uploading video of West’s recent engagement to Kim Kardashian at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, where Hurley was an invited guest. (Because Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are very private people. Obviously.)

Job Listings

Twitter is looking for a corporate development and strategy principal to help identify and evaluate targets of interest for the company. Candidates need at least 10 years of experience, including at least four years of experience at a tech company or in another role that required rigorous analysis and knowledge of the tech industry (like venture capital or corporate development). An engineering degree is preferred. Apply here.

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Essential Reads

Apple wants to bust your iPhone. It’s not your imagination.

Hundreds of executives from large companies in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. tell Forrester Research that Facebook ads create less value than any other digital marketing opportunity.

Redpoint’s Tomasz Tunguz writes about how to measure “dark social.” (Earlier this month, writer Alexis Madrigal had an even more comprehensive piece on the phenomenon. It’s definitely worth reading if you haven’t already.)

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Detours

It’s bad bosses, not workloads, that cause depression at work, according to a new study (and everyone’s life experience).

More and more, robots are beginning to look, act, and perform tasks like humans.

One year ago today, Superstorm Sandy slammed into New Jersey, becoming the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history. The Atlantic has posted some amazing photos of the damaged areas, along with images of the very slow progress being made. (Starting with photo no.12, the images are interactive and feature “before” and “after” scenes.)

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Retail Therapy

White and blue gingham shirts are always in style, but we like this red and blue checkered number for a change of pace.

Coming out November 12: Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. (Author Fred Vogelstein is a superb writer; we’re pre-ordering this one.)

Talk about your bling: Someone has created 22-karat gold toilet paper. Finally, an easy way to literally throw money straight down the toilet.

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

A spy hub in Germany, NSA operations in France, and now, reports that the NSA spied on more than 60 million phones call in Spain in one month alone. This is becoming more awkward by the day.

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Homebrew Separates Itself from the Pack

This summer, yet another San Francisco-based, seed-stage venture fund was formed. Called Homebrew, the firm’s cofounders are Hunter Walk, who spent much of the previous decade working as a product manager at Google, and Satya Patel, who has bounded between operating and investing roles over the last 15 years, including most recently at Twitter, Battery Ventures, and Google, where he met Walk. The two began fundraising in January; they closed the fund with $35 million in late April and made the news official in July.

Whether the firm can compete in what is an increasingly crowded part of the startup ecosystem is another story. Not only does Homebrew have many hundreds of angel investors and dozens of other seed-stage firms as competitors on deals, but it also has to contend with AngelList’s month-old Syndicates program, which enables angel investors to quickly mobilize a group of investors to back a deal.

Homebrew’s timing might look lousy, but it will make sense over time, suggests Walk, who argues that there are still unexploited niches in seed funding.

For starters, Homebrew is looking to lead or co-lead syndicates with initial checks of $500,000 to $800,000 as a part of an institutional round that’s between $1.25 million to $2.5 million. “There’s a lot of money from talented people who want to invest between $50,000 and $250,000 in companies, but a small number who want to step up and lead these rounds before there’s much data to crunch,” says Walk.

Homebrew expects to back 20 to 25 startups with its first fund, and it intends to own 10 to 15 percent of each company for its efforts.

Walk says Homebrew’s investment principles also set the firm apart. One of these is its focus on startups that level the playing field for individuals and small businesses. As an example, Walk points to Twilio, a service that helps developers build apps for text messaging and other services on phones. (Homebrew is not an investor.) Walk also highlights Plaid, a startup whose goal is to make it easier for developers to build financial applications. (Plaid recently raised $2.8 million from Spark Capital, Google Ventures, NEA, Felicis Ventures and Homebrew.)

I ask Walk about the far bigger need in the market for Series B funding. After all, it often seems that there are too few funds to accommodate the many seed- and early-stage companies that are looking for follow-on investments. Does Homebrew risk watching its seed-stage deals fall off a cliff?

Walk says Homebrew raised money from four institutional investors partly with that issue in mind. If Homebrew needs to raise more money to support its existing portfolio (à la the new Clover Fund of Felicis Ventures), it already has relationships with people in the business of writing big checks.

