VentureBeat

updated

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 Cisco) and the now-public VanceInfo. We’re not certain why things didn’t work out at DCM (all sides say something different), but it’s true that DCM has focused more on investments in Asia of late, and a refitting was needed. Previously, Theis was an executive at New Era of Networks (NEON), and before that spent a decade at Sun Microsystems.

Erika Brown, a long-time reporter at Forbes covering venture capital, is leaving to join venture capital firm Matrix Partners‘ office in Silicon Valley, where she will be director of marketing and business development (see her Facebook message). She told me she’ll serve the firm in a number of roles, for example helping market portfolio companies, but also providing research on what companies to invest in, including due diligence. Brown, you’ll recall, is the reporter who puts together the Forbes Midas list of the top 100 investors (see most recent Midas List). Now the question is, who takes over her role? Who will draw the ire of the VCs who are left of the list, those who complained so vociferously each year to Brown.

Separately, Bob Lisbonne, a partner at Matrix, who was a key product manager during Netscape’s early days, is leaving the firm. Too bad to see one of the more geek-friendly VCs leaving the field. He’s known to still code occasionally. Among Lisbonne’s board positions are Blue Lane Technologies, Consera Software (acquired by Hewlett-Packard), Euclid Media, LucidEra, PostPath, Renkoo, TeaLeaf Technology and Xign. In a statement, he said: I intend to explore some new ideas, have fun writing software, and ultimately pursue one or more entrepreneurial endeavors. I’ll continue to work out of my office at Matrix, so all my contact info remains the same.

Christopher “Woody” Marshall, has left Trident Capital to joined Technology Crossover Ventures as a general partner in Palo Alto, Calif. Among the investments he managed at Trident were AccountNow, Advanced Payment Solutions, Bytemobile Inc., Merchant e-Solutions, MapQuest, SideStep and Xata. TCV is investing a huge $3 billion fund, raised last year.

Update: This just in, courtesy of PEHub: Cynthia Ringo has left VantagePoint Venture Partners, and is partner at JP Morgan spinout DBL Investors , which is raising its second fund. This becomes her third VC gig. Ringo has moved around a lot. Previously, she was CEO of CopperCoom. She led the failed Pluris. She was also executive at Madge Networks and Red Brick Systems. Before VantagePoint, she was at BluePrint Ventures.

Forbes’ Erika Brown has a good summary of how Silicon Valley has turned into a mini Hollywood.

She recounts the escapades of Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founders of Yelp, the local social site for reviews of bars and restaurants, who hold parties (see pic) with inebriated young women hanging over them, including a “Yelp Elite” mixer at the San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art ending in a girls-only kissing orgy. When asked where they want to be in five years, Stoppelman responds: “Sitting on top of a pile of money … [in unison with Simmons] … surrounded by women! Yeah! [high five]”

There is the book party hosted by billionaire Larry Ellison for political pundit Arianna Huffington at his swank San Francisco pied-a-terre. Nick Douglas, writer of the valley’s gossip site, ValleyWag, attended the soiree and wrote a column about it the next day, griping about his treatment by Google co-founder Larry Page and his girlfriend. There are Valleywag’s “Hotties of Web 2.Ooh!” contests, etc, etc.

Erika concludes:

I’m reminded of a scene from Almost Famous, a movie about an aspiring reporter who writes about an up-and-coming rock band. A crusty old journalist advises his teenage protégé: “You cannot make friends with the rock stars … They’ll buy you drinks, you’ll meet girls … I know. It sounds great. But they are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars, and they will ruin rock ‘n’ roll and strangle everything we love about it … and then it just becomes an industry of cool.”

Most of the action is moving up to the city in San Francisco, leaving the more staid region to the south — the traditional “Silicon Valley” as quiet as ever.