Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Talking Kleiner 3.0 with Its New Consumer Investing Partner

Kleiner Perkins has been through the wringer since the go-go dot-com days of the late 1990s. After making a bundle on Google, the storied venture firm raised too much money from investors and grew too ambitious in scope before dramatically retrenching a few years ago — but not before being hit with one of the highest-profile lawsuits in venture industry. (It won the case, which centered on gender discrimination, but it took a beating in the process.)

To restore its former glory, the firm is largely transformed from the firm it was a dozen years ago. For starters, it has undergone some major casting changes. Only one of its five general partners — Ted Schlein, who leads Kleiner’s investments in security and some of its enterprise investments — has been with the firm throughout all the tumult, having joined the firm 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Beth Seidenberg, who focuses on everything from life science to digital health, joined Kleiner in 2005; Wen Hsieh, who focuses on enterprise and hardware deals, joined in 2006; Mike Abbott joined in 2011 to focus largely on enterprise deals; and Eric Feng, a former CTO for both Hulu and Flipboard, joined last October to lead the firm’s consumer investing.

Kleiner, which is currently raising $1.3 billion across two new funds, has also taken a page from the playbook of Benchmark and some other smaller partnerships, and its partners now enjoy equal partner economics. (Kleiner has also five associate partners, as well as a separate growth investing group.)

To get better insight into the firm and how it operates today — as well as where it’s shopping — we talked yesterday with Feng. Our chat has been edited for length.

More here.

RelayRides Rebrands as Turo, Raises $47 Million Led by Kleiner

RelayRides, the six-year-old, San Francisco-based peer-to-peer car rental service, has just rebranded itself as Turo. The company is also announcing $47 million in Series C funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The combined announcement is meant to grab attention. Turo doesn’t disclose the number of people using its platform or the number of cars currently available to renters. But the company says that 60 percent of its revenue now comes from out-of-town travelers who are renting the cars of people who are themselves flying out of town. And it wants to take the trend global, thus the name. CEO Andre Haddad says it evokes both “touring,” or, in Italian, “turismo.”

The shift makes sense. There are plenty of hassles involved in airport parking, from the typical drive to the far-flung lot to the big parking tab. Cars are also depreciating assets from which more owners could easily wring money.

Turo isn’t not alone in trying to capture people who are willing to hand over their car keys for a little more spending money. Among its other competitors are GetAround and Flightcar, a company whose major restructuring we wrote about last month.

Still, there are differences. Whereas GetAround rents cars by the hour or day, Turo requires a one-day minimum and says the average rental period is 5.5 days.

More here.

Ellen Pao Portrays Lawsuit as Very Last Resort

Yesterday, in Ellen Pao’s first appearance on the stand in her gender discrimination case Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she once worked as a junior partner, she testified that filing suit against the firm was the culmination of many discussions with various of the firm’s senior executives over a five-year period during which she flagged issues of harassment and gender discrimination and beseeched them to change the “loosey-goosey way we dealt with issues.”

Wearing a simple, caramel-colored dress and purple blazer, Pao spoke of attempts to encourage at least four senior Kleiner executives to institute HR policies around discrimination and harassment following her affair in 2006 with her then senior colleague Ajit Nazre, who she says was “relentless” in his pursuit of her and pressured her into what would become “rocky” six-month-long relationship.

After Pao ended the affair, said Pao, Nazre began cutting her out of email chains and excluding her from meetings. For help, she turned to then general partner Ray Lane, who was Nazre’s mentor; Lane twice suggested the two have a conciliatory lunch. (Pao says she conceded, but left mid- meal after Nazre professed his love for her.) She also reached out to general partner Randy Komisar, who told her he “didn’t want to know.”

Pao also later told general partner John Doerr about her brief relationship with Nazre. Doerr was prepared to fire Nazre over the incident, said Pao, who added that she and Lane successfully worked together to preserve Nazre’s job at the time. But subsequent conversations with Doerr, Lane, and general partner Ted Schlein about the need for Kleiner to institute better policies to deal with such situations and prevent future problems were repeatedly ignored, she testified.

Pao, a Harvard-educated attorney who spent two years as an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore early in her career, also testified that she told Juliet de Baubigny, the firm’s head of human resources, that she felt Kleiner needed a related HR policy — particularly as Pao suspected Nazre of sexually harassing three administrative assistants. In response, de Baubigny told Pao she thought Nazre was a “sex addict,” recalled Pao of that exchange, who said yesterday that she was “surprised” by de Baubigny’s characterization. “I thought [de Baubigny] must have additional information about the administrative assistants.”

On the stand, Pao came across as likable, including smiling on occasion as she addressed questions by her attorney, Theresa Lawless. It was an image very much at odds with the picture of Pao that Kleiner’s attorneys have sought to create as someone with “sharp elbows.”