Another point of differentiation with other seed funds? Walk says Homebrew’s startups (it has backed six so far) have solid business models involving monthly recurring subscriptions and transaction-based fees. While no guarantee of success, Walk figures this focus on revenue might help his companies’ chances of raising money from Series A and B investors when they go to market.

“We didn’t pick ‘revenue-first businesses’ to time the market, or because we think they’re more fundable,” adds Walk. “But the type of companies we back do have clearer investment and exit paths.”

New Fundings

Accio Energy, a five-year-old, Ann Arbor-based wind energy company, has raised $710,000 in debt and options, according to an SEC filing. The company has previously raised venture financing from Ann Arbor-based Resonant Venture Partners, the economic development group Automation Alley and the Frankel Commercialization Fund, which is run by business students at the University of Michigan.

BeautyBooked, a one-year-old, New York-based company whose platform invites users to search, discover, and book spa and salon appointments, has raised $530,000 in seed funding from New York Angels and Innovation Garden, a New Jersey-based accelerator program.

ByteLight, a 2.5-year-old, Boston-based company has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Flywheel Ventures, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, Sand Hill Angels, the eCoast Angel Network, and Google evangelist Don Dodge. (If you missed it, Dodge spoke with StrictlyVC about ByteLight and competing technologies recently.) ByteLight’s technology relies on LED lights in the ceilings of stores, which pulse at a rate that’s faster than the human eye can see but that a phone camera can pick up to pinpoint shoppers’ locations.

Deal Décor, a two-year-old San Francisco-based e-commerce startup focused on high-end furniture, is raising $500,000 in seed funding, according to an SEC filing, which shows the company has raised $235,000 toward that end. Deal Décor closed on $1.2 million in seed funded just two months ago, in a round that included Signia Venture Partners, Plug & Play Ventures, and numerous individuals. Deal Décor has attracted a lot of attention over the last year or so. You can learn more about the company here and here.

Eatrue, a young, San Francisco-based maker of nutritional supplement energy bars, has raised $400,00 of a $1 million private offering, according to an SEC filing. Along with founder Daniel Grossman, the filing lists as directors Mel and Patricia Ziegler, the founders of Banana Republic.

Mobius Therapeutics, a seven-year-old, St. Louis-based pharmaceutical company developing a drug that can help with glaucoma surgery, has raised $5 million, according to an SEC filing. The Series B funding was led by the St. Louis-based venture capital firm Cultivation Capital. Mobius raised a previous, $1.7 million, round last year.

nPulse Technologies, a two-year-old, Charlottesville, Va.-based data security analytics company, has raised $1 million in fresh funding, according to an SEC filing. The company disclosed a separate, $1.95 million in funding just three months ago.

Rail Yard, a two-year-old, Austin-based startup whose online marketplace connects commercial building tenants with telecom and other tech services, has raised $750,000 as part of a $965,000 offering, according to an SEC filing. The Austin Business Journal reports that Rail Yard has collected the capital from a syndicate of unnamed angel investors.

Snapchat, a two-year-old, Pacific Palisades, Calif.-based mobile-messaging service that’s particularly popular with teens, is considering raising up to $200 million at a valuation of $3.5 billion, AllThingsD reported on Friday. That would be more than triple the valuation that venture firms assigned Snapchat in June, when it raised $60 million. To date, the company has raised $73 million, including from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital, SV Angel and Institutional Venture Partners.

Trod Medical, a seven-year-old, Belgium-based medical company that makes surgical instruments designed to treat prostate cancers and destroy localized lung tumors, has raised $6.1 million in a round led by Capricorn Venture Partners and Vesalius Biocapital. Other investors in the funding include Gemma Frisius Fund; the spin-off fund of the University of Leuven in Belgium; and the Flemish investment company PMV.

