VentureBeat

Matt Marshall

URL: http://venturebeat.com
Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. He founded VentureBeat in late 2006. He covered the venture capital and start-up beat for the Mercury News from 2001-2006. He significantly expanded the newspaper’s coverage of venture capital and start-ups during that time, in daily articles and a weekly column called the VC Insider, and then online with his blog SiliconBeat from 2004. Matt was awarded Journalist of the Year by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists in 2002, and the James Madison Freedom of Information award in 2003. These awards were for a series of articles he wrote in conjunction with two successful Mercury News lawsuits, in part instigated by Matt, against California’s public pension fund (CalPERS) and the University of California. The lawsuits sought disclosure of the financial performance of venture capital and other private equity funds that CalPERS and UC had invested in, arguing that state taxpayers and retirees had a right to know these results. As a result of these laws suits, public employees now have full access to information on the performance of their retirement investments. Matt was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 through 1998. In 1999 he wrote a book while in Germany, “The Bank: the Birth of Europe’s Central Bank and the Rebirth of European Power” (Random House, 1999). He has also written for the Washington Post and several other publications. Matt has a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University.

Posts by Matt Marshall

Norman Pearlstine, the former editor in chief of Time Inc., has left the politically connected buyout firm Carlyle after less than two years, and joined the financial media company, Bloomberg.
The departure comes at a time when Carlyle is going through serious turmoil, with prominent partner Bob Grady stepping into a lesser role. The firm recently [...]

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VentureBeat earlier broke the news that RIM and other investors, including JLA ventures, have created a $150 million investment fund to back start-ups that work on the Blackberry.
Here’s a Q&A with Rick Segal (left), a partner at JLA Ventures, who will invest the fund. We corresponded today by email. The official announcement comes tomorrow.
VentureBeat: As [...]

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Update I: This story was originally published Friday afternoon
Update II: For more, also see our Q&A with one of the partners managing the Blackberry fund

Research In Motion, the RBC and Thomson Reuters have invested in an $150 million venture investment fund, called the BlackBerry Partners Fund, to support developers of applications running primarily on the [...]

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Shawn Fanning, who gained fame after launching early music file sharing company Napster, is in advanced stages of talks to sell his most recent social gaming start-up, Rupture, for $30 million.
The buyer would be Electronic Arts, but unlike first reported by Techcrunch, the deal hasn’t gone through. I reached someone very close to the deal [...]

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Four venture capital personnel moves:
Robert Theis, a venture capitalist who left Silicon Valley firm DCM last year after serving for eight years, has joined Scale Venture Partners, also in Silicon Valley, as managing director. Thies will focus on investment in “technology infrastructure and applications.” At DCM, Theis invested in companies PGP, Roamware, NeoPath (acquired by [...]

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Jangl, the Internet phone company we reported about earlier this week as being in talks to sell, is essentially being closed down and its assets sold off. It is still looking for a buyer; a deal close to being signed last week has fallen through.
I just got off the phone with Michael Cerda, who was [...]

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Updated
Accel Partners, a leading venture capital firm that has backed Facebook among others, has poached a partner from rival Silicon valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
Accel is about to announce it has snagged Sameer Gandhi to join the firm as a general partner in Palo Alto, VentureBeat has learned.
This is a tit for tat, because [...]

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Fora.tv, a video site that some have called the “C-Span of the Web” for its intellectual video archive of conferences and symposiums, has raised a $4 million first round of funding.
The site has relatively little traffic, compared to the big, more general video sites, but its serious approach — and presumably educated audience — is [...]

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Jangl, a Silicon Valley Internet phone company that also offers VoIP services via widgets on the web, is looking to be sold, and it will announce more news “this week.”
VentureBeat first learned something was up last week, when we heard reports about employees from Jangl applying for other jobs. One includes the VP of marketing.
When [...]

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Sun is aiming squarely at the start-up market, making several database and server related moves it hopes will lock start-ups into its services early on. First, Sun is offering support to companies that integrate Sun’s open source database product, MySQL with the popular Amazon web services hosting, called Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2). That’s [...]

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Xobni, the San Francisco company we raved about last year that offers a way to better organize your email from Outlook, is launching publicly with its test version.
Its key feature is a sidebar in your inbox that shows you profiles of the people you’re corresponding with. It makes information easily accessible, such as their phone [...]

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VentureBeat threw a party last night to celebrate the launch our new digital media blog. (In truth, the blog is still a glorified tab on our main site, but we’re headed soon to a more separate offering.)
Held at the Ambassador club in San Francisco, hundreds of movers and shakers in digital media arena showed up [...]

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World Golf Tour, a company that uses Flash technology to make a realistic game for golfers, has raised a second round of financing in the double-digit millions of dollars.
The San Francisco company, which I raved about a year ago when I first tried it out, announced the funding at the VentureBeat party last night. The [...]

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Kleiner Perkins, the respected Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said it has finished raising its thirteenth fund (called KPCB XIII) for early-stage companies, totaling $700 million.
Separately, the firm announced the creation of a $500 million “Green Growth Fund,” which will be invested in somewhat more mature, green-focused companies. It said a new partner, Ben Kortlang, [...]

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updated three times
Xiaonei, the company that likes to call itself the “Facebook of China” has raised a whopping $430 million from financial backers, VentureBeat has learned from the company’s investors.
The backing gives it a larger financial warchest than Facebook itself, and sets the scene for a showdown with the American company. Facebook has just started [...]

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Venture capital firms have produced returns that exceed market averages, with late-stage venture capital firms doing especially well.

Firms investing in later-stage companies have done well in part because of the solid IPO and merger and acquisition market over the past few years, though that is changing. These firms saw returns of 31.9 percent over the [...]

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Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that backed Google in its early days, is planning to raise a “Green Growth” fund of more than $400 million, to invest in later-stage cleantech companies, according to PeHub. The move is a sign of the maturation and realities of the green technology industry. Many [...]

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Folks, as VentureBeat expands into new territory, we’re looking for great people to join us on the way.
Recently, we took first steps to focus on certain topics, including digital media and clean tech, creating tabs for these. Now we’re looking to 1) create some focused events around those topic areas, and so are looking for [...]

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Updated
RightScale, the latest company to emerge offering “cloud” computing services, has raised $4.5 million in a first round of funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.
The Santa Barbara, Calif., company helps businesses manage their Web sites by transitioning them to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or remote servers that lets businesses pay as [...]

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Intacct Corp, a San Jose online financial management software company that competes with Intuit’s Quickbooks, said it has raised an additional $15 million of financing. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Emergence Capital, Sigma Partners, and Sutter Hill Ventures participated.
This follows the $14 million Intacct raised last year to [...]

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