About the site

Inside news, big ideas and small nuggets of info about technology innovation in Silicon Valley and the money that drives it.

Matt Marshall joined the Mercury News in Nov. 1999. He covered the stock market and Silicon Valley technology companies, and moved to cover the venture capital beat in Feb. 2001. He writes a column called the VC Insider about Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the start-ups they fund. The column appears every other Tuesday.

Beginning in 2002, Matt instigated two successful Mercury News lawsuits 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. Public employees rely on such investments for their retirement income, and yet there was no public oversight of how those individual investments were performing. For his series of articles in conjunction with these lawsuits in 2002 and 2003, Matt was awarded Journalist of the Year by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists, and the James Madison Freedom of Information award.

Matt was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 through 1998. 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). Earlier, Matt wrote 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.

See Matt’s recent Mercury News stories here (registration probably required to view them).
Matt’s column also appears on SiliconValley.com the tech-focused Web site of the Mercury News’ parent company Knight Ridder. Check out his stuff here.

Michael Bazeley is the Internet reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. He covers most aspects of online technology, from e-commerce to spam to search engines. He places an emphasis on local companies. Michael is a life-long technology enthusiast. As a part-time web developer, he has coded and designed many web sites, and he’s been setting up blogs since back in the day. But this is the first blog he’s written for regularly. Contact him at mbazeley@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5642.

See Michael’s recent news stories here.