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New Funds

On Friday, Boulder-based Foundry Group announced the closing of its fourth fund, Foundry Group Select. As firm cofounder Brad Feld wrote in a post about the fund, it has a rather different focus than the firm’s previous funds. Specifically, it will be invested “solely in our Foundry Group and previous funds’ portfolio companies that have achieved significant success,” writes Feld. Here’s the filing. For those concerned that Foundry will no longer be funding new startups, a quick reminder that it raised its last, $225 million fund just one year ago.

Bip Financial, an Atlanta firm that invests in emerging, high-growth opportunities (including, in the past, restaurant franchises), is raising a new venture fund according to an SEC filing. According to the Form D, fundraising for Bip Early Stage I began two weeks ago and the firm has so far secured $6.5 million toward an amount that is listed as “indefinite.”

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IPOs

Twitter is waiting until after its IPO to name a woman to the board, reports AllThingsD, whose sources say the company is particularly interested in someone experienced in international relations.

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Happenings

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe was in full swing today in Berlin, with featured speakers that included Marc Samwer, who most recently founded Global Founders Fund with his brothers; AOL chief Tim Armstrong; and numerous members of Benchmark Capital, including Matt Cohler and Bill Gurley. The conference has already wrapped up for the day, but you can see the presentations you missed here.

Samsung’s developer conference also gets underway in San Francisco today. It looks seriously geeky, but it’s a quick way to learn about Samsung’s latest developer tools and SDKs. Maybe you can also corner David Eun, EVP’s of Samsung’s new Open Innovation Center, who will be speaking around 11 a.m PST. More information about the event is here.

Nokia‘s Abu Dhabi event in review. (BBC Video.)

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People

On Friday, a San Mateo County judge ruled in favor of allowing famed venture capitalist Vinod Khosla to block public access to a beach in Half Moon Bay where he owns 200 acres of oceanfront property. Fishermen, sunbathers and surfers have been accessing Martins Beach for at least half a century, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Now, they can only access the beach by swimming to it.

New York Times reporter Nick Bilton may soon see his new book about Twitter turned into a feature-length movie. (Our prediction: Bradley Cooper will be cast as Jack Dorsey.)

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Job Listings

Wilson Sonsini is looking for a corporate associate with two to three years of relevant corporate experience in “one or more of the areas of venture capital, initial public offerings or mergers and acquisitions. Superior academic credentials, excellent verbal, written and interpersonal skills required. An interest in startup or venture capital practice preferred.” The job is in New York.

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Essential Reads

Twitter agreed to stay in San Francisco in exchange for a tax break that now looks like it will cost the city tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The New Yorker looks at why electric vehicles have stalled. Says an analyst quoted in the piece: “The one company that’s been able to succeed so far has been Tesla. They’re not selling to normal consumers, but to the people who already have a Porsche in their garage. If Tesla is serious about going into the mass market, they’re going to have their head handed to them.”

The NYSE really doesn’t want a replay of the Facebook botched offering when Twitter goes public. Here’s how much it doesn’t want that.

Google is reportedly building a floating retail store for Google Glass, but it doesn’t yet have the permits needed to anchor it at its final destination, off the coast of San Francisco.

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Detours

In almost every European country, bikes are outselling new cars.

The hidden benefits of food stamps.

Mind-reading technology speeds ahead.

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Retail Therapy

These are great pants.

Sex Panther cologne. Of course, you wouldn’t want to be caught with it in your own bathroom vanity, placed in strategic proximity to your latest copy of Harvard Magazine. We highlight it only as a gag gift.

Does underwear really need this much innovating?

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Germany and France would like to talk with the U.S. about its trans-Atlantic spying.

Murli Ravi is the head of South Asia investments for JAFCO Asia, and from his perch in Singapore, he’s never seen so much cross-border activity as in the last 12 months. Ravi joined JAFCO in 2008, after studying the regional venture community as a senior analyst with INSEAD. “Let’s just say I’ve made three trips the U.S. in 2013. I made zero trips to the U.S. in the four years prior,” he observes.

Late yesterday, I Skyped with Ravi to learn more.