She also seemed highly competent. Indeed, at the direction of Lawless, Pao spoke at length about the many accolades bestowed on her by Doerr during their working relationship, as well about her investing instincts. She testified yesterday, for example, that she tried convincing Kleiner to invest much earlier on in Twitter, and that her case for the company went unheeded because, according to general partner Matt Murphy, who’d previously met with Twitter, its team wasn’t business-minded. (Kleiner eventually invested in Twitter in late 2010, at a $4 billion valuation.)

Pao also testified that she convinced the partnership to back RPX, a patent technology startup that Kleiner would not have funded without her due diligence. (It would eventually go public in 2011, an otherwise terrible time for tech stocks.) She added that Doerr gave the company’s board seat to Komisar because Pao was pregnant with her daughter and as such, “I wasn’t being considered for a board seat or board observer role.”

She also said that upon her return from maternity leave, she had “many” discussions with Komisar about RPX. Said Pao, “[H]e was not involved with the company, and the [RPX] team had started to complain about him. Every time I heard a complaint, I would raise it with Randy. I wanted to try to help solve the problem.”

Unsurprisingly, Pao spent much of the day describing a very male-dominated culture at Kleiner. Pao was asked, for example, about that now infamous all-male dinner at former Vice President Al Gore’s apartment at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, where Pao also had an apartment at the time.

“It was pretty humiliating,” said Pao of seeing entrepreneurs in the building who were on their way up to the dinner. One of them was Mike McCue, the CEO and cofounder of the news aggregation app Flipboard, on whose board Pao sat at the time. “I was coming down the elevator and ran into people in the lobby . . . When I went outside I saw Mike McCue [parking] . . . and he said ‘OK I’ll see you up there,’ and I said ‘No, no, I’m not going to be part of this dinner.'”

Pao also described wanting to leave the firm in 2007 owing to the company’s culture. Following conversations with the firm’s senior partners about it, and asked by Doerr to elaborate, Pao wrote him — in email shown to the courtroom — the she’d like to see “less fear in making unpopular statements. Less risk around offending others.” She also pointed to “politics,” suggesting she’d like to see “consensus building in a way that shares information and contributes to an open process.”

Not last, Pao told Doerr she thought the partnership needed to show greater respect to entrepreneurs, regardless of whether or not the firm was interested in funding their companies.

Said Pao, “I’d seen some meetings where we were late and would make entrepreneurs late. There was [another] meeting in particular where we weren’t interested in talking about [the] specific venture and we started talking about taking some people from [the company that was in the pitch meeting] and [hiring them into another startup]. And when you’re talking about breaking up a [company in front of its founders], that just seemed very disrespectful to me.”

Pao has yet to be cross-examined by Kleiner’s legal team. She returns to the courtroom today.

Photo of Ellen Pao outside a San Francisco courthouse by Jeff Elder of the Wall Street Journal.

Ray Lane Under Oath

Ray Lane, an emeritus partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, came across as a good guy yesterday during his testimony in the trial of former partner Ellen Pao, who is suing Kleiner for gender discrimination. But he didn’t do Kleiner any favors, at times seeming to blame himself for mistakes and, at others, undermining Kleiner attorney Lynn Hermle as she tried painting a picture of Pao as too inexperienced for a promotion.

Much of Lane’s testimony centered on his handling of the complaints of both Pao and Kleiner partner Trae Vassallo, both of whom turned to Lane before anyone else at the firm to discuss former partner Ajit Nazre.

Pao had a short-lived but intimate relationship with Nazre, which she confided in Lane in 2007 after hearing Lane remark to Nazre in her presence that it was nice to see him with his wife and children at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. (Nazre, Pao told Lane, led her to believe that he had split up with his wife.)

Roughly four years after that exchange, Nazre showed up in Vassallo’s hotel doorway during a work trip wearing a bathrobe and slippers. Vassallo – married with children — also went to Lane before talking with anyone else at the firm.

In Lane’s testimony about both situations — which he said he viewed as “two very different incidents” — Lane came across as a well-meaning mentor who wasn’t necessarily equipped to handle the information he was being given.

In one 2007 exchange with Lane, for example, Pao wrote, “Thank you for your help in working through a difficult issue. It’s a really awkward situation. In the interest of moving forward and avoiding more unpleasantness, I’m willing to live with some disagreement over what happened if Ajit can be professional and collegial . . . I’m relieved to able able to put it behind me, glad that you were listening.”

Lane wrote back that, “I really believe ‘stuff happens’ and both of you are terrific people. . . . this should not be offset by common human behavior. No bridges were burned, mistakes were made, apologies offered, and it’s up to us to move forward, and not shoot ourselves in both feet.” He also encouraged Pao and Nazre to “talk about working together [and moving] forward . . . you both have enormous mutual respect, despite any personal liabilities.”

