VC Bio: Ben Horowitz

From Ben's Blog: My name is Ben Horowitz, and I am cofounder and General Partner (along with Marc Andreessen) of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz based in Menlo Park.

Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Marc and I co-founded Loudcloud, a managed services provider (today, we’d call it a cloud service provider, but people were not quite ready for that in the early 2000s) which became Opsware, an data center automation software provider. I tell the dramatic story of how Loudcloud became Opsware and was ultimately acquired by HP in my blog post titled The Case for the Fat Startup. You can learn more about what I did prior to co-founding Loudcloud by reading my biography on Wikipedia.

My blogging agenda for this year is to reflect on the many experiences I’ve had in my career—as computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, fund raiser, company acquirer and seller—and distill the lessons I’ve learned in each of those roles. I’ll use this blog to share what I’ve learned, provide a sharp opinion or two, and generally contribute to the lively dialog around entrepreneurship, building and leading organizations, and venture capital.

VC Bio: Jeremy Levine

Jeremy Levine is a partner in Bessemer’s New York office. He joined the firm in 2001 and focuses primarily on software and Internet companies. He has led investments for Bessemer in North and South America, Europe and Asia.

He currently serves on the boards of consumer-Internet companies including Pinterest, Wikia and Yelp; online-retail businesses including Onestop and KupiVIP ; SaaS companies including Convertro, MindBody and Parallels; and software firms including eEye Digital Security, Intego, and Metalogix. Jeremy led BVP’s original investment in business-networking site LinkedIn (IPO) and co-led the firm’s investment in Gerson Lehrman Group, a company that offers businesses an online network of experts. He also served on the boards of Gracenote, OLX and Quidsi before each was acquired.

Prior to joining Bessemer, Jeremy was vice president of operations at Dash, an Internet-software publisher. He came to Dash from AEA Investors, a management-buyout firm, where he specialized in consumer products and light industrials. He started his career as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co.

Jeremy graduated from Duke University with a B.S. in computer science and economics.

VC Bio: Josh Kopelman

Josh has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the Internet industry since its commercialization. In 1992, while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – an Internet information company. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Josh founded Half.com in July of 1999, and led it to become one of the largest sellers of used books, movies and music in the world. Half.com was acquired by eBay in July 2000 -- and Josh remained with eBay for three years, running the Half.com business unit and growing eBay’s Media marketplace to almost half a billion dollars in annual gross merchandise sales.
In late 2003 Josh helped to found TurnTide, an anti-spam company that created the world's first anti-spam router. TurnTide was acquired by Symantec just six months later.
In addition to being an active angel investor, Josh has served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Comcast Interactive Capital - a $350 million venture capital fund affiliated with Comcast Corporation.
Josh is an inventor on eight U.S. Patents for his work in Internet technology. In June 2000, he was awarded Ernst and Young’s prestigious “Entrepreneur of the Year” award for the Greater Philadelphia region. Josh has also been recognized as one of the “10 Most Influential People in Philadelphia Technology” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the “76 Smartest Philadelphians” by Philadelphia Magazine and as one of forty individuals under the age of forty who have made the biggest impact on the Philadelphia region by the Philadelphia Business Journal.
Josh is often quoted in industry trade journals and national newspapers, has appeared on numerous national television shows, and is a frequent speaker at industry-wide conferences on entrepreneurship, Internet marketing and the future of Internet services.
In 2001 Josh and his wife created the Kopelman Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on angel philanthropy to provide “start-up” grants to social entrepreneurs. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Main Line Health, suburban Philadelphia's most comprehensive healthcare resource, operating four of the region's most-respected hospitals. He also serves on as a member of the advisory boards for Wharton Entrepreneurial Center and the Weiss Tech House at the University of Pennsylvania.
Josh earned a Bachelor of Science degree cum laude in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

VC Bio: Jim Breyer

Jim has been an investor in over thirty consumer internet, media, and technology companies that have completed public offerings or successful mergers. Many of these investments returned over 20 times their cost to investors. In April 2011, Forbes published its Midas List of top technology investors and ranked Jim Breyer #1. In August 2010, Fortune Magazine named Breyer the #1 smartest investor in technology, and one of the 10 smartest people in all of technology.

Jim is currently on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc (WMT), where he is the Lead/Presiding Independent Director, and serves on the Strategic Planning and Finance Committee, and the Technology Operations Committee. Jim also serves on the board of Dell Inc (DELL), where he is the Chair of the Finance Committee, and where he serves on the Incubation Advisory Board, the Leadership Development and Compensation Committee and the Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee. Jim recently was elected to the Board of News Corporation (NWS) in October, 2011. Previously, Mr. Breyer served on the Board of Marvel Entertainment (MVL) up until their acquisition by Disney (DIS), and he was founding Chairman of Marvel’s Strategic Planning Committee.

Jim is currently the lead/co-lead investor/Director in several privately-held companies such as Brightcove (since 2005), Etsy (since 2007), Facebook (since April 2005) where he is the founding Chairman of the Compensation Committee, and Legendary Pictures. He is also an investor/project manager in international internet media companies such as RenRen (China), Vostu (Brazil) and several others.

