few years ago it became fashionable for large VC’s to do seed funding.  8221;  And I think this line of thinking has started to become conventional wisdom as outlined in Chris Dixon’s excellent blog post saying that you need to be careful raising seed money from a large VC fund . But I’m no longer an entrepreneur – I’m a VC at a $200 million fund called GRP Ventures , the largest active fund in Southern California.  This is part of my ongoing series about Raising Venture Capital . This posting was inspired by an email from

Technical Strategy I support the technical team to: review short and long-term technology strategies to help direct strategic technical decisions and help to ensure appropriate technology usage, help define needed technical research activities, assess new and emerging technologies to determine application to business needs, help determine resource needs within business constraints, review and influence business and technical processes to help balance competing needs and priorities. Normally, its a burst of activity at the start and then things settled down into a pattern with bursts

Torrance-based Active Storage a developer of RAID products for Apple computers, has raised a Series A funding round, the firm said Tuesday afternoon. said the funding was led by Intel Capital, and also included Mission Ventures and Valhalla Partners. Amount of the funding was not disclosed. The company--which was founded by former executives at Apple, Inc.--said The firm said its founders were responsible for Apple's Active STorage XRAID products.

Or look at funding activity if you are considering start-ups. For some reason over the past week, I've been asked by three different people I know about job opportunities that might fit them. Since, I've given them the same advice, I thought it was worth putting in my blog. I personally believe that the best way to hire, find partners, and find a job is through a network.

Despite the fact that fund size and fund returns are generally inverse related, all of the incentives are to raise bigger funds: As fund size grows larger, fund managers essentially ends up with guaranteed wealth.    A general partnership that has a total of $500mm under management (over 2 or even three funds) generates $10mm per year in fees before making its first investment.   The number of partners Saturday’s TechCrunch had an article with the title above…  the “end” of traditional VC has been something that we (and many others) have been predicting for a while.  

Ernst & Young LLP released an analysis of clean technology fundings for Q3, finding that there were $363.5M billion in fundings. Within the clean technology industry, energy and electricity generation companies took the largest amount of funding, with $1B in investments, $990M of those in solar. Santa Monica-based SolarReserve was in clean technology investments in Southern California for the quarter, a significant chunk of an overall $1.6 According to Ernst & Young, based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource, the record $1.6B

Probability Scenario #1 - The "Duke, North Carolina, UCLA's of the world" - if they were entrepreneurs, they would have good chance to get funded. A serial entrepreneur network , a relevant and ACTIVE angel investor, a university advisor, a "mentor mindset VC", a "kind" lawyer etc... Tags: venture entrepreneur NCAA fundin I was filling out my winning March Madness Basketball brackets .. oops ..

This morning's interview is with Billy Fried , co-founder and CEO of Kijubi (www.kijubi.com), a new startup which is looking to help people find travel activities. Billy Fried: As an active person, with an active family and active friends, I've gone on vacation and searched around for things to do, or looked for things to do on a weekend here in SoCal. was always perplexed at finding fun activities out there The firm is launching itself today at TechCrunch50. We talked with Billy last week about the firm, and what it's trying to do: What's

I came across an interesting article that reports on the trends in venture capital Series A funding , as investment stands at the end of August, 2009. The article does report that seed funding activity was low, but those numbers are difficult to come across at best. Tags: Web Startup Advice 2009 internet startup series a series a funding trends VC venture capita I think there are positive signs for those of us looking to the capital markets for resources (cash to build our grand visions, that is).

The numbers--which are derived by socalTECH from venture deals reported by companies, in news, disclosed in regulatory filings, and otherwise publicly reported--showed that the biggest deals for the quarter were for SolarReserve, which raised $140M for its solar energy projects; Active Network, which scored $80M from ESPN and others; Fisker Automotive, with $65M, Sapphire Energy, with $50M; and Intelligent Beauty, which raised $43M. The numbers were driven by large dollar fundings in the clean technology sector, including large rounds to PowerGenix, Aptera Motors, and Pentadyne. The