Lane’s initial advice to Vassallo similarly seemed to reflect the culture of a small firm unaccustomed to dealing with thorny personal issues. The day Vassallo told him about Nazre’s unwanted advances, said Lane, he suggested that she discuss the matter with the husband so that the couple could decide on a course of action together.

Lane explained that he thought whatever followed should be up to Vassallo and not Kleiner. Still, said Lane, he worried at the time about Vassallo’s safety – noting that “things could have gone another way, [Nazre] could have pushed his way in” to her hotel room – and expressed regret yesterday at not starting an investigation straightaway.

“It was my mistake,” he said of waiting until Vassallo wrote a formal complaint about Nazre to Lane and other Kleiner partners roughly one week after coming to Lane.

It wasn’t the only mistake Lane appeared to acknowledge making.

Asked by Pao’s attorney why Nazre was promoted to senior partner in 2008, despite Nazre’s relationship with Pao and, crucially, though Nazre lied to Lane when first confronted about it, Lane answered, “Good question.” He went on to explain that Nazre “quickly” confessed to his relationship with Pao, and that Nazre, in Lane’s view, was very knowledgeable about green tech and “an important part” of the firm’s team.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kleiner’s attorney, Hermle, tried steering Lane to the larger point of whether or not Pao should have received the promotion that Pao is arguing she deserved. Toward that end, Hermle pulled up two emails relating to different CEOs who expressed displeasure in working with Pao.

One CEO had apparently resorted to ignoring Pao, who recognized she’d have to find another way to win him over and wrote to Lane of the executive: “Frank is hierarchy focused and not as comfortable dealing with me directly so I need to be more ‘velvet-gloved’ (note the number of times it took to get him to copy me on emails).”

Asked about the exchange, Lane described the CEO as a “difficult character” who is “more than 60 years of age” and “very set in his ways.”

Hermle also produced an email exchange involving Workday cofounder and co-CEO Aneel Bhusri, who’d been talking with Kleiner about a late-stage investment before Workday went public in 2012.

Wrote Bhusri to Lane, who forwarded his note to partner Ted Schlein: “Frankly, Ellen seems pretty clueless, can someone else take the lead?” Wrote Lane to Schlein, under Bhusri’s comment, “I kind of agree with him.” Schlein then responded: “She ran the names of folks by me, for diligence. I can’t say I paid too close attention so could be my fault.” Lane then responded to Schlein, “I will talk to [Bhusri] live tomorrow, but we have to put somebody else in or I will handle personally. I did the same as you, allowed Ellen to work it alone.”

Was this a “major problem?” Hermle asked Lane on the stand. “No,” said Lane. “I don’t think it was a major problem.” Added Lane, “I thought [Pao] wasn’t being sensitive that this was a company that was already valued at more than a billion dollars.” But the bigger issue, Lane suggested, was that Bhusri didn’t like Kleiner’s technical review of Workday, which involved talking with “just a few customers.”

Said Lane, “Mr. Bhusri disagreed with the approach. I thought the approach was fine.”

Kleiner’s Mike Abbott on (Probably) Not Starting Another Company

Three years ago, Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in the plum role of general partner. Yet one senses the longtime operator and entrepreneur — whose many past roles include as Twitter’s VP of Engineering; as SVP at Palm; and as cofounder of the data virtualization startup Composite Software, acquired by Cisco last year for $180 million in cash — isn’t completely finished getting his hands dirty as an engineer. We caught up the other day, chatting about everything from Kleiner’s well-documented management changes to Abbott’s closet coding. Our conversation has been edited for length.

When you joined Kleiner, it seemed to be undergoing a generational shift, with you and Megan Quinn reportedly charged with building the firm’s digital practice. Now, many younger partners the firm had brought on are gone, including Quinn, who has become a strategic advisor. What’s going on?

Megan decided for personal reasons that she and her significant other were moving to the U.K. We wanted her to be part of the KP family, so that’s totally distinct from [the decision the firm made a year ago to downsize] . . . But we’re very much making sure that KP’s platform is getting built for the future and clearly we’ll be adding a couple of new folks as we find the right people for us.

You joined the firm less than two years before it shook up its management team. How has that impacted your work and your outlook on KP?

I don’t think I knew the firm would [be involved in] different legal issues or what not. I’m not going to lie and say I was aware of everything. But I was aware there was a conviction to make changes and I applaud [longtime general partners] Ted [Schlein] and John [Doerr] for doing [what they felt was best for the firm]. We have a long history of handling generational transitions and a great history to leverage; it doesn’t change the fact that we have a lot of work to do.

John Doerr is joining the board of Slack, Kleiner’s latest high-profile deal. What are your new investments? What interests you?

