You might not be familiar with the 25-person, Palo Alto, Ca.-based startup Piazza, but plenty of engineering and other STEM students are aware of it. The online platform where students and instructors come together to learn and teach was first conceived by founder and CEO Pooja Sankar, who as a first-year student at the Stanford Graduate […]
Khosla Ventures
Talking 1099 Workers (and More) with Redpoint’s Ryan Sarver
Last week, the California Labor Commission found that a San Francisco-based Uber driver should have been legally classified as an employee, and not a contract worker, by the company. The ruling could be a very big deal for Uber and many other on-demand companies that argue they’re an appealing alternative to people who want to work […]
Another Hardware Fund Emerges: Meet Root Ventures
You may have noticed: Hardware investing is in vogue. Andy Rubin, creator the mobile operating system Android, recently launched Playground Global to advise device makers in exchange for equity. Formation 8 is raising a $100 million hardware-focused venture fund. That’s saying nothing of the seed-stage fund Bolt, which raised $25 million a few months ago, and the […]
Amid Unicorn Talk, High-Potential, Low-Glamour PayNearMe Slogs Along
PayNearMe doesn’t get a lot of attention from the press. Partly, that’s because the five-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca., company doesn’t seek it out. But PayNearMe is also in a business that’s not nearly so relatable to many in Silicon Valley as enterprise messaging or high-end black-car services. It’s focused on the roughly 25 percent of people in […]
Opendoor Raises $20M for Its Audacious Home-Buying Business
Opendoor, a year-old, San Francisco-based company, is on a mission to make residential real estate liquid by making it simple to buy and sell it online. Investors are buying what it’s selling. This morning, the company is announcing $20 million in fresh funding led by GGV Capital, a round that brings the company’s total outside […]
Keith Rabois on the Tricky Business of Multi-Stage Investing
Last week, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, investor-writer Semil Shah interviewed Keith Rabois of the Sand Hill Road firm Khosla Ventures. There, he asked Rabois how Khosla manages its multi-stage approach, and whether Rabois anticipates that more firms will raise different-stage funds to capitalize on today’s go-go market. Rabois — who speaks at […]
Keith Rabois to Startups: Go Public Already
Last week, at a StrictlyVC event San Francisco, investor-writer Semil Shah interviewed Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures in a wide-ranging chat. Among the issues raised was why companies are staying private longer, and whether founders, investors and the institutions that finance venture capitalists should be concerned. Rabois – a former lawyer who’d earlier served as […]
A Custom Apparel Company with Big Ambitions Raises $35 Million
Into ironic T-shirts? You aren’t alone. In fact, the market is so robust that Teespring, a two-year-old company that helps anyone turn their idea for a T-shirt (or hoodie) into a real product, has just raised $35 million in Series B financing from Khosla Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz, which had plugged $20 million into the company earlier this […]
Hardware Incubator Highway1 Readies for New Applicants
Creating a hardware device is hard; making it in large quantities is exponentially harder. A reminder of this hard truth appeared on Friday on the Indiegogo page of Scanadu, a medical device startup that began shipping its long-awaited Scout product to its backers last week, then stopped, saying the device isn’t working as expected. It’s exactly […]