Globalization is an ongoing trend. What are you seeing?

You also see companies move here because [their product is better suited to the market in Asia]. I sit on the board of a company called Bubbly , formerly Bubble Motion, that was founded in the Valley but moved to Singapore.

I remember reading about that move and thinking that it boiled down to lower costs for the company.

Well, Bubbly is a social messaging service like Twitter, except that instead of read and tweet, you speak and listen, which also appeals to the markets here. Unlike on Twitter, where you’re talking to the world and hoping someone will talk back, with Bubbly, it feels like someone is talking to you because you hear them in your ear, whether it’s a friend or a celebrity who has recorded a message about picking up her kids or an upcoming show. Unlike on Twitter, by the way, consumers here are also willing to pay to listen to celebrities. Right now, the biggest markets for Bubbly are India, Japan, Indonesia, Philippines – all of which have their own celebrities.

Are Western celebrities taking advantage of the platform?

There are soccer players from the English community on the platform. Snoop Dogg is on Bubbly, too. Some celebrities transcend boundaries.

Snoop Dogg is an appealing character, though I believe his new name is Snoopzilla, for the record. Do other recent transplants jump to mind?

A couple of other companies that have taken the same route are Vuclip — which hasn’t quite moved its headquarters to Asia, but does focus mostly on Asian and especially Indian audiences — andMig33 — which did move and has seen success in Indonesia in particular.

You also have companies like Line and Kakaotalk that didn’t originate in Southeast Asia but now have a huge user base in this region. Coincidentally or otherwise, these messaging companies have a lot of similarities with Bubbly.

What about enterprise companies?

It’s so far been a little less common for enterprise companies to move here, and I see that as a major untapped opportunity. There are lots of inefficiencies in the way big business is done in some of the countries here, which gives more competitive firms from elsewhere a potential advantage if they choose to come here. Equally, some startups from this region who are able to thrive here have shown that they are quite capable of stepping onto the world stage, because the historical lack of resources available to small companies is a sort of trial by fire.

New Fundings

Flint, a young, Redwood City, Calif.-based mobile payments startup that targets mobile entrepreneurs, has raised $6 million in Series B funding from the wireless service provider Digicel Group, SVG Ventures, Storm Ventures, and True Ventures. The company has raised $9 million to date.

Iris Mobile, a five-year-old, Chicago-based mobile marketing company, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Origin Ventures, Hyde Park Angels, Hyde Park Venture Partners, OCA Ventures, and Illinois Ventures.

Itembase, a two-year-old, Berlin-based startup behind an online platform that helps users track their purchase data, has raised $3.25 in Series A funding from High-Tech Gründerfonds, Rheingau Founders, German Startups Groups, Westtech Ventures, HR Alpharound, and individual investors. In concert with the funding, the company announced it also has a new board chair: early Skype investor Morten Lund.

iMoney Group, an 18-month-old Kuala Lumpur company that has created an online personal finance platform and is expanding across Southeast Asia, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from Fenox Venture Capital, 500 Startups, Vogel Ventures, Jungle Ventures, Econa AG, and Rebright Partners. Earlier this year, the company raised $500,000 in seed financing from Asia Venture Group.

Komli Media, a seven-year-old, Mumbai-based digital advertising platform company, has raised $30 million from new investor Peepul Capital, along with previous investors Helion Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Komli has raised roughly $100 million to date.

Tiger Pistol, a two-year-old, Melbourne, Australia-based social media marketing company, has raised $1 million from Rampersand, a new firm. Tiger Pistol has raised $2 million to date.

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IPOs

Yesterday, in a revised SEC filing, Twitter set an initial price range for shares in its IPO at $17-$20, for a valuation of about $11 billion. The filing shows that Twitter plans to price the offering on Nov. 6th.

Line, a two-year-old Japan-based messaging application that allows people to exchange information, play games, and send virtual stickers, is expected to go public next year on the Tokyo stock exchange, according to a Nikkei.com report flagged by TechCrunch. Nikkei reports that Line’s valuation is expected to fall somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion. According to the New York Times, Line has 230 million registered users — a number it took Facebook five years to reach.