Jim is on the Strategic Investment Committee/Board of Accel-KKR and IDG-Accel China Fund, and is a founding Insight Partner of Technology Crossover Investors (TCV).

Earlier, Jim worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York, and in product marketing and management at Apple, Inc.. and Hewlett Packard.

Jim is the former Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, a former President of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists, and on the Board of the Associates of the Harvard Business School, Pacific Community Ventures, Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Technet and a Trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and of The Menlo School and Menlo School Executive Committee. Jim is Chairman of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund, former Chairman of the Harvard Business School California Research Center, and is the former Chairman of the Silicon Valley region committee for Stanford University's Campaign for Undergraduate Education. He is also a member governor of several World Economic Forum committees. In December 2005, Jim was appointed an Honorary Professor at the 1,000 year-old Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, China. He graduated with highest distinction from Stanford University with a B.S. degree and from Harvard University with an M.B.A. where he was named a Baker Scholar (top 5% of class).

Jim is passionate about contemporary art, film, wine, travel, and music. He actively supports numerous education and environmental non-profit initiatives.

Stay in touch with Accel news, jobs, and events through Facebook at www.facebook.com/Accel

VC Bio: Vinod Khosla

Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite growing up in an Indian Army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about Intel starting up, he dreamt of starting his own technology company.

Upon graduating with a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Vinod failed, at age 20, to start a soy milk company to service the many people in India who did not have refrigerators. He came instead to the U.S. and got his master's in biomedical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University. His start-up dreams attracted him to Silicon Valley, where he got an MBA at Stanford University in 1980.

Upon graduation he was one of the three founders of Daisy Systems, which was the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The company went on to achieve significant revenue, profits, and an IPO, but Khosla, driven by the frustration of having to design the computer hardware on which the Daisy software needed to be built, started the standards-based Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for software developers. At Sun he pioneered "open systems" and RISC processors. Sun was funded by longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In 1986 Vinod switched sides and joined Kleiner Perkins, where he was and continues to be a general partner of KPCB funds through KP X. Through the years there, with other partners, he took on Intel's monopoly with Nexgen/AMD (the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel, sold to AMD for 28 percent of AMD), incubated the idea and business plan for Juniper to take on Cisco's dominance of the router market, formulated the very early advertising-based search strategy for Excite, and transformed the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7B). He helped in creating value, having fun, succeeding, failing (remember Dynabook?), and driving impact in partnership with entrepreneurs and the partners at KPCB.

In 2004, Vinod, driven by the need for flexibility to accommodate four teenaged children and a desire to be more experimental, to fund sometimes imprudent "science experiments," and to take on both for-profit and for "social impact" ventures, formed khoslaventures, funded entirely with family funds. His goals remain the same: work and learn from fun and knowledgeable entrepreneurs, build impactful companies through the leverage of innovation, and spend time in a partnership that makes a difference. Vinod has a passion for nascent technologies that can have a beneficial effect and economic impact on society. His greatest passion is being a mentor to entrepreneurs, helping them build technology-based businesses. Vinod serves on the boards of a few companies, but he generally meets directly with most of the portfolio companies as they face transitions or key decisions.

Khosla is a charter member of TiE, a not-for-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals founded in 1992 that now has more than forty chapters in nine countries. He is also a founding board member of the Indian School of Business. His current passion is social entrepreneurship, with a special emphasis on microfinance as a poverty alleviation tool. He is a supporter of many microfinance organizations in India and Africa. He has been experimenting with education and global housing. Vinod is also passionate about alternative energy, petroleum independence, and the environment. He can be reached at vk@khoslaventures.com.

His memory is so good he does not have to remember anything.

— Not The Man (@NotDosEquisMan) December 15, 2011

Surprise hit Pinterest a top 10 most-trafficked social network...venturebeat.com/2011/12/22/pin…

— techstartups (@techstartups) December 24, 2011

Honey Badger VIDEO

LBS: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley discusses new merchant platform, IPO, 100 employees, 2 offices, 15mm users

What is foursquare?
Foursquare makes the real world easier to use. We build tools that help you keep up with friends, discover what’s nearby, save money and unlock deals. Whether you’re setting off on a trip around the world, coordinating a night out with friends, or trying to pick out the best dish at your local restaurant, foursquare is the perfect companion.

foursquare by the numbers (last updated December, 2011)

Community: Around 15 million people worldwide
Over a billion check-ins, with millions more every day
Businesses: Over 500,000 using the Merchant Platform (more information at foursquare.com/business)
Employees: About 100 between headquarters in New York, NY and an office in San Francisco, CA
When was foursquare founded?
Foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai met in 2007 while working in the same office space (at different companies) in New York City. Working from Dennis' kitchen table in New York's East Village, they began building the first version of foursquare in fall 2008, and launched it at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas in March 2009.

Twilio rasises $17MM from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures. Hello World.

Twilio has raised a $17 million Series C round of funding from returning investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures.

Twilio is based in Silicon Valley with technology allowing developers to build telephony and messaging into their applications.

