Author: Connie Loizos

This startup is making customized sexual harassment training that it says employees won’t hate (or forget) If you work for someone else, you likely know the drill: in comes that annual email reminding you that it’s time for unconscious bias or sexual harassment training, and if you could please finish up this mandatory module by this date, that would be terrific. The email — not to mention the programming itself — is straight out of “Office Space.” Little surprise that when Anne Solmssen, a Harvard-trained computer scientist, happened to call…

Forerunner Ventures’ newest bet is Curated, a marketplace that matches pros with people buying high-ticket items If you’ve ever tried buying a bike online, or ski equipment, or any number of expensive goods where it would be useful to know a lot more than you do, you might check out Curated, a two-year-old San Francisco-based startup that wants to help busy shoppers who know generally what they want but don’t necessarily have time to visit a specialty store to learn more. It isn’t the first startup to help with shopping…

Founded by a former Uber exec, Oliver Space wants to design and furnish apartments for busy professionals Chan Park feels like “an eternal nomad.” It all started at age 12, when he moved from Korea to the U.S., where he attended middle school in Minnesota, followed by high school in New Jersey, followed by college in New Hampshire. Then he really began to bounce around, working as a trader in New York, embracing the life of a ski bum in Utah, then heading to Asia in the service of Uber,…

Don Valentine, who founded Sequoia Capital, has died at age 87 Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine passed way at his home in Woodside, Ca., today at age 87 of natural causes. Sequoia posted a tribute to Valentine shortly afterward, calling him “one of a generation of leaders who forged Silicon Valley.” A native of New York, Valentine majored in chemistry at Fordham University before joining Raytheon in South California, then moving north to the Bay Area to work at Fairchild Semiconductor, where over the years, Valentine began investing his own…

VC Ben Horowitz on WeWork, Uber, and one cultural value his employees can’t break Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book coming out this coming Monday titled “What You Do is Who You Are,” that takes a look at how to create “culture” at a company. It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot but very hard grasp, let alone implement in a sustainable way. Horowitz learned firsthand as a CEO how elusive it can be when he took stock of his company,…

Softbank says it has now invested .5 billion in WeWork, “more than the GDP” of Bolivia, which has 11.5 million people Yesterday, in addressing nervous WeWork employees at an all-hands, the company’s new chairman, SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure, told those gathered that their days of worrying are over, says Recode, which obtained a leaked recording of the meeting. In comments that may stun industry observers who haven’t done the math — and upset at least some percentage of SoftBank investors — Claure is quoted as telling employees: “We have guaranteed…

Founder-investor Natalie Massenet on how new brands win “Direct-to-consumer should not mean online only,” says the fashion entrepreneur. Connie Loizos @Cookie / 7 hours Natalie Massenet, the fashion entrepreneur who founded the designer fashion portal Net-a-Porter, chaired the British Fashion Council for four years and today runs Imaginary Ventures, a venture firm that’s focused on consumer startups, took the stage a bit ago at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit. There, she was asked why Imaginary has funded more women founders than men (it has just happened that way, suggested Massenet)….

Have we reached the tipping point? Limited partners or  LPs  — the pension funds, the university endowments, the family offices that largely provide venture firms with their spending money — are receiving a lot of attention from venture capitalists, some of it unwanted. VCs have begun knocking down their doors with requests for fresh capital commitments so they’ll have money to invest if the market cools down. The problem is, many of these LPs are already over-allocated. LPs traditionally invest in many asset classes, such as public equities, and they…

Adam Neumann planned for his children and grandchildren to control WeWork WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann didn’t plan for his family’s control of WeWork to end at his death but he expected it be controlled by future generations of Neumanns, too, says Business Insider. The outlet reports that in a speech Neumann gave to employees in January of this year, footage of which it says it has viewed, Neumann is seen saying that WeWork isn’t “just controlled — we’re generationally controlled.” He reportedly goes on to say that while the five…