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Exits

Clipless, a months-old mobile coupon app for Android, has been acquired by deal aggregator 8coupons for an undisclosed amount. Clipless never disclosed outside funding; 8coupons, a seven-year-old, New York-based company hasn’t either, though TechCrunch reports that its valuation is $30 million.

ZeroVM, a year-old, Tel Aviv-based cloud technology company, was acquired yesterday by the publicly traded Web-hosting company Rackspace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Happenings

The New York Times is holding its Global Forum Asia conference in Singapore today. By the time StrictlyVC hits your inbox, it’ll be over, but you can check out what you missed here, including recorded interviews with HP’s Meg Whitman and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe gets underway this weekend in Berlin. You can learn more here.

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People

Eric Olson has joined Origin Ventures, the Chicago-based early-stage venture capital firm, as an associate. Olson most recently served in Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, working with a group tasked with assessing Chicago’s economy and helping it grow at a faster rate. Before that, Olson was a management consultant at A.T. Kearney and an associate at DFJ Portage Ventures.

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Job Listings

Boston-based Third Rock Ventures – which invests in biotech drug, device, and diagnostic companies – is looking to hire a senior associate with three to five years of work experience in the life sciences industry for its San Francisco office. Applicants should have an MBA;  an undergrad degree in life sciences is “strongly preferred.”

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System is looking for a senior portfolio manager to focus on its co-investment program. (H/T: peHUB)

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Essential Reads

The decline of Wikipedia.

Paul Graham pegs the value of all companies to pass through his eight-year-old Y Combinator at $13.7 billion.

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Detours

There’s been a lot of speculation that teens aren’t driving because they’re too busy with their social media and/or they’re more environmentally conscious than earlier generations. A new study says the real reason is much simpler: they’re broke.

Former NSA director Michael Hayden is overheard talking on background to a reporter while riding a commuter train.

Insights into why you look like your dog.

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Retail Therapy

Children will drop their ice cream cones when you race down the street on one of these babies.

We’ve no idea what problem this is solving.

Star Wars Lightsaber Thumb Wrestling Kit. (We know. You can thank us later.)

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Early Pinterest investors enjoy a very nice mark-up on their investment, as the social network completes a whopping new $225 million round led by Fidelity Investments.

John Sculley is reportedly exploring a bid for Blackberry with some Canadian partners.

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Jim Robinson of RRE Ventures on Square, Bitcoin, and the Firm’s Next Fund

Jim Robinson, cofounder of 19-year-old RRE Ventures, is a veritable sage of the New York venture scene, having arrived earlier — and stayed longer — than many of his industry peers.

I caught up with Robinson yesterday to talk about what’s happening in New York, as well as to learn more about what’s happening specifically at RRE, a firm that now invests 75 percent of its capital in New York-based companies. Our conversation has been edited for length.

RRE has raised five funds to date. Will you be raising a sixth soon and if so, how much will you be targeting?

We’re still investing our fifth [$230 million] fund; we’re mostly through that. And we’ll raise a new fund shortly in the same, $250 million range.

Would we ever see RRE raise a bigger fund?

Fund sizes go in an out of vogue, but you go bigger either to do bigger deals or hire more people. Bigger deals have never been our business model, and we’ve always liked our size and shape: five or six partners, a couple of principals, a couple of associates. During the dot.com era, we’d gotten bigger and we sort of concluded that we didn’t want to grow our practice, [because] we felt a little more disconnected, both from our partners and the companies we were funding. When you have 10 VCs standing in a field, they’ll argue about the weather.

There’s obviously a lot going on in New York. Is there too much going on?

Are there too many startups right now? Probably. When you start hearing about whether you should bother with college or start a company instead, it’s probably [a bad sign], but these things [sort themselves out]. I think it’s probably more acute out there [in California]. Most people would rather do a little more following than leading in life, which is a normal human condition, and you don’t get to do that in a startup.

