I am trying to figure out the seriousness of something that I see is going on in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. I need your help to understand the phenomenon, and would appreciate if you engage in this thread and offer your perspective. VCs are moving up the entrepreneurship value chain, [...]

TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs. Over recent months, though, there's been an odd development: Certain posts by entrepreneurs critical of VCs are being quietly removed and then [...]

Let me start off by saying this: Gary Sharma's Alley Reporter site is great, in terms of the service that it offers, the layout, the content, etc. But, as we all know, the name "Silicon Alley Reporter" originally referred to a trade pub that Jason Calacanis started in 1996. Jason [...]

SpongeFish, a website featuring user-generated how-to content, has raised $2 million in a first round of funding, according to VentureWire. I have to admit that I'm a bit baffled by the plethora of how-to websites, but there does seem to be real interest here. In our coverage of how-to video [...]

SpinVox, a London company that converts your voicemail into text, has raised more than $100 million to expand quickly by signing deals with large telecom carriers around the world - an apparent land-grab.The amount of cash is significant, and a sign that SpinVox wants to sign up carriers before competitors [...]

This paper's result makes me think we need to augment the martini model of venture investing with a martini and olive model: We examine the impact of business angels on 182 Series A financings and subsequent company outcomes. Our studied rounds have a varied mix of business angel and formal [...]