I’ve been spending a lot of time around computer vision. I think the advancements in deep learning that Google and Facebook are making are interesting. One of my most recent investments is Airware [a three-year-old company that’s developing a drone operating system]. It’s going to be really interesting to see what kinds of applications get built [because of it].

I’ve spent my career focused on big data, but now we have efficient ways to query it and store it and [the next step] is extracting real intelligence out of it.

How? What are some of the other related applications and services that interest you?

I think it’s interesting to think through how, if you were to build a Salesforce or NetSuite today, you would build it. RelateIQ, which Salesforce acquired, was starting to do interesting analytics around the email accounts of sales teams to enable them to do better lead forecasting – like looking at the frequency that [a rep] talks with a customer, and the time between that outgoing email and the customer’s response.

What we haven’t seen yet is more work around the quantified employee, meaning: How do you start building metrics that go beyond performance management? If I usually send X number of emails, and check in so many times on Github, and you build a fingerprint of me as an employee and that [fingerprint] suddenly changes, well, maybe it’s because of my personal life or maybe it’s because I don’t like who I’m working with and maybe now I’m at risk [of leaving the company]. I’m not suggesting monitoring employees for bad behavior, but when I was at Twitter, managing a couple hundred employees, boy, if there’d been a way for me to get different metrics that were implicitly derived and would have helped me be a more effective leader and manager . . .

Before joining Kleiner, you were a fairly active angel investor. What’s your pacing like as a VC?

I’ve done two Series A deals [for the firm] this year and one Series B. It’s not like, “You used your two; you’re done.” But if you look at the size of the fund and reserves, it kind of ends up that way.

Is that frustrating?

It’s not easy, even if I’m writing more software [on the side]. I really enjoy the mentoring and service aspect [of venture capital], but I won’t lie; as someone who has built products for 20 years, the feedback cycles are a lot longer than when you’re shipping software.

Wait. You still go home and write software?

I do. I’ve recently met with a number of companies doing deep learning and just wanted to see what state-of-the-art was for someone like me to try out.

A couple of weeks ago, I also wrote a couple of [scripts] for custom keyboards, which you can use for i0S 8 [as it now allows third-party keyboards in the App store]. I don’t necessarily know if there’s a company or not, but different keyboards for different locations is fascinating to me.

Are you talking about helping another team incubate a company or are you tempted to start another company?

I certainly can and would [help incubate a company]. KP has a history of people starting companies out of its offices, which made me feel better [when I joined], thinking I could start one. But having started companies, I know what kind of investment that takes and I’m not sure I’ve been able to reconcile whether [I] can really do [a startup] and provide enough time and support to the companies on whose boards I sit.

I wouldn’t say no way [will I ever start another company]. But I have a deep respect for what it requires.

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A Young VC Resurfaces with His Year-Old Startup: Spruce

Every month, a few startups that enable patients to consult with doctors without visiting their offices seem to emerge from nowhere. It’s no wonder. According to the research firm IHS, revenue from these so-called telemedicine companies could hit $1.9 billion in 2018, up from $240 million last year. That shift owes largely to the Affordable Care Act, which is pressuring doctors to help drive down costs, but it’s also easy to imagine that a growing number of doctors likes the prospect of practicing medicine from anywhere, at any time.

Some companies, like Teladoc — which just raised $100 million from investors — have begun partnering with insurance companies like Aetna and Blue Shield of California to offer subscribers telemedicine services as an added benefit in their coverage. Others like venture-backed HealthTap and Doctor on Demand, both of which offer live videoconferences with doctors, are going straight to consumers.

A year-old company, Spruce — founded by former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Ray Bradford and launching publicly today — has a slight twist on the latter model. The 11-person, San Francisco-based company is debuting a mobile app that enables patients to pay $40 to consult with doctor but doesn’t give them instant care. Instead, users log on to the app, provide details about their specific condition, and receive a response from a board-certified physician within a day. (If a prescription is required, that information gets forwarded on to the pharmacy of the user’s choice.)

It doesn’t sound terribly revolutionary, but as Bradford explains it, the market opportunity makes up for a lot. “The majority of healthcare will be tech enabled and delivered via mobile devices. If you think about size of market and volume of doctors, you start to appreciate what a massive shift this will be, and we think the trend is just getting started.”

Earlier this week, we chatted briefly about Spruce, which is first targeting patients with acne problems but plans to expand into other ailments once it nails down its act.

Why acne first?

Fifty million Americans have acne. It’s not just a teenage problem. Most doctors visits are by adults. Meanwhile, the average wait time to see a dermatologist in the U.S. is 30 days, so the majority of people settle for over-the-counter solutions.

Why not employ videoconferencing, as are many other telemedicine startups?

