Startup One Stop

Good morning, All,

We’ll get to that.

In case you missed it, Gurbaksh Chahal, CEO of Radium One, ended up pleading to a couple of misdemeanors after having been charged with some 47 felony counts for allegedly having battered his girlfriend 117 times over a period of half an hour. He hired a good lawyer – and he appeared on Oprah, after all, who called him an eligible bachelor. As did Extra. Yes, just make sure you have 911 on speed dial. This was all after the allegations and it’s all bad behavior – as is Jason Calacanis’s basically calling for mob justice, and offering the hacker group, Anonymous, money if they could get the video tape that was thrown out in court. Do we really need to see the video? Calacanis would have made his point had he taken that $10k and donated it to a women’s shelter – or at least matching funds. That’s a statement, too. Read More...

Good morning, All,

Not too long ago, there was a whole discussion about the rampant ageism that exists in our industry. We all know that it’s true on the hiring side, and Fred Wilson raised it again last week in a Business Insider interview, where he talked about the young VCs who are raising funds, many without the benefit of having had any hands-on experience at a startup or in the business world. Of course, there was a response, from Mike Rothenberg, who is a Lucky Sperm kid who went to Stanford and Harvard (why not?) and became a VC basically right out of HBS and note where his fund is investing – in the vertical he knows, which is basically twenty-somethings (he’s about to turn thirty, so yes, they do invest in thirty-somethings as well). He doesn’t discuss competencies or specific industry segments – just age and the advantages of the peer-to-peer network.

At #StartupColumbia, Alan Patricof, considered the father of venture capital, brought up the fact that, prior to VCs, it was the wealthy families who invested in new ventures – he mentioned Rockefellers, Whitneys and Phippses of the world. So it seems that the pendulum is swinging back, but this time it’s Tisch, Kushner, Rothenberg et al. The ground is not shifting, as Rothenberg claims: only the names have been changed to deceive the clueless. But they see it as a young man’s game and tend not to take a long view of things. Ah, history: boring. But what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat. Read More...

Good morning, All,

We take absolutely no sides here, but did want to bring up the matter of the pretty much forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich over a donation he made that evidently rankled the OKCupid crowd. And quickly mushroomed.

Not too long ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook told shareholders that If You Don’t Believe in Global Warming, Sell Our Stock! Bold words, but what did not seem to grab any headlines is that former Obama EPA Chief Lisa Jackson is now an Apple employee, despite the fact that she was pretty much forced to resign from the agency amid questions about whether her agency was complying with open-records laws.  She was also sending fraudulent emails, btw. In the brouhaha of the Eich story, what you might have missed is another story involving that tech executive that hit the news: the EPA was testing deadly pollutants on humans – without their knowledge or consent – during  Apple employee Jackson’s tenure at the agency. Where’s the outrage there? Read More...

Good morning, All,

Tech companies have been on a buying spree lately, especially Facebook and Google. It seems like it was just last week that Facebook dropped $19B for WhatsApp (ok, so it was two weeks ago) and then shelled out $2B for Oculus Rift. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.

According to the video cited above, a lot of it has to do with fear and ambition – and the fact that these companies came seemingly from out of nowhere and quickly dominated the zeitgeist, not to mention the global business landscape. Read More...