VentureBeat

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Mint, the San Francisco company that helps you manage money online, said it has raised $4.7 million in a first round of funding led by Shasta Ventures.

Investors include First Round Capital and Ram Shriram, early investor in Google.

We’ve written several times about this company since it launched last month, and received widespread praise. The company says it has since signed up 50,000 users.

Mint also added Donna Wells, formerly vice president of corporate marketing and acting CMO at Intuit, as chief marketing officer. That’s a solid addition, considering Mint is a competitor to Intuit. Wells was also a senior vice president of marketing at Expedia. Mint also named Aaron Forth, a former director of product at eBay, to vice president of product.

Update: Here’s what Ram Shriram tells us about his motivation for investing:

I invested in mint simply because I am excited about the market space [and] its remarkable value to users to manage their daily lives (and that this was my vision at Yodlee going back to my seed investment there in 1999). I also liked the UI, the founding team and their execution skills which were better than most startups I see. In a few years a majority of consumers will transact in this manner simply because they trust the site, it saves them time and they can both personalize the data and segment it so they know where their spend is going [and] where they are making money.

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Auction giant eBay has acquired StumbleUpon, an San Francisco company that helps people “stumble upon” and share new sites related to their interests, for about $75 million.

In a statement this afternoon, eBay said the acquisition will give it “exposure to a fast-growing community-based service” that has around 2.3 million users, and that StumbleUpon is attractive because it shares similarities with eBay’s concept of community.

The deal size is not large relative to other deals we’ve seen lately, but it is a big coup for the founders, who moved from Canadian to San Francisco more than a year ago, and were self-funded until March of last year. They raised a round of $2 million or less (update: $1.5 million, we’ve confirmed) from Google’s founding investor, Ram Shriram, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Topic founder Ariel Poler, angel investor Ron Conway. (Update: First Round Capital also invested.)

Indeed, they reap a massive profit, something that most start-ups taking venture capital can not afford to do. Companies like Digg, for example, are rumored to be valued by venture investors at more than $75 million. Because VCs have bought shares at such a high price, they won’t let a company sell at such low levels.

The StumbleUpon deal was expected, rumored by several sources, and the price was reported accurately by the WSJ earlier this month.

Once people download is toolbar, StumbleUpon shows you Web sites that you can rate as good or bad. It starts showing you more of the types of sites you appear like, based on those sites have been rated highly by other people that have voted similar to the way you have. It does the same for videos, people and product information.

It makes money by showing an ad every hundred or so stumbles.

With no marketing, the StumbleUpon community has grown 150 percent from last year and
delivers some five million new recommendations a day to its user base, the company said.

As mentioned earlier, StumbleUpon could potentially let people stumble upon eBay products they’ve bought in the past, though the eBay did not mention this in its statement.

StumbleUpon launched in 2001, but only recently caught on in a major way.

Apple’s Steve Jobs dealt setback — Former Apple finance chief Fred Anderson now says Apple chief executive Steve Jobs misled him about stock option accounting. Story here, and statement by Anderson here. Question: Will this bring down Jobs?

Ram Shriram weighs in on FCC vote on wireless rule changes — See the Google investor’s VentureBeat column, where he advocates the FCC should take the first step toward opening wireless standards and access when it meets later today (Wed). He says the innovation gap will grow, if it doesn’t. Separate but related: India added 67 million mobile phone users (WSJ sub required) last year alone, more than the 41 million land lines in the entire country.

Google Maps have limited reach — Indian streets, along with the village masses of the Indian countryside, defy Google’s search for order, and so Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and its investing scout in India, Ram Shriram, have invested in Mapmyindia, according to Content Sutra. Although even Mapmyindia has trouble in India’s own capital.

Blackberry users get VoIP — Iotum’s Talk-Now feature lets Blackberry users see who in their contact list are available to chat with. Now, Iotum has incorporated Jajah’s VoIP service, letting users make low-cost global phone calls with an Internet call.