It’s more convenient. Both the patient and doctor are doing things on their own time. If you’re on the clock with a doctor [Doctor on Demand customers pay $40 for 10 minutes or so with a physician, for example], maybe I can’t share everything I want to share. Likewise, the [offline] doctor is answering my questions, rather than going through the motions of collecting information in a rote way.

You left Kleiner to start this company in August of 2013. How much have you raised and will you be in the market again soon?

We raised $2 million in seed funding from Kleiner, with participation from Baseline Ventures and Cowboy Ventures. We raised it later last year [so we’re not raising again just yet].

You spent a couple of years as a VC and you worked previously in product development at Amazon Web Services. How do those experiences inform what you’re doing now?

The biggest way is seeing the importance of picking a big market, and you don’t get a much bigger market than healthcare.

StrictlyVC: May 7, 2014

Hello, and happy Wednesday morning, everyone!

For an easier-to-read version of today’s newsletter (we’ve been having some formatting issues with a new email service provider we’re been trying out) click here.

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Top News in the A.M.

Wow. In 2013, the USPTO granted nine patents for every patent application that was rejected and then abandoned by its applicant. That’s 92 percent, up from 68 percent in 2009, reports Vox.

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Mike Abbott of Kleiner Perkins on Snapcat, Box, and the Inherent Danger in High Valuations

Mike Abbott has only been a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for two-and-half years, but he’s a grizzled veteran of the startup industry nonetheless. Abbott previously served as Twitter’s VP of Engineering, for example, and as an SVP at Palm. In 2002, he also founded the data virtualization startup Composite Software, which was acquired by Cisco last year for $180 million in cash. (Composite had raised at least $38 million, including from Apax Partners, Palomar Ventures, and Clearstone Venture Partners.)

Little wonder that Abbott has a pretty strong perspective on many things startup related. The other day, we talked about a few of them, including attractive places to shop right now, why some transition on a startup’s board can be good, and what companies can do about spiraling valuations.

How would you characterize what you’re looking for right now?

Predominately, I spend time [considering] applications that are driven from large data processing . . . And I probably have a little more of a bias toward either design-centric and engineering-centric companies. That sounds generic, I realize, but that’s what I’ve done operationally. So . . looking at novel things around mining email in the enterprise, or what the implications are for sales forecasting, or mining digital health data for consumers or insurance providers.

I’ve also spent some time looking into the ephemeral content space.

That’s interesting. Ephemeral content seems afield from your other interests.

I do office hours at Stanford and every time I meet with a student, I ask what’s on their phone’s home screen and take a peek. And over the last few years, [it’s gone from] students using Facebook to not using Facebook not having it on their phones to the rise of Snapchat [and the idea that] not having content on your phone is a cool thing.

What does that mean for Twitter’s prospects? The Atlantic has already pronounced it a dead duck, as you likely know.

It’s funny, because [reporters] write these articles, then use Twitter to spread the word about them. A number of pieces have said that it’s dying, only to report six months later, “Oh, it’s back!” No one can doubt that Twitter is a meaningful information network that’s changing the world. Is everyone on it? No. And I think the company needs to evolve the product to make it easier for the masses to use. But there isn’t a clear number two, and it’s continuing to grow. I’m very bullish on the company.

Kleiner has gone through a transition and is a much smaller operation going forward. Have you taken on any of your colleagues board seats?

I haven’t and for the most part, we’ve hoped to have partners stay on those boards on behalf of KP even if they’re [transitioning out of the firm].

Speaking generally, do you think there’s a particularly good way to transfer board seats?

We always look at companies and ask if we have the right person on that board to help the company. So there may be changes in the future, depending on [partners’] different strengths and the different stages of a company. When I joined Kleiner, for example, I took over a seat at InMobi, the private ad network, where it happened to be that my background specifically at Twitter was helpful and they were excited. I do think it has to be a conversation between the company and the firm to get the right person.

There’s been a lot of talk this week about the impact of high valuations when the market turns less hospitable. How sensitive is Kleiner to price, and is that changing in this increasingly unpredictable environment?

For those of us who saw of this firsthand in 1999 and 2000, you [know that] you have to be cautious when you’re doing this higher-altitude fundraising because the market can change . . . I do think it’s going to be tough for some of these companies that have raised at these upper bounds to weather the storm.

Does the correction we’re seeing make you nervous?

It’s not that much of a surprise, I guess. Also, at the early stage, it hasn’t impacted us too much. The venture world lags the public markets by six months typically. I do think for certain companies, there’s a new question being asked, which is: If the economy changes, will this service or product still be in demand. I won’t name any specific companies, but if you have a service that’s in higher demand along with higher disposable incomes when the economy is doing really well, what happens when it changes? I don’t necessarily know that that question would have been asked nine months ago. You could argue that it should have been.

