have thirteen-plus companies which have gone from inception to selling for North of a billion dollars, including the last company we sold, in October of 2008, BillMeLater, which we sold to eBay for a billion dollars. You know Zag, herein town, and more recently our new car investment, TrueCar. This morning's interview is with Mark Suster , a venture capitalist at GRP Partners (www.grpvc.com). GRP has just recently closed on a new $200M fund, and Mark has been one of the more active venture capitalists in the Los Angeles area in recent months.

According to numbers derived from socalTECH's venture database, there was $717.96M invested in Southern California in the first quarter, up from only $465M in Q4 of 2008. However, venture funding totals were still well off the first quarter of 2008's nearly $1.2 Other firms receiving significant capital during the quarter were car buying technology firm Zag , with around $37M raised, and solar energy firm eSolar , which Southern California Venture capital totals were up slightly in Q1 of this year from last quarter, to around $718M in deals, according to an analysis of socalTECH.com's proprietary venture database .

Santa Monica-based Zag, a venture-backed developer of online car buying software, said this morning that it has made a Zag said it has promoted Bernie Brenner to Executive Vice President in charge of the firm's consumer initiatives, named David Pributsky as VP of Partner development. Brenner has served at 1-800-CARSEARCH, PromiseMark, and CARFAX; Pributsky joined Zag in 2006 and served at eVox Productions and Malldecker Media; Easterby was most recently a number of hires and a promotion.