…while other phone users can get Blackberry features — Users of Windows Mobile 6 phones, including Palm Treos, will this fall be able to use software from BlackBerry that makes these phones work like a BlackBerry. It will load applications like its push email, phone, address book, calendar, browser and so on. We remember Silicon Valley’s investors dismissing Blackberry a few years ago, saying it didn’t understand software. Despite its recent outage, this company isn’t going away.

FunnyOrDie.com continued — Turns out, the comedy site, run by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, got its capital from Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme. Kvamme became interested, he tells Forbes, when his 17-year-old son, an aspiring stand-up comedian came to him and said there weren’t any good comic sites online. Kvamme’s explains why this is a venture-backed company: On one hand, you have the talent of Ferrell and McKay driving things but they can only do so much, so you also draw on user generated content and voting to do the rest. (Photo via Valleywag).

Chinese video clones keep coming — Ku6.com has received $5 million from DFJ ePlanet Ventures and some others, according to Bill Bishop. Meanwhile, Tudou.com has raised a very large (for China, and for video) $18 million from JAFCO in its third round of financing, and is reportedly valued at about $70 million. This comes after it got more than $9 million from IDG, Granite Global and others.

Check out Zude — It launches May 1. Mashable says it is a better version of the homepage Netvibes, but it is really just a convenient way to drag and drop any content from the Web onto your page.

Peace between MySpace and Photobucket — The announcement is here, but we don’t know how they resolved it.

The proliferation of Twitter continues — When a company spreads virally, it’s a good sign. Twitter, the service that lets people update their friends with their latest goings-on, is finding itself being pulled into various plug-ins for your browser — from 30boxes’ feature, which lets you share Flickr photos, Youtube video and URLs via Twitter, to TwittyTunes, which lets you send a message to Twitter telling friends what music you’re listening to, with a link back to the song and artist.

Controversial company, PayPerPost, now seeking readers — PayPerPost, the company which pays bloggers to post articles about advertisers, just acquired Zookoda, which gives those bloggers another way to distribute their paid posts to readers. Announcement here. Zookoda, of Australia, lets a bloggers update their readers via email whenever they blog a new post. (Presumably, paid articles won’t draw hordes of readers — so now the strategy is to push the posts on people). Zookoda is the second company that listed on our VentureBoard to be sold.

Here’s the latest action:

March Madness alerts — Palo Alto mobile search company 4INFO will send you an alert in the final minutes of any of NCAA March Madness game that looks like it could be an upset. It sends final scores too. To sign up, text TOURNEY ALERTS to 44636, or signup at the company’s site.

Coffee-house entrepreneurs — The SF Chronicle has a piece about the SF entrepreneurs who launch companies at coffee houses, exploiting the WiFi connections at places like Starbucks. Problem is when the competition finds out. We remember once meeting wiki company Jot’s founder Joe Kraus at Coupa Cafe, a place where Ross Mayfield, of competitor Socialtext, often had his alter-office.

Dick Costello, chief exec of Feedburner, starts blog — He focuses on entrepreneurship, and has some good tips about how to raise cash, and how to manage hiring, among other things.

AskCity’s map tools are nifty — We’ve already mentioned the useful local map, direction, movie, restaurant and other features offered by AskCity. Here’s the latest: You can now circle places on a map, such as an intersection, and then search for say, that coffee shop that your friend told you about, but which you forgot the name of — because it lets returns in its results all of the coffee shops within the circle you drew.

Google’s bus system — Every Google employee gets a ride to work, with a WiFi-equipped bus so they can work while commuting. (See NYT story).

Paul Mercer, interface guru, hired by Palm — Mercer, a former Apple employee, who designed the interface of the nano-sized Samsung YP-Z5, has been hired by Palm, to help it regain momentum in the face of Apple’s iPhone launch.

Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires — The latest list is out, and Google’s showing is impressive. Co-founders Larry and Sergey are the two youngest on the long list of Californians.

Freebase reality check — Lot of excitement Friday about the launch of Freebase by Metaweb Technologies, billed by some to be the “synapses for the global brain,” but some people are yawning at the idea.