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New Fundings

Bloomlagoon, a two-year-old, Helsinki-based mobile games company, has raised $3.6 million in Series A funding round led by Northzone. Other investors in the round included Inventure and 360 Capital Partners along with earlier investors Jari Ovaskainen and London Venture Partners.

Delectable, a year-old, San Diego-based company whose iOS app allows users to find and share wine recommendations, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Deep Fork Capital and numerous individual investors, including Ron Conway, Max Levchin, and David Sacks.

Fever, a year-old, Madrid, Spain-based event discovery and booking app, has raised $3 million in seed funding from a long line of individual investors, including professional soccer player Sergio Ramos of Real Madrid, and singer-songwriter Alejandro Sanz.

HG Data, a 3.5-year-old, Santa Barbara, Ca.-based business intelligence company,
has raised $2 million in additional Series A funding led by Rincon Venture Partners. Earlier investor Epic Ventures also participated in the round, along with several individual investors. The company has raised $6.3 million to date, shows Crunchbase.

Loxo Oncology, a year-old, New York-based company that’s focused on targeted cancer therapies, has raised $24 million in Series B funding from New Enterprise Associates, OrbiMed Advisors, and Aisling Capital. The company has raised $57 million to date.

Metacloud, a 2.5-year-old, Pasadena, Ca.-based company that deploys and supports production clouds for companies across a range of industries, has raised $15 million in Series B funding from new investors Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and UMC Capital, as well as earlier investors AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Storm Ventures. The company has raised $25 million to date.

Roseonly, a year-old, Beijing-based e-commerce company that sells on flowers, chocolates, and other high-end gifts, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from IDG Capital and Accel Partners, according to China Money Network. The latest round values the company at $100 million, says the report.

Smore, a nearly three-year-old, Palo Alto-based platform for easily creating single-page promotional websites, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding led by Founder’s Co-op, with participation by Greylock Partners Israel and various angels. Smore is a graduate of the TechStars accelerator program.

TrademarkNow, a two-year-old, Helsinki-based company whose online trademark search tool promises to make it easier to find potential trademark infringements, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital. Others of the company’s investors include Lifeline Ventures, Tekes, and angel investors.

Vaurum, a two-year-old, Palo Alto-based cryptocurrency company developing bitcoin exchange software for financial institutions, has raised $4 million in seed funding from Battery Ventures and angel investors, including Tim Draper and Steve Case.

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IPOs

Everything you need to know about Alibaba‘s IPO filing, along with everything to know about its early winners.

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Exits

Adometry, a nine-year-old, Austin, Tx.-based marketing analytics and optimization platform that had raised $44.6 million from investors, has been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. Adometry’s investors included Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The WSJ has more here.

Convertro, a five-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based that (like Adometry), runs a marketing optimization platform, has been acquired by AOL for $89 million plus up to $10 million in earn-outs. Convertro had raised north of $5 million from MHS Capital,Bessemer Venture Partners, Founder Collective, and DAG Ventures.

Kippt, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based collaborative bookmarking system for professional networks, allowing users to collect and share content, has been acquired by the digital wallet technology company Coinbase for an undisclosed amount of money. Both companies are graduates of the summer 2012 Y Combinator accelerator program.

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People

Saydeah Howard, formerly a VP of human resources at the educational toy maker FrogLeap Enterprises, has joined Institutional Venture Partners as its VP of talent and venture services. Earlier in her career, Howard worked as an associate at Russell Reynolds Associates.

James Loftus, formerly the head of corporate development at Yahoo, has left the company to become a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, reports Business Insider. Loftus had worked at Yahoo for nearly two years and for more than two years at Google before that, where he was in charge of mergers and acquisitions.

Anne Wojcicki is taking her genetics startup 23andme to English-speaking markets abroad after facing hurdles from the U.S. FDA, reports Reuters. In a company blog post, Wojcicki had stressed that she “stands behind the data” and would work in concert with the FDA to “lay the groundwork” for regulatory approval. Yet a friend of Wojcicki tells Reuters that without testing the waters outside the U.S., “it might be more difficult to get the data to support authorization in the U.S.”

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Job Listings

Twitter is looking for a business development manager for its mobile and connected devices group. The job is in San Francisco.

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Data

The National Venture Capital Association‘s annual Yearbook has new data on the incredibly shrinking venture industry. According to its findings, over the last decade the number of venture funds has fallen by 25 percent; the number of venture firms has fallen by 8 percent; and the number of venture capital professionals has fallen off a cliff, down to 5,891 in 2013 from 14,777 in 2003. Geekwire has more here.

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Essential Reads

Amazon remains the clear frontrunner when it comes to online sales. But new data reveals that the race is heating up, with Apple now in second place.

