Lerer Ventures is a seed stage venture capital fund based in New York. They invest in founders at the earliest stages of a startup’s life. Everyone at the fund starts and runs companies for a living. Lerer Ventures is where they invest in their peers.
The firm Read More
Everyone in the tech world knows Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire and Facebook investor with a $100 million Silicon Valley mansion. Fewer Americans are are familiar with Leonid Boguslavsky, who ranks right behind Mr. Milner at no. 2 on Forbes list of powerful figures in the Russian tech establishment.
But that may change quickly with the opening of RTP Ventures, the U.S. arm of a $750 $700 million fund. RTP’s U.S. arm is based in New York and managed by Kirill Sheynkman, a former EIR at Sequoia, venture partner at Greycroft, and a well-established veteran of Silicon Valley. “I’ve lived most of my career in Silicon Valley and that is where I founded my companies, but I fell in love with New York. I’m a city person and this is the best place for me to run this new venture,” Mr Sheynkman told Betabeat by phone.
RTP Ventures has a unique complexion for a VC fund. “Because Leonid is basically the GP and the LP, we didn’t have to form a thesis and go out to pitch investors. This is money he made investing in tech, not coal or oil.” Read More
With some big name IPOs getting off to a hot start, venture capital firms went all in on during the second quarter of 2011. New data from a MoneyTree report that pulled info from PriceWaterHouseCoopers, the NVCA and Reuters, found that VC funding jumped 18.7% in Q2, reaching its highest level since the 2008 economic crisis began.
Interestingly software was the leader in terms of dollars received. It beat out more capital intensive sectors with 25% market share ($1.5 billion), followed by biotech ($1.2 billion), medical devices/equipment ($840 million) and IT services ($763 million). Read More
This post is taken from a lengthy comment by local techie Aaron Sylvan on a recent Betabeat story on NY Angels. We felt the comment was in depth and deserved its own forum.
Boy am I gonna get chewed out for this one… I hope my comments are useful to someone, because I expect to be flamed for this commentary. Hopefully I don’t burn any bridges by presenting a somewhat unpopular view.
The NY Angels is a great group, but I agree that the business model around “Angel” investing has changed considerably. Read More
Imagine showing up for a job interview late, without doing any research on the company, or even looking up the people you were meeting on LinkedIn or Twitter….do you think you’d get the job?
No way, right?
And yet….VC’s do this all the time. Read More
A little over two months ago Betabeat weighed in on the state of NY Angels, a group that gained a lot of visibility and respect for backing tech projects during the dark years following the dot-com bust. Every so often a media outlet will cover a NY Angels event or interview one of their executives. The latest is from Xconomy, which is ramping up its coverage of the local tech scene.
Xconomy’s Arlene Weintraub sat down NY Angels vice chairman Brian Cohen. When we last spoke with Cohen, we asked why the group’s portfolio, which has its own page on the website, didn’t show any investments after 2009. “We are building a new website, so check back in 60 days,” Mr. Cohen told us.
Well, it’s been 100 days, and the site looks exactly the same. Read More
Betabeat will be getting some new neighbors! Hopefully the air has cleared and we can all grab lunch.
John Frankel, who has been an angel and VC since the dot-com days, announced today that his ff Venture Capital is building out 5,000 square feet of new office space at W. 36th. It will be the home base for Frankel and his new team, partner Read More
Chris Farmer of General Catalyst borrowed a page from the Google book to create InvestRank, a system for ranking venture capital firms.
The system looks at the venture who led the first rounds in highly successful companies and assigns them a rank based on how many other firms followed them in a syndicate during the subsequent rounds. So in place of looking at inbound links, Investrank looks at inbound investments. Read More
A year and a half ago Ken Lerer and his son Ben decided to shift from simply angel investing to raise a formal venture fund. That clocked in at $8.5 million, based on Ken’s connections in the media world and Ben’s access to the young tech scene.
Today Lerer Ventures announced their second round, which at $25 million is roughly three times the size of their inaugural raise. Eric Hippeau, who announced he was coming to Lerer the same week AOL bought HuffPo, will be in charge of the fund. Read More
Dylan Byers has been the go-to scribe at AdWeek for profile pieces intent on knocking their subject down a peg or two. We’ve enjoyed watching him take aim at a few Observerites in recent months.
This week his chosen subject was New York VC Fred Wilson, but Byers couldn’t muster much of an attack. Read More