The Twilio Fund is a micro-fund that was started by 500 Startups and SV Angel in
September of 2010 to invest one quarter of a million dollars of seed capital into Twilio-
powered startups. Since the launch of Twilio Fund, ten companies received funding including Callyo, FastCall411, KnockKnock, Magnolia Prime, Order Mapper, Proven, Qwipd, Textaurant, Voicendo, and Volta.

Forbes Midas List, top 100 tech investors

As 2011 comes to an end, let's take a look at the 2011 Midas List:. Top 10 below, reference to Forbes:

Rank	Name	Firm
1	Jim Breyer	Accel Partners
2	Michael Moritz	Sequoia Capital
3	Reid Hoffman	Greylock Partners
4	Peter Fenton	Benchmark Capital
5	Scott Sandell	New Enterprise Associates
6	Kevin Efrusy	Accel Partners
7	Peter Thiel	Founders Fund
8	Peter Barris	New Enterprise Associates
9	David Sze	Greylock Partners
10	Marc Andreessen	Andreessen Horowitz

John Lilly - Greylock partner talks Facebook, Groupon and Dropbox

John Lilly

Link to John's Blog

John joined Greylock as a partner in 2011. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO.

Earlier in his career, John held positions on the executive team at Trilogy Software and as a Senior Scientist in Apple's research labs.

John is currently on the Board of Directors of Citrus Lane, Clearslide, Code for America, Gowalla, Mozilla Corporation, and the Participatory Culture Foundation. He is a board observer at tumblr, and lead Greylock's investment in Dropbox. John previously served on the boards of directors of TripIt (acquired by Concur in 2011), CenterRun (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2003), and Reactivity (acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007).
John holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering and an MS in Computer Science with a focus on Human Computer Interaction, both from Stanford University. He is currently a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford's d.school, and an adviser to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program as well as SSE Labs, an incubator at the University.

He is a co-inventor on seven United States patents.

VMTurbo raises $10MM Series B from Bain, Highland

VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software in virtualized environments, today announced that it has closed a $10 million B-round of funding, financed by returning investors Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. VMTurbo will use the funding to expand product development, customer support, sales and marketing.

"VMTurbo is emerging as the leader in automating the management of virtualized cloud infrastructures," said Peter Bell, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners. "Both service providers and enterprises are embracing VMTurbo's platform to realize the compelling ROI that cloud computing can provide."

About VMTurbo VMTurbo delivers an Intelligent Workload Management solution for Cloud and virtualized environments. VMTurbo uses an economic scheduling engine to dynamically adjust resource allocation to meet business goals. Using VMTurbo our customers ensure that applications get the resources they need to operate reliably, while utilizing infrastructure and human resources in the most efficient way.

Lou Shipley

President and CEO

Prior to joining VMTurbo, Lou was General Manager of Citrix Xen Products Group. Previously, he was President and CEO of Reflectent Software, an end user application performance monitoring company acquired by Citrix in 2006. Lou was General Manager of the Citrix Management Systems group, then took on the role as General Manager of Citrix XenServer when Citrix acquired XenSource in 2007. He joined Reflectent after working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Highland Capital Partners. Prior to Highland, Lou served as Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for WebLine Communications, a customer contact center software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $325 million. Previously to WebLine, Lou served as Vice President of Americas and Pacific operations at Avid Technology. He joined Avid as a startup and oversaw growth to over $450 million in revenue. Lou also founded and served as President of Avid Japan, KK. Lou is a graduate of Trinity College and Harvard Business School, and is a Guest Lecturer at MIT Sloan School. He serves as a Trustee at Westminster School in Simsbury, CT and is on the Board of Directors at Xtranormal.com.

Ad Age Top Commercial 2011: The Force: Volkswagen Commercial

Ad Age:
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/10-best-commercials-2011-136663?page=10

Resistance is futile. At 7:33 p.m. ET on Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011, Volkswagen unleashed one of the great crowd-pleasing TV ads of all time on Fox's broadcast of Super Bowl XLV. "The Force," from Deutsch/ LA, ingeniously conceived and perfectly executed, more than lived up to its name. It took two familiar ad themes—kids and Star Wars—and merged them to create that most rare species: a true global (who knows, maybe intergalactic) pop-culture phenomenon. Backed by the imposing sounds of "The Imperial March," a child in a Darth Vader suit roams his suburban home, attempting to bend inanimate objects (and the family dog) to his will with Jedi mind tricks. He fails utterly—until Dad gets home in his Volkswagen Passat. The kid races out to the driveway and focuses all of his metaphysical energy on the midsize sedan. It roars to life obediently—thanks to Dad activating the remote starter from the house. The boy steps back, thunderstruck by his own supernatural powers. The spot's metrics are astounding: 44 million views on YouTube, a reported 6.8 billion impressions worldwide, more than $100 million in earned media—all from such a simple execution. The spot, while visually strong, isn't a wonder of craft or technique. It's a triumph of fun, unadorned storytelling, which clearly goes a long way. Few ads in history have been as charming, as clever, as perfectly paced, or as well loved as this. Simply the best of 2011.