Yahoo is selling roughly 40 percent of its Alibaba stake in the Chinese Internet company’s upcoming IPO, a move that could generate more than $10 billion for the struggling Internet giant. Naturally, analysts are already weighing in on where CEO Marissa Mayer should invest it.

Wired takes readers inside Tindie, a thriving new marketplace for DIY gadgets.

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Detours

NFL Commission Roger Goodell agreed yesterday to do an online Q&A with followers of the NFL’s official Twitter account. He received lots of questions, too. Among them: “Is there anyone anywhere more out of touch and incompetent than you?” “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if it wasn’t suffering brain trauma from 12 years as an NFL offensive lineman?” “Any predictions on who the next NFL player to be convicted of murder will be?”

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Retail Therapy

Star Trek cakes.

PostalPix aluminum prints.

The very last thing the world needs.

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Correction

In a people item in Monday’s newsletter about Fran Hauser, the newest partner at San Francisco-based Rothenberg Ventures, we reported that firm founder Mike Rothenberg was “formerly a director at his family’s residential real estate investment firm in Austin, Texas.” That wasn’t quite right; apologies. Rothenberg founded the firm with his brother, he told us in an email yesterday, explaining that it was “more of a startup than a family operation.”

Mike Abbott of Kleiner Perkins on Snapchat, Box, and the Inherent Danger of High Valuations

How would you characterize what you’re looking for right now?

Predominantly, I spend time [considering] applications that are driven from large data processing . . . And I probably have a little more of a bias toward either design-centric and engineering-centric companies. That sounds generic, I realize, but that’s what I’ve done operationally. So . . looking at novel things around mining email in the enterprise, or what the implications are for sales forecasting, or mining digital health data for consumers or insurance providers.

I’ve also spent some time looking into the ephemeral content space.

That’s interesting. Ephemeral content seems afield from your other interests.

I do office hours at Stanford and every time I meet with a student, I ask what’s on their phone’s home screen and take a peek. And over the last few years, [it’s gone from] students using Facebook to not using Facebook to not having it on their phones to the rise of Snapchat [and the idea that] not having content on your phone is a cool thing.

What does that mean for Twitter’s prospects? The Atlantic has already pronounced it a dead duck, as you likely know.

Kleiner has gone through a transition and is a much smaller operation going forward. Have you taken on any of your colleagues’ board seats?

I haven’t and for the most part, we’ve hoped to have partners stay on those boards on behalf of KP even if they’re [transitioning out of the firm].

Speaking generally, do you think there’s a particularly good way to transfer board seats?

Does the correction we’re seeing make you nervous?

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Kleiner Perkins’ Trae Vassallo Reboots

Trae Vassallo’s early investment in Nest Labs, maker of Internet-connected devices like thermostats and smoke alarms, has placed her in the ranks of today’s top venture capitalists. But Vassallo, along with a handful of other longtime Kleiner Perkins general partners, was recently cut from the firm’s investment committee in a sweeping reorganization first reported by Fortune.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that sources say Vassallo is planning her next move – though she refuses to comment. She also seems ready to shed her reputation for green tech deal-making and to embrace her passion for Internet-connected devices for both consumers and enterprises.

During a visit yesterday afternoon to Kleiner’s Sand Hill Road offices, I chatted with Vassallo about her career thus far, and her goals for the future.

Hers is actually a very familiar story in Silicon Valley, land of the super achievers. After earning three degrees from Stanford – a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering and an M.B.A. – Vassallo headed to IDEO, where she designed products for Palm and Dell. She then cofounded the mobile device company Good Technology, which later sold to Motorola.

By 2003, Vassallo had been invited to join Kleiner Perkins, just as the firm was beginning to bet heavily on green tech. Vassallo worked closely with a number of related management teams, including RecycleBank, a green rewards and loyalty network; Altarock Energy, a geothermal development company; and the electric luxury car company Fisker Automotive.

But it was Vassallo’s innate knowledge of mechanical engineering that became her biggest triumph. While Kleiner Perkins’ partner Randy Komisar ultimately sat on the board of Nest, Vassallo was first to recognize the opportunity the startup presented to Kleiner, having investing so much of her time focused on smart grids and energy efficiency. In fact, Vassallo says, in the months before Nest founder Tony Fadell sat down with Kleiner, she was specifically studying thermostats as a way for consumers to more easily measure and control their energy usage.

According to Fortune, Vassallo further negotiated the Series A round on behalf of Kleiner and continued to support the management team, including through introductions to utilities.

The deal returned Kleiner a reported 20 times its investment when Nest sold to Google last month for $3.2 billion in cash.

But Nest wasn’t Vassallo’s only connected-device deal. In 2011, she also led Kleiner into Enlighted, a lighting control tech company that can individually measure and manage lighting at each light fixture and reduce energy consumption by 50 to 75 percent. Designed for offices and commercial buildings, Vassallo likens it to a “Nest for the enterprise,” particularly given its ultimate goal of proving security and other features beyond lighting.