Even as global warming concerns grow, oil companies are getting more efficient at producing more oil — Which means more global warming. (See NYT story.)

Clearwire’s woes — Clearwire, the company that went public last week to raise more cash to build out its costly WiMax network, sees continued downward pressure. It went public at $25 last week. See graph at left, from this morning, where it dipped below $20 briefly. However, it rose at the end of the day.

FraudWall raises $1.01 million — We reported on the click-fraud company, Fraudwall, launched by Ron Conway and Jim Pitkow, in January. It has now raised $1.01 million of a $1.5 million planned first round, from Sherpalo Ventures and Baseline Ventures, according to PE Week. Sherpalo’s Ram Shriram is a new investor. Shriram, still on the Google board, is especially likely to have good insight into how important the click-fraud problem is for Google to solve.

Yet another photo/video site, Zannel, launches — Zannel is designed for mobile users. You can upload your camera-phone’s photos or video to Zannel’s web site, and you can send them to friends, through Zannel’s peer-to-peer network. The recipient gets an SMS (text message), opens it up and a link takes them to their WAP browser. We reported on its $6 million in funding here.

Frontline Wireless is a new start-up aiming to bid on wireless spectrum that it will let police and other emergency response agencies use, in the hopes of making a profit at the same time.

The strategy, led by an interesting mix of interests, potentially including Google, is to get a corner on a 12MHz section of spectrum of long-wave radio, which is designed for big open spaces. Wifi is for offices and metro areas. This long-wave radio spectrum is great for places like the hills beyond Berkeley, Calif, where it could reach your car’s GPS device, your RIM or iPhone, and provide it with wireless broadband.

Frontline’s network, importantly, would be an open network, having plenty of room for anyone who wants to lease part of it (from the eventual owner). This stands in contrast to the closed networks owned by the carrier networks. The key condition of Frontline’s proposal: That whoever successfully bids on the 12MHz will also open it up for use to emergency response services (first responders) for their free use.

Frontline Wireless plans to make a bid on the spectrum this year, co-founder and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt told VentureBeat during an interview earlier this morning. He knows of few other companies interested in making a similar bid. The 12MHz he wants is part of the 60MHz to be auctioned by the federal government in early 2009. Hundt’s proposal is an answer to a request by the FCC commissioner for good ideas about how to use the auction for public safety. The lack of a common national network for police and fire departments was made tragically clear during 9/11 • so there really is a good reason for this. The 60MHz of spectrum to be auctioned lies in the 700MHz to 800MHz band, part of a spectrum close enough to existing first responder frequencies that it makes sense, Hundt said.

Meanwhile, the company has won an undisclosed amount of investment from high-profile angel investor Ram Shriram. Hundt said he met with Shriram last year at Evvia restaurant in Palo Alto, and sought his support because Shriram can open doors in the tech world. Namely, Google.

That company has been an early supporter of “network neutrality” for fixed broadband. It will likely be a backer of wireless broadband, too, Hundt reasons. Moreover, RIM and Palm and Apple may also be interested.

Frontline has a credible management team: Besides Hundt (a Democrat), there’s Janice Obuchowski, a former head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (and Republican), and Hayes Griffen, chief executive of Vanguard Cellular (later acquired by AT&T Wireless for $1.7 billion).

The company’s open-access pitch may help it avoid the problems that Cyren Call, another venture-backed company has run into. That company’s bid for a lower piece of the spectrum was recently rejected by the FCC. Bids for the upcoming auction will take place later this year.

The Founders Fund, the venture firm led by former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel, has hired Sean Parker, the controversial entrepreneur, who has just turned 27, as a managing partner.

Parker somehow attracts attention wherever he goes. He has already launched three well-known companies. At 19, he co-founded Napster, and his cheekiness drew anger from the recording labels, which eventually shut down Napster with lawsuits. Parker told VentureBeat last week, in an interview, that his time at Napster was his biggest lesson — about who to hire to run companies and who to take money from. “I wasn’t sophisticated enough, I didn’t know any better.” But Parker’s past still has some investors in Thiel’s fund nervous. Thiel responds: “Sean has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, in part because he’s been so successful.”

