David Haase, a former employee of the beleaguered San Francisco-based firm Rothenberg Ventures Management Co. (RVM), is suing the firm and its founder, Mike Rothenberg, saying he was asked to run up more than $100,000 in business expenses on an American Express account at the direction of Rothenberg and never repaid. In his lawsuit, filed […]
Lawsuits
Pierre Omidyar Involved in Effort to Help Gawker in its Appeal
Well, this story keeps getting more and more interesting. According to a newly published account in the New York Post, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, is involved in an effort to help Gawker Media in its appeal of a $140 million judgement that was awarded to Hulk Hogan following Gawker’s release of a sex […]
A Lending Case Involving Top VCs Moves Toward a Trial
Elevate, a venture-backed company that uses big data to assess loan applications from people with low credit scores, has been called out as a predatory lender, including in Fortune last year. One reason among others is that the APR on some of its loans is a stunning 349 percent. Yet the company’s predecessor, Think Finance, […]
A Strange New Battle Begins Over Who Owns Cruise Automation
A strange new battle over valuable startup equity took another step forward late yesterday afternoon. Jeremy Guillory, a Bay Area mechanical engineer, has filed a cross-complaint against 2.5-year-old Cruise Automation and its longtime CEO, Kyle Vogt. At issue: Guillory says that the self-driving car company — which developed an autopilot system for existing cars and is […]
How Goguen’s Suit Hurts Sequoia
The Friday before last, we told you that longtime Sequoia partner Michael Goguen had been slapped with a stomach-turning complaint. At its crux, it accused him of breaching an agreement he’d made to pay $40 million to a woman he’d known for years. Apparently, after paying her $10 million, Goguen concluded that he was within […]
The Ellen Pao Trial: A Postmortem
On Friday, jurors concluded that Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was neither discriminated nor retaliated against by the famed venture capital firm when she was passed over for promotions and ultimately fired. It was a dramatic conclusion to the five-week trial of Pao, who is today the interim […]
StrictlyVC: March 27, 2016
Oh, how we love Fridays! Have a great weekend, everyone. See you Monday morning. —– Top News in the A.M. Last week, French police reportedly raided Uber‘s offices in Paris. Yesterday, it was Dutch authorities barreling their way into the Amsterdam offices of the mobile car-booking company. More here. BlackBerry just reported a surprise profit for […]
The “Fuzzy” Logic of Venture Partnerships
The gender discrimination and retaliation case of Ellen Pao versus Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has enthralled Silicon Valley in recent weeks, with everyone now focusing on what a jury that’s set to begin deliberations will decide. But one of the many, bigger questions the trial has raised is whether it will impact how venture […]
In Kleiner Case, Question of Retaliation Moves Front and Center
Yesterday, Paul Gompers, a Harvard Business School professor, testified that Kleiner Perkins has one of the best records in venture capital when it comes to the number of female investors it employs. Gompers had taken the stand as an expert witness of behalf of Kleiner, which is currently fighting a suit brought against it by […]
At Ellen Pao Trial, Last-Ditch Efforts By Both Sides
We wouldn’t want to be a juror at the trial of Ellen Pao, the interim Reddit CEO who is suing her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for gender discrimination and retaliation. While both sides have enjoyed small victories at the trial, many of the “gotcha” moments raised by each have been neutralized when […]