As a next step, Vassallo says she’s looking for more related opportunities. For example, she sees a day when every home has numerous tablets that cost next to nothing and form a kind of in-home communications system.

Vassallo is also interested in companies that apply social benchmarking to connected devices and put the numbers they generate into a more useful context. “I don’t necessarily want my friends to know how out of shape I am,” she jokes, “but I’d be interested in knowing how [my fitness level] compares to other working moms in the same age range.”

I ask Vassallo if she’s also interested in working more closely with other women VCs, a growing number of whom have been striking out on their own. She is friendly with longtime DFJ investor Jennifer Fonstad, for instance, and says she’s thrilled that Fonstad and Theresia Gouw, a former managing director at Accel Partners, have joined forces to create a new, self-funded venture firm.

“I think women should do business together,” she tells me, determined not to give away anything about her plans yet. “I think it’s important to have one another’s backs.”

For now, though, Vassallo is focused on Silicon Valley’s next generation. This weekend, she’s judging an “entrepreneurship” contest at the middle school of one of her three children. She also created a robotics program at Castilleja School, a school for girls in Palo Alto.

Sitting in her glass-lined office, Vassallo says, half-kiddingly, that she used to wonder why she nabbed a degree in mechanical instead of computer engineering. Today, that training is beginning to pay off in all kinds of ways.

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For Nest Investor Shasta Ventures, Persistence Pays

Google’s plans to acquire the smart home appliance maker Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash should translate into a tidy return for the half dozen firms that invested $80 million in the three-year-old company. Kleiner Perkins may have the most reason to kick up its heels, having led Nest’s Series A round in early 2011. (The deal, rumored to give Kleiner a 20x gross return, might well convince its limited partners that Kleiner has recovered its mojo.)

But the deal is also a personal victory for venture capitalist Rob Coneybeer of 10-year-old Shasta Ventures, who was introduced to Nest founder Tony Fadell eight years ago by fellow VC Stewart Alsop. (“He thought we’d like each other,” explains Coneybeer, who is a mechanical engineer by training and shares Fadell’s love of gadgets.)

Once acquainted with Fadell, Coneybeer spent as much time with him as he could in the hope that one day they could work together. Last night, I talked with a clearly elated Coneybeer about his relationship with Fadell and his subsequent investment in Nest; what follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Where does your story with Fadell start?

I’ve been interested in mobile and hardware and investing in the Internet of things for a while, and when Tony left Apple, I kept in touch with him as he was investigating different ideas, including devices that use batteries to get recharged and what happens to those devices if you connect them to the Internet. So he’d been thinking about things, and we’d get together every two to four weeks to talk.

When did it turn into more than that?

Tony had gotten to know myself and some of my partners, and he’d developed relationships with a couple of different firms … When Tony became difficult to reach, I realized he might be starting something, and I basically pursued him and said, “I’d love to find out what you’re up to,” and I offered to sign an NDA. And he said, “You’d do that?” And I said, “Yeah, I never sign NDAs, but to learn what you’re up to, I would, absolutely.” A week or two later, he walked me through what he was up to, and I met the core team he’d pulled together.

He went with us and with Kleiner [for Nest’s A round]. He’d known [Kleiner partner] Randy [Komisar] for a long time, and Randy has great experience in bringing consumer electronics to market [including as a founding director at Tivo].

What was Shasta’s value-add to the company?

It was a good personal fit. And having built [Shasta] around consumer and expertise around hardware companies, we were able to make great introductions, including to Best Buy and Lowe’s and other channel partners. We also helped with recruiting, in closing key candidates. Beyond that, it’s hard to provide a laundry list; Nest has such an accomplished team.

Kleiner led the Series A round, but you say Shasta was a “significant participant.” Can you talk about what kind of return you’ll see from Nest’s sale? TechCrunch sources say it will return “almost all” of your second, $250 million fund, closed in 2008.

I can only tell you that [the return will be] very, very, significant. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific, but you can write “very” three times.

Is Nest your biggest exit personally? I recall that before Shasta, as a partner at New Enterprise Associates, you led an investment in the fiber optic switching company Xros, acquired by Nortel.

That was $3.25 billion, so this is my second three-billion-dollar outcome. It does feel really good to build something from scratch [Shasta] and work really hard for 10 years to build a brand and to [be a part of] a product and outcome that people are really excited about. It feels like things are finally coming together.

Are you even a teeny bit disappointed? I know you thought Nest could become a formidable standalone hardware business.

I’ll just say that Google is acquiring the best hardware team on the planet. In terms of designing high-quality, durable, consumer hardware, you can’t name a better team.

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