Yahoo acquires Tumblr
Yahoo announced today that they will acquire our portfolio company Tumblr. In September of 2007 we, together with Spark Capital, invested in a 3 person start-up founded by David Karp, a 21 year old coder who had not finished high school. At the time, our biggest challenge was convincing David to drop the four other projects he was working on to focus on Tumblr. Once he did, he quickly built one of the world's greatest platforms for self expression. Over the last five years, Tumblr became much more than that. Today we, as users, are all overwhelmed by the amount...
ContinueThe Patent Quality Improvement Act
This week, Senator Schumer introduced legislation that would take a whack at patent trolls: the Patent Quality Improvement Act aims to make it easier and cheaper for companies facing spurious infringement suits to defend themselves. This is not a complete fix for the software patent problem, and we absolutely need go further (more on how, below), but it's a step forward and we wholeheartedly support the Senator here. For those who are new to this problem: patent trolls are eating internet startups. "Troll" is another word for "patent assertion entity" (PAE) or "non-practicing entity" (NPEs) -- i.e., a company that...
ContinueCoinbase
We have been thinking about and looking to make an investment in the Bitcoin ecosystem for several years. Today, we are happy to be able to talk about our first investment in the sector. We have made an investment in Coinbase along with our friends at Ribbit Capital, SV Angel and Funders Club. We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power. It reminds us of SMTP, HTTP, RSS, and BitTorrent in its architecture and openness. Like what happened with those other low level protocols, entrepreneurs and...
ContinueCircleUp
As venture capitalists, we understand how valuable an injection of capital into an early-stage, fast-growing business can be. But our industry has a particular set of economics, one that has skewed the availability of equity investment towards startups in the technology sector. Yet, despite a lack of access to upfront capital, entrepreneurs are constantly innovating in all areas of our economy. One of the most vibrant verticals is consumer products, with over 50,000 new consumer and retail companies started every year. These businesses are drivers of economic growth. CircleUp has created an equity crowdfunding marketplace, enabling investors to own pieces...
ContinueScience Exchange
Right now, there are thousands of scientists whose research is being held up because they lack access to the experimental expertise needed to test a hypothesis or verify a result. But while we have seen how online marketplaces can dramatically expand and create new businesses in many other diverse areas, it is still too difficult for those scientists to access the right experimental expertise. Help is on the way. Techniques that some label "science as a service" are making specialized resources and institutional expertise available on demand and with openness and transparency. Science Exchange is applying these market-based principles, having...
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