One person he rubbed is the big-gun himself, Michael Moritz of Sequoia — an early backer of Yahoo, Google and YouTube. After Napster, Parker co-founded Plaxo, a site that updates contacts. Soon, Parker was in peoples’ faces again. Some accused Plaxo of spamming, because of its constant update requests. During the post-bubble downturn, Parker got pushed out by Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, and there’s been silence over the real reasons ever since. There were reports of private investigators going after Parker. And things weren’t improved, Thiel says, when Parker wouldn’t let Sequoia invest in his next company, Facebook. “Sequoia had no chance to invest,” Thiel explains, “because of the way they mistreated him at Plaxo. He’s been treated worse than he deserved.” VentureBeat has contacted Sequoia for comment.

Without Parker, Plaxo has become more diplomatic — but almost too much. You never hear about it anymore.

Parker soon met Mark Zuckerberg in New York, after the young “Zuck,” as he is known, had launched Facebook. Parker helped Zuckerberg learn the ropes. He helped him raise money at great valuations — ticking off several VCs who’d wanted in on the deal. They first raised seed money from the Founders Funds’ Thiel, who Parker had met through Sequoia’s Michael Moritz — an irony. Facebook raised only $500,000, and it was profitable immediately. Facebook’s traffic rocketed, and the company went in red again after taking more venture capital from Accel Partners to expand.

While Zuckerberg has been widely acknowledged as Facebook’s leader, even by Parker himself, there’s little question Parker helped Zuck keep control and ownership. Zuck loves coding, so with Parker’s business sense the two were a great pair. Parker helped bring in Owen Van Natta as COO. Parker was one of four board members at Facebook (along with Zuck, Thiel and Accel’s Bryer). He hired former Napster employee Aaron Sittig to redesign the site as we know it. Parker obsessively negotiated with the owner of facebook.com to buy the domain. Parker also came up with much of what we see as the Facebook News Feed, and he believes that format is the future of communication on the Web. “The social graph,” he says, referring to the connection people have with others through multiple degrees, “is the critical ingredient.”

[Side note: See this link here for other details. It was written by Numair Faraz, a friend of Parker's who said Parker had tacitly agreed to the post. Numair forwarded it to us a couple of weeks ago. At the time, we ran Numair's blog post by Facebook's spokeswoman, who reviewed it, and declined comment. When we ran the facts by Parker, he clarified the following: Plaxo had two other co-founders, Tipping Point was not an inspiration for either Plaxo or Facebook, he met Facebook's Zuckerberg met in NYC and Zuckerberg had every intention of turning the site into a business; Parker just accelerated the process, he clarified. Finally, regarding Numair's comparison on Parker with Jim Clark (pictured above), the same comparison was made by Peter Thiel. In an interview, Thiel said Parker reminded him of Clark, who also founded three high-profile companies (SGI, Netscape, WebMD) but that Parker was twenty years younger: "He's just getting started," Thiel said. "The time horizon is really long."]

Parker’s self-acknowledged insecurity is what drives him to be edgy, but also to excel: “I’m still super insecure,” he said. Parker feels it in talks he’s having with entrepreneurs on behalf of the Founders Fund, he says: “I always feel like the underdog. I walk away from meetings asking myself ‘Did I add any value, or are they going to tell other people that shouldn’t talk with us?’”

Like many people at Facebook with ambition, Parker left Facebook quite early in the game. Facebook is firmly in Zuck’s grip, along with a few trusted “family” members, as his close-knit circle is referred to. Parker retains a sizeable chunk of Facebook shares. Others have left, impatient because Zuck won’t sell the company or give them more responsibility.

Parker says his three start-ups have also exhausted him, another reason for him to try out VC: There was “a lot of stress, a lot of conflict,” he said.