RRE has enjoyed some nice exits, including, most recently, the sale of payments company Braintree to eBay for $800 million in cash last month. I understand you had a chance to invest in the seed round of Square, too, but didn’t. Is that your biggest miss?

Hah, no, not even close. We’ve been around 20 years. We have a bunch of those. We didn’t do Priceline and should have. We didn’t do PayPal and should have. Long ago, we’d invested in Apriva [a point-of-sale dongle made to work with once-ubiquitous PalmPilot handhelds] and barely gotten our money back, so we were leery of incumbents in the payments processing world. We also worried about [Square’s] price. It seemed expensive to us at the time.

Many VCs argue that it’s worth paying up for the right deal. How do you feel about being price sensitive?

If you pay up and it works out great, you say, “Great, this was sensible.” If you pay up and it doesn’t work out, you don’t talk about it. If I had a growth fund here, there’s no question that I’d say on occasion, “This is too big an opportunity.” Then again, price is a function of supply and demand. We disregard it at our own peril.

What do you think about the digital currency bitcoin? 

We’ve been looking at bitcoin technology for over a year. We’ve probably looked at 20 [bitcoin-related] companies seriously and we’ve made very small seed investments in two, but we’ve been reticent to place a major bet on one to date. It gets down to regulatory issues, which seem to indicate that if you’re an institutional investor in a digital currency company, there’s some legal liability. If there are problems in the system, [the liability] doesn’t just stop at the company but can go through investors and even, potentially, investors’ investors. It’s just not field-tested yet.

No doubt we’ll have a major investment in a [bitcoin] company, whether it’s in one year or three years. But we’re watching what’s happening on the federal and state and international level right now. We’re still in studying mode.

New Fundings

Black Lotus, a 14-year-old, L.A.-based security company that caters to data centers, hosting providers and telecommunications carriers, has raised $3.5 million from Industry Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm.

BloomNation, a two-year-old, L.A.-based startup behind a marketplace for florists, has raised $1.65 million in seed funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Spark Capital, Chicago Ventures, and CrunchFund also participated.

BoostUp, a three-year-old, Detroit-based savings platform designed to help consumers save for major purchases (brands that want their business can help them, too), has raised $1 million led by Detroit Venture Partners. In August, the company moved to downtown Detroit from Chicago. It also ditched its original name, Motozuma, during the transition.

Cureatr, a two-year-old, New York-based startup that makes group messaging software for healthcare providers, has raised $5.7 million in Series A funding from Cardinal Partners and Milestone Venture Partners.

FormLabs, a two-year-old, Somerville, Mass.-based maker of desktop of 3D printers, has raised $19 million from DFJ Growth, Pitango Venture Capital, and Innovation Endeavors.

The Football App, a five-year-old, Berlin-based company whose mobile app provides users news about team updates and lets them communicate with other fans about sports news, has raised $7 million in fresh funding. The money comes from Union Square Ventures just six months after the company raised $10 million from EarlyBird Venture Capital. The Football App has been downloaded more than 10 million times.

Funding Circle, a three-year-old, U.K.-based online platform that connects people willing to lend money with small businesses needing capital, has raised $37 million in Series C funding. Accel Partners led the round, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, and Ribbit Capital. Funding Circle, which has now raised around $52 million to date, is using part of its newest financing to enter the U.S. market, reports TechCrunch. Specifically, the company is merging with San Francisco-based Endurance Lending Network. Much more on the news here.

F-star, a seven-year-old, Cambridge, Mass.-based biopharmaceutical company, has formed an immuno-oncology spin-off called F-star Alpha with $12.1 million in Series A funding from Atlas Ventures, Aescap Venture, TVM Capital, SR One, MP Healthcare Venture Management and MS Ventures. You can learn more about the deal — and this particular business model — here.

Gravitant, a nine-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based company that optimizes the cloud consumption of its enterprise customers, has raised $10 million in Series B funding. New investor Corsa Ventures led the round with participation from existing investor S3 Ventures. The company has raised $13.8 million to date.

