The Scott Sanfilippo Interview Media Optimization Firms Are Red Hot In Southern California in 2009 Proliferate - Aggregate - Integrate Startups Uncensored #4 - “Finding and Working with Partners” SoCal VC’s absent from Forbes Midas List Top Five Best Uses of an Entrepreneur's Legal Dollars What Data Crunchers Did for Obama An Evaluation of Web Strategy in the Musical Instrument Business Keywords Layoffs Fund Venture Capital Events Technology Angel Mahalo Zag MySpace Geni

Most of these companies bootstrapped themselves and bypassed local SoCal VC firms raising larger rounds with Silicon Valley based mega VC fund after achieving significant revenue growth. Total Funding: $42M I nvestors: Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures and GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund Openx.com Pasadena CA - Ad server for web publishers. A stealth internet advertising / publishing renaissance is quietly happening in Southern California 10 years after the dot com bubble burst. Any investor who tells you its

The panelists included James Cham of Bessemer Venture Partners; Beau Laskey of Steamboat Ventures; Greg Martin of Redpoint Ventures; Leo Spiegel of Mission Ventures; Ross Levinsohn of Velocity Interactive; Jim Armstrong of Clearstone Venture Partners; Mike Stuhley of the Tech Coast Angels; and Gus Tai of Trinity Ventures. READ MOR Southern California's top startups showed up in force Friday at the Westin South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, for the Technology Council of Southern California's annual VentureNet conference. (socalTECH socalTECH was a media sponsor of the conference).

Late Friday night, a Silicon Valley firm, Meru Networks , whose major backer is Santa Monica-based Clearstone Ventures filed for an IPO . Clearstone owns 21 percent of Meru, and is represented on that firm’s board by local VC William Quigley.  Full disclaimer: both Clearstone and Redpoint have or are current sponsors of socalTECH, though our coverage is always independent of our advertisers and sponsors.) ...Tags: There’s a lot of folks gambling on the IPO market this week, with a bunch of IPO news — both from local VCs as well as one local company.

The subjective list–based on Forbes’ assessment of how much venture capitalists did for their investors–has previously included Jim Armstrong of Clearstone Ventures , Brad Jones of Redpoint Ventures , Andrew Senyei of Enterprise Partners , and Clearstone’s Bill Elkus , along with Blair. Southern California venture capitalists are mostly absent from Forbes’ latest Midas List — the magazine’s list of the most influential venture capitalists — with the exception of Domain Associates’ James Blair . Of course, with

These are the folks that put on the Startonomics conference this past February at UCLA, which was a great primer for web entrepreneurs and provides a level of networking and education that is needed in SoCal.  Since SoCal Tech Group is all about empowering entrepreneurs in the LA area, we’d like to give away  ONE ticket to this fantastic event to a deserving entrepreneur (a $200 value!).  The Dealmaker has been putting together conferences and roundtables in LA of consistently high quality for the past two years.  These Well, Dealmaker has recently announced a new workshop

A few months ago, Peter Lee --a venture local capitalist who has served at firms such as Prism Ventures and Clearstone Ventures Partners--joined a relatively unknown venture firm here in Southern California, Baroda Ventures (www.barodaventures.com). Peter Lee: Essentially, we are Southern California focused, through we will be looking at out of SoCal investments--we're not closing our doors to those, but our interest is really in focusing down here. We caught up with Peter earlier this week to get the background on Baroda, and to talk a little about the firm's investment goals. We're

The board asked me to jump in, and I did, working with Ted Alexander and Jim Armstrong, of Mission Ventures and Clearstone Ventures, respectively. Lots of angels are passive, but we were in a position where as angels we knew the company didn't have the management, but had a wonderful idea and promise, that we had some leading SoCal VCs interested, and what we concluded collectively was that the company needed to add management capability. Yesterday, Pasadena-based LeisureLink (www.leisurelink.com) announced a $6.2M funding round for the firm's travel booking service.

My competition is not Rustic Canyon, it's not Clearstone, or the other venture firms in town. You've got lots of experience in the SaaS market with Salesforce.com, what's your opinion on where that market is today--and how do SoCal's Software startups stack up? Mark 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.