Stripe attracts $18M in funding at $100M valuation
Stripe, an online-payment system company going after PayPal, is said to have raised $18 million at a $100 million valuation from Sequoia Capital and other investors, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
The deal has not been finalized but a few unnamed sources revealed that Sequoia was responsible for $17 million of the funding. Lawyer Michael J. Patrick from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West LLP was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “There must be something red hot … Continue Reading
Small business accounting service Xero raises $16.6M
Xero, an online-accounting service for small businesses, announced today it has received $16.6 million in its latest round of funding. PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel participated in the round.
“Xero was started by a few entrepreneurs who struggled to get the right financial information to make business decisions. They set out to build accounting software that caters to small business and accountants,” said Jamie Sutherland (pictured right), Xero’s President of U.S. Operations … Continue Reading
Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.2% of Facebook, Peter Thiel has 2.5%
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.2 percent of the company, according to Facebook's just-released IPO S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Facebook's initial public offering is one of the most hyped technology events of the year, and the company is expected to debut on the stock market in May. Its stock ticker symbol will be "FB." The company has not yet named a starting price has yet been named, but Facebook said in the filing that it expects to raise at least $5 billion in the IPO.
CapLinked wants to modernize startup investment, takes money from new investors
CapLinked, the startup that wants to make it easy to invest in private companies, has just taken in a $500,000 round of from a new group of investors.
“Investing in private companies has depended on outdated technology for too long,” said CapLinked CEO Eric M. Jackson in a release this morning.
“Emails loaded with attachments, spreadsheets for tracking leads and clunky enterprise data rooms are straight out of the 1990s. CapLinked makes the process easier … Continue Reading
Thiel Foundation: Silicon Valley needs to stop requiring college degrees
Everybody knows that if you’re smart and ambitious, you attend college. Why? Tradition. But if we’re ambitious about creating a better twenty-first century, should we follow traditions from the nineteenth?
In the past hundred years, technology entrepreneurs have given us cars, jets, vaccines, cell phones and computers. The college industry, meanwhile, has made remarkable innovations in raising prices and offering novel forms of debt.
College tuition has gone up 500 percent in the last 30 … Continue Reading
BestVendor is the utility belt for small business apps
Being successful in business is about knowing what your competitors know and being able to act on it. If you could find out what kinds of work tools are helping your competitors stay lean and mean, it could be a real leg up. You can’t just call up a competitor and ask. But a new startup called BestVendor is creating a Yelp-like recommendations network around work apps to make that kind of tool discovery possible.… Continue Reading
Floating technology incubator gets cash infusion from Facebook funder Peter Thiel
Blueseed, a new incubator to be based on a ship 12 miles off the California coast, will see its first round of funding led by big-name investor Peter Thiel.
The floating “seastead” will host 1,000 entrepreneurs just a few miles from San Francisco. Its main draw is its location in international waters — a perfect, if temporary, solution for non-U.S. entrepreneurs looking for a way to get closer to Silicon Valley.
The team is attempting … Continue Reading
Peter Thiel will give you $100K not to go to college, opens 2012 Thiel Fellowship class
“Don’t go to college.” Four words you probably never heard your mother or father say to you growing up. But that’s exactly what famed entrepreneur Peter Thiel is saying, and he’s upping the ante. “Don’t go to college, and I’ll give you $100,000.”
Pete Thiel, who was an early investor in Facebook and co-founder of PayPal, doesn’t subscribe to the traditional notion of finish high school, getting a degree and then moving into the working … Continue Reading
PayPal co-founder launches Breakout Labs to fund early-stage science and tech research
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has launched a new program called Breakout Labs that will fund early-stage science and technology research ideas, the entrepreneur said Tuesday during at speech at Stanford University.
Breakout Labs, which will operate under Thiel’s non-profit organization the Thiel Foundation, will focus its investment efforts on research proposals that are either too early stage or too radical to obtain funding from venture capital firms or grants. Breakout Labs will consider all types … Continue Reading
Financial security startup BillGuard raises $10M to protect you from fraud
Personal finance startup BillGuard has raised $10 million in second-round financing, and it’s using it to expand its service that helps protect accounts from fraudulent activity, the company said Tuesday.
BillGuard protects users by registering their credit and debit cards and keeping an eye out for questionable and fraudulent charges. The company uses a crowdsourced approach to identifying unauthorized charges, by not only providing its own detection but also incorporating users’ billing complaints to track … Continue Reading
Tech news owes a lot to Arrington, conflicts and all
A lot has changed since I first made it to Silicon Valley a little more than a year ago.
But one thing has remained constant: the ruthless competition for discovering and reporting the best news stories. Among those competitors is TechCrunch, one of the most efficient and tenacious tech news publications in the valley.
Michael Arrington stands — or, stood, rather — at the center of that team. His personality and potential conflicts of interest … Continue Reading
Demo: Reid Hoffman gives advice for entrepreneurs (video)
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman might be one of the most successful entrepreneurs to emerge from the post-dot-com era, and today he shared some of the secrets to his success.
Hoffman started LinkedIn on May 5, 2003 and took the company public on May 19, 2011, an exit that made him a billionaire. Today he’s an investor, an entrepreneur and knows how the system works.
“One of the things that makes entrepreneurship difficult is that there … Continue Reading
Peter Thiel: Clean technology is a “disaster”
Early Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has a problem with clean technology companies.
With innovation in transportation and alternative energy forms stalled, cleantech investing has become a disaster that has scattered Silicon Valley investors and left the U.S. behind in terms of innovation, Thiel said at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference in San Francisco.
“Cleantech is an increasingly large disaster that people in Silicon Valley aren’t even talking about any more,” Thiel said. … Continue Reading
Former Clinton aide, UNC-system president Erskine Bowles joins Facebook
Erskine Bowles, recent co-chair of President Barack Obama’s commission on fiscal responsibility and reform, and former president of the University of North Carolina system, has joined social networking giant Facebook as a member of the board of directors.
Bowles has an extensive background in academia, which seems appropriate given Facebook’s close ties with universities. When the site first launched, Facebook spread virally as a way to communicate and connect on college campuses — much like … Continue Reading