HighFive, an 18-month-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, has raised $13.5 million in Series A funding led by General Catalyst, which was joined by Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. Other investors to participate include Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, Box CEO and cofounder Aaron Levie, and Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston. HighFive is still operating in stealth mode, but a spokeswoman tells me it is “reimagining the way people communicate at work” and will be “squarely focused on business.” She adds that the company is rolling out its beta products to its first customers in the next two weeks.

HomeShop18, a five-year-old company located in Uttar Pradesh, India, has raised $14 million in new funding, including from Network18 Group, a media group in India that operates some of the country’s news TV channels. HomeShop18 is an online and on-air retailer. GS Home Shopping, a Korea-based TV home shopping company, also participated in HomeShop18’s funding. The company has raised roughly $65 million to date.

Nutonian, a 2.5-year-old, Cambridge, Mass.-based that makes machine learning software, has raised a $4 million Series A round led by Atlas Venture. GigaOm has a more detailed write-up of what the company does here.

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Exits

Aexio, an eight-year-old Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based mobile network optimization company, was acquired yesterday by InfoVista, a Paris-based company focused on network performance management. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. In 2010, Malaysia Venture Capital Management Berhad, Malaysia’s largest venture firm, had acquired 23 percent of Aexio for an undisclosed amount of funding.

LookFlow, a four-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based company whose technology incorporates facial recognition and machine learning, was just acquired by Yahoo. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. LookFlow had raised an undisclosed amount of funding, including from Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher and Wellsphere founder Dave Kashen.

Shutl, a three-year-old, U.K.-based same-day delivery service, was acquired yesterday by eBay for an undisclosed amount. Shutl had raised around $8.7 million from Hummingbird Ventures, UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, e.ventures and Notion Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

SoCoCare, a San Diego-based startup focused on mobile customer care, was acquired yesterday by Five9, a San Ramon, Calif.-based company. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Twelve-year-old Five9 is backed by SAP Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Partech International. Five9 has raised at least $72 million over the years.

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Happenings

Business Insider hosts a conference in New York City today called Startup 2013. The focus is on “educating the next generation of startup leaders” and Henry Blodget will be on hand (of course), along with other big New York names, including RRE Ventures’ Stuart Ellman, Betaworks’ cofounder John Borthwick, and Dan Porter, the newly named head of digital at William Morris Endeavor.

Also kicking off today at the San Jose Convention Center in the Bay Area: the 2013 Net Impact Conference, a gathering with more than 350 speakers who are scheduled to talk for a wide range of tracks, from “tech for good” to “sustainable food” to “corporate impact.” You can find more details here.

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People

It’s looking like Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li will soon own Fisker Automotive. More here.

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Job Listings

GE is looking for a business development and ventures associate in its San Ramon, Calif., office. The new hire will join GE’s Software & Analytics Business Development and Strategy team, which “composes strategy and then sources and executes acquisitions, venture capital investments, strategic alliances, and licensing on behalf of GE Software and Analytics and GE Global Research.” To apply, click here.

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Essential Reads

The West Coast tech industry hearts recently elected Democratic New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. The Silicon Valley Business Journal counts the ways donations.

Enough with this “tech surge” business, says venture capitalist Fred Wilson. He thinks the government should open source the healthcare.gov project, “or at least all the components that easily lend themselves to open source,”  and he’s asking people to sign this petition toward that end.

The SEC releases a refreshed, 100-page crowdfunding proposal. The public has 90 days to respond.

LinkedIn wants the keys to your email for its innovative new Intro feature – but can you trust it?

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Detours

Zack Seckler tells jokes with a click of his camera’s shutter.

Googlers discuss how long any one employee has managed to live (live!) at the search giant’s accommodating headquarters.

Witness a very funny newspaper correction.

Dermatologists say to wash your face just once daily — in the evening.

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Retail Therapy

A men’s cologne made in collaboration with the Glenlivet distillery. (Is Glenlivet trying to get you fired? We think it might be.).

Earphones for a “high-powered look.” (Do not buy these.)

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