He said he joined Thiel because of Thiel’s maverick ways. Thiel is not a classic VC; he runs the firm with an entrepreneur’s bent, from his Clarium Capital hedge fund offices — swanky, we add, nicely perched atop the hills of the Presidio. Parker says too many VC firms are run by people who never launched and ran their own companies. At Founders Fund, Thiel is focused on investing in early-stage companies, and he’s given Parker a carte blanche to find the best companies he can, Thiel says. Founders Fund is investing a $50 million fund, and it is about to launch a second, larger fund.

Venture capitalists have launched a full-court press on campuses. With thousands of venture firms jockeying for the best ideas, it’s no surprise that venture capitalists are spending more and more time with young students at the best universities.

Mark Stevens (pictured here), a venture capitalist at valley firm Sequoia Capital, has given $22 million to USC to help that school make money from licensing promising technologies developed on campus. The program will provide grants to faculty and students with promising ideas, according to the WSJ.

This gives Stevens access to some of the ideas, as the story suggests (though the WSJ doesn’t mention the exact arrangement Stevens has with USC). It’s the latest sign that ideas are getting picked off earlier and earlier. We mentioned how eight Stanford MBA students formed around AGLOCO after a venture capitalist posted a note at Stanford looking for a student to help execute an idea. That’s an unprecedented number to join a company, especially at a time when AGLOCO competed with other start-ups to lure students. Already, five start-ups have been launched by this year’s crop of Stanford’s second-year MBAs. This year’s frenzy over Stanford’s MBA students exceeds even the bubble year of 1999, says AGLOCO’s Jim Jorgensen, who was hiring at the time. “That’s when it was nuts, but VCs weren’t all over these kids the way they are now,” he told VentureBeat. One Stanford student advertised on Craiglist to say she was looking for a CTO, and a VC who had no idea of who she was contacted her to inquire about her company, Jorgensen said.

You can’t blame them. Investor Ram Shriram bumped into a professor at Stanford while riding an elevator, and that led to an intro to the Google guys. A few years later, Shriram was a billionaire.

The Less-Is-More theme continues:

Ram Shriram, the founding investor in Google who backed Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were still at Stanford, remembers those frugal days. Page and Brin insisted on taking public transportation when they first visited Europe, refusing to fork out money for cabs.

Few companies will get a YouTube-style buyout offer of $1 Billion plus, so they’ll have to tighten their belts early, he said: “I’d rather see start-ups scrappy and frugal and on a diet of Ramen noodles,” he said on a panel during the Web 2.0 Summit.

Angel investor Paul Graham, who runs the Y-Combinator incubator gives a notable quote in a New York Times story about the how cheaply a new Internet company can get started — and how angels like him have a much easier time with this than elephantine venture capital firms.

“We are like mice, and VC’s are more like elephants. They can only make a few deals, so each one has a whole amount of weight and worry attached to it,” he said

From the article:

As for the target investment of $6,000 for each employee, an explanation on Y Combinator’s Web site makes it clear that Mr. Graham and his colleagues are not looking for computer science entrepreneurs who want to be pampered: “C.S. grad students at M.I.T. currently get $2,000/month to live on, so this represents three months’ living expenses. Though in fact most groups make it last longer.”

Ram Shriram, the guy who invested early in Google and made at least a billion, has in part switched his attention to Indian investment possibilities.

Now he’s decrying the dearth of skills there.

Surprising, given all the hand-wringing and publicity in the U.S. in recent years about the never ending supply of talented labor there.

First comes this story from the NYT, which cited studies saying that only one in four engineering graduates in India are employable, due to lack of required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations.

And Shriram, in a recent talk here in the valley, noted a shortage of middle management and of engineers with the latest Web development skills, such as knowledge of Javascript and AJAX:

“The people are smart, innately smart but don’t have this particular skill set yet,” said Shriram, an Indian native who is a founding member of Google’s board of directors.

It’s been really hard to find middle management, for example. It’s great to find a good founding team, but then I can’t find middle management. I can’t find engineers.”