venture capital

How to pick a winner in bubble times

A group of venture capitalists and private equity investors discussed the challenges and rewards of early and late stage investing in web companies today. Fundamentally, the game hasn't changed: You can't win if you can't pick winners.

Panelists: Adam Clammer, head of technology group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts; Bill Maris, Managing Partner, Google Ventures; Henry Ellenbogen, Portfolio manager, T.Rowe Price; Jerry Murdock, Special Limited Partner, Insight Venture Partners; Mike Maples, Managing Partner, Floodgate; Dana Settle, Partner, Greycroft MORE

Startup mating rituals 101

An anthropological technography of the strange, ritualized world where startups sell themselves to venture capitalists: Demo Day.

FORTUNE -- As more people have fled to the startup community for the promise of wealth and freedom, a new tier of gatekeepers have emerged. They're called "incubators," and their imprimatur is tantamount to a college degree. It's like getting a degree from Harvard or MIT, explains David Cohen, the co-founder of TechStars, one of MORE

Bill Joy: Better batteries key to Green power adoption

Kleiner Perkins' Green guru believes on a household level, green power needs to recharge advanced batteries rather than plug right into the fuse-box.

FORTUNE -- Having helped both create the Java programming language and co-found Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy is best known as a technologist and entrepreneur. He hopes to add environmentalist to that list.

As a partner at leading venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Joy is devoting much of his time to MORE

TheFunded: Still the Valley's anonymous gossip shop

Founder Adeo Ressi talks about TheFunded, a site that lets startups take aim at venture capitalists with brutally honest reviews of the way they do business.

If you're not already acquainted with TheFunded, think of it as Yelp for entrepreneurs who rate venture capitalists. But there's a twist -- a throwback to the web's woolier days: TheFunded shields users' identities, encouraging them to don a cloak of anonymity. That means the MORE

Can Groupon crack the China puzzle?

The leading daily deals site has everything going for it domestically, but that means nothing when it comes to avoiding the scrap heap other high-flying U.S. Internet companies have been tossed onto in China.

When Groupon China finally, officially, goes live, again, it will have some 1,700 local "tuangou" sites to compete with. Yes, if anything sums up the hurdles Groupon is facing in China, it's that the language of the MORE

The Silicon Valley Summit produces iconic picture

Held at venture capitalist John Doerr's house last night in the suburb of Woodside, President Barack Obama met the leaders of Silicon Valley to discuss jobs and innovation.

Full size, suitable for wall mounting, here. via Whitehouse Flickr

From the White house Flickr account comes this iconic picture of the heads of the largest Silicon Valley Tech companies including:  

Andreessen Horowitz's cloud vision

Best known for its consumer tech investments, the fund ventures into enterprise cloud computing.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is best known for high-profile investments like Zynga, Foursquare and Skype. But the fund, headed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz, is also betting big on business-to-business upstarts, and these days that means backing companies that enable or rely on cloud computing.

Last summer Andreessen Horowitz made MORE

The SEC's challenge in the secondary market

SecondMarket, Sharespost, NYPPEX all let wealthy investors treat private companies, like Facebook, as publicly traded ones. Are they flouting securities laws, or reinventing them for the 21st century?

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

Sorry, small investors. If you want to buy shares in Facebook, Groupon or Twitter, you're going to have to wait until their IPOs.

That much is certain now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has started looking into the trading of MORE

Why VCs are becoming founders

Armed with pedigrees and degrees, some entry-level venture capitalists are finding it's more fun and lucrative to be on the entrepreneur's side of the term sheet.

By Jill Priluck, contributor

In early 2009, Bartek Ringwelski was spending his days working at Canaan Partners, a venture capital firm in Westport, Connecticut, where he analyzed pitches and learned startup basics. But after he received 100 responses to a Craigslist post for a cleaning person, MORE

New York (Yes, New York!) is tech city

Watch out, Silicon Valley. Thanks to Google, Foursquare, and others, the Big Apple is fast becoming home to some top Internet talent.

New York's tech cred is on the rise: Manhattan-based Foursquare's geolocation service is the envy of Silicon Valley. Facebook bought out two New York startups, and Google just purchased the huge Chelsea building where it employs nearly a tenth of its global workforce. Now incubators are sprouting downtown, venture MORE