Showing posts with label Jason Calacanis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jason Calacanis. Show all posts

Friday, November 13, 2015

25K Becomes $110 Million In 5 Years

Secretive, Sprawling Network of ‘Scouts’ Spreads Money Through Silicon Valley
Sequoia Capital has funneled millions of dollars to scores of well-connected entrepreneurs and academics, who invest and look for ideas
Startup investor Jason

Calacanis took a $25,000 gamble five years ago on a company almost no one had heard of called UberCab. That investment in what is now Uber Technologies Inc. has ballooned to roughly $110 million.

..... Most of Sequoia’s scouts are entrepreneurs whose startups were funded by the firm. That means they know a lot about what Sequoia is looking for and will recommend the firm to other entrepreneurs. ....... Forging tight relationships that generate new deals for venture-capital firms is more important than ever as the cost of creating startups falls. The resulting acceleration in company launches has made it harder for venture-capital firms to identify the best opportunities as startups emerge. And competition is growing as new investors who are flush with capital invade the technology world. ...... Sequoia made early bets on many of today’s tech titans, including Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. ...... It was the only venture firm that backed messaging company WhatsApp, sold to Facebook Inc. last year for $22 billion. Sequoia invested about $60 million for a stake valued at $3.5 billion in the deal. Sequoia now owns stakes in 33 private, venture-capital-backed companies valued at more than $1 billion apiece, more than any other venture-capital firm. ...... If a scout’s investment is successful, the vast majority of gains are shared by the scout and Sequoia’s limited partners, Mr. Botha says. Other scouts and Sequoia partners themselves get a small piece of the gains. ..... Sequoia says it instructs scouts to tell startups in which they invest where the money is coming from. But the firm tries to hide the investments from rivals by making them through limited liability companies with odd names. The names include Dragonsteed LLC, Vermillistock LLC and Rocketbooster LLC. ...... In addition to a small number of professors who are scouts, a separate team of unpaid students at Stanford, Harvard University, Columbia University and other elite colleges is on the lookout for promising ideas and entrepreneurs. ...... “VCs want their brand names on campuses,” says Daniel Liem, who says he was a Sequoia scout while studying computer science at Stanford. “They want to find the next Zuckerberg or Spiegel,” Mr. Liem adds, referring to the founders of Facebook and Snapchat Inc. ...... Sequoia’s scouts usually invest about $30,000 at a time and are given initial access to about $100,000 a year. Mr. Botha says the amount can grow if scouts identify even more hot ideas. ..... For scouts, the appeal is membership in an elite club and free money to make seed investments, which they might not be able to afford. .... Scouts are a “very early warning system, like having a bunch of little satellites installed across the Valley, picking up blips on the radar,” he says.




Friday, December 23, 2011

Dave Morin Talks to Calacanis



Source: Jason Calacanis

Calacanis, as usual, does half the talking.

The money quote has got to be Morin talking about the "hard conversations" you are supposed to have. The more of them you have the better you get at them.

Another quote. "Stop going to conferences, stay at the office, do the work, listen to your users."

Saturday, April 16, 2011

This Week In Venture Capital: Gotham Gal



I have had one very brief conversation with the Gotham Gal and she blew me out of the water. I do read her husband's blog near daily. And I do follow her daughters on Tumblr. Almost every time I see something from them, I tend to reblog it. This crew is good.

The Gotham Gal
The Wilsons Were In Cairo Recently

Fred Wilson: Mark Suster Interviews The Gotham Gal

Sunday, April 03, 2011

Mike Yavonditte: An Hour Of Video



Okay so it is not an hour of Mike. When you have Jason Calacanis doing the interviewing, the guy feels like he is half the guest himself, and so this is 30 minutes of Jason and 30 minutes of Mike. But it's a good interview. Jason being an entrepreneur himself has really been able to bring out the story from Mike. It was an hour well spent for me.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis’ Top Tech Products (And A Political Rant)  As of the start of 2010, I’ve set a five year goal for myself: be the most sought-after, and value-added, angel investor in the world. http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/7598157351



The Jason Calacanis Weblog
Jason Calacanis
Mahalo.com: Human-Powered Search
Jason Calacanis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the Silicon Alley Reporter. Originally a 16-page photocopied newsletter, as its popularity grew it expanded into a 300-page magazine .... Calacanis's tireless socializing ..... He then hired some of the top users of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Flickr to go to Netscape as Netscape Navigators ....... in August 2007, Calacanis got into a public confrontation with Dave Winer that led to Winer's resignation from the panel of experts for the TechCrunch20 conference organized by Calacanis ... Winer interrupted Calacanis' speech during the event, calling it "conference spam" and igniting a war of words on their blogs. .... October of 2009 Mahalo reached 12 million unique visitors and became the 155th largest site in the United States
JasonMC (Jasoncalacanis) on Twitter
Jason Calacanis (Jason) on Twitter
Jason Calacanis Profile Weblogs, Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget – ranked # 1 by Technorati, Joystiq, Autoblog, and Blogging Baby. Founded in January 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005.....a 5th Degree in Tae Kwon Do and has run in eleven consecutive New York City Marathons .... serves on the board of directors of Bay Ridge Preparatory School.
Flickr: jasoncalacanis' Photostream
Jason Calacanis - FriendFeed
Jason Calacanis' Tumblelog




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