Venrock in the News

April  12, 2010  Nobody will ever confuse San Diego’s Sorrento Valley for Sand Hill Road. And that’s not a bad thing if you’re one of the guys at Avalon Ventures.

“The story is really that Avalon is now one of just two really active life sciences venture funds in San Diego, which is the third largest biotech hub in the world,” says Jay Lichter, a managing director with Avalon.

April 20, 2010  The “right-time” web where we can tap in to the massive volume of social media content produced by our friends at precisely the time we need their help is a challenging problem to solve. Stuffing the Twitter firehouse into a database for search retrieval would likely not create a compelling answer for most mainstream Internet users. We think there are at least 3 things that make right-time social search difficult.

April 18, 2010  When it comes to mobile applications, user experience is key to their success. As an investor, I get to see several new apps a week and I can’t tell you how many of their UIs are cluttered and fail to make clear the crux of their value fast enough.

Kara Swisher, April 16, 2010  Earlier this week at Twitter’s Chirp conference, Venrock’s David Pakman seemed to strike a chord by coining a new buzzword that deserves to gain some level of acceptance.

April 14, 2010  Insight into whether the critical apps developers are on board with Twitter's new business plan, with CNBC's Julia Boorsitn.

March 26, 2010  Presentations from View from the Top, held March 16, 2010, in Palo Alto, CA. The event was produced by the MIT Alumni Association in conjunction with the MIT Club of Northern California and with support from MIT Professional Education.

Panelists:
Thomas G. Burns '62, SM '63, Director of Strategic Planning, Strategic Energy and Economic Research, Inc.
Barry Cinnamon '80, Chief Executive Officer, Akeena Solar
Ray Rothrock SM '78, Managing General Partner, Venrock Associates

March 2, 2010  Altor Networks, with its product Altor VF 3.0, has been announced as the winner of RSA's Innovation Sandbox “Most Innovative Company at RSA Conference 2010” contest.

According to the post on the Conference's official blog, Altor was chosen as the most innovative company among the ten finalists that competed for the title.

Alastair Goldfisher March 1, 2010  “It’s not as sexy as cleantech or social networking, but it is an active space and comes and goes in cycles.”

That’s what Ray Rothrock, partner of Venrock, said to me last week about security-related investments, in advance of the week-long RSA Conference that kicks off today in San Francisco.

By Claire Cain Miller, February 23, 2010  SAN FRANCISCO — Technologists have been worrying aloud for years that America is losing its competitive edge as other countries invest more heavily in technology education and innovation.

To counter that trend, Intel and 24 venture capital firms said Tuesday that they planned to invest $3.5 billion in American start-ups over the next two years.

February 10, 2010 In the battle over the pricing of electronic books, publishers appear to have won the first round. The price of many new releases and best sellers is about to go up, to as much as $14.99 from $9.99.

David Montgomery, February 8, 2010  In these days of constant connectivity it's possible to check your email in-flight at 30,000ft – but not while driving your car. That doesn't make sense, according to Dev Khare, vice president at venture capital firm Venrock. Let's be clear. He's not advocating law-breaking or dangerous driving. But Khare insists technological developments mean there is no reason why being safely connected has to end when you get behind the steering wheel.

January 29, 2010  SVB Financial Group recently hosted a panel discussion titled How Venture Capital Works. The panelists discussed the relationships, decisions, and economics that drive venture capital. The panel included participants representing the three key roles in VC industry dynamics:

Bryan Roberts, Ph.D. -- Partner with Venrock, a leading venture capital firm

Judith Elsea -- Co-Founder and Managing Director of Weathergage Capital, a fund-of-funds and limited partner in venture capital investing

John Mendlein, Ph.D. -- Chairman of Fate Therapeutics, an emerging company backed by venture funding.

Michael Hanewich moderator and Head of Silicon Valley Banks Life Sciences East practice.

January 29, 2010  Which venture capitalists funded the most companies last year? We went through our funding data in CrunchBase to come up with the Dealmaker Rankings below.

January 22, 2010  Entrepreneurs in the social and real-time data sectors would do well to study up on Venrock’s Brian Ascher. At the spritely age of 43 with several big tech exits under his belt (Adify, DatAllegro, Unicru), the investor is bound to be a force in the global Silicon Valley for a while to come.

January 11, 2010 Researchers are a step closer to developing new antimalarial drugs after discovering the normal function of a set of proteins related to the malaria parasite protein, which causes resistance to the front-line drug chloroquine. The findings also provide a novel tool for studying the malarial chloroquine-resistance factor.

Joann Muller December 31, 2009 Among the goodies handed out by the Feds in 2009 was $2 billion of stimulus money to promote the manufacture of batteries for electric cars and plug-in hybrid vehicles. The sweeping gesture was supposed to restart the economy and save the planet. President Obama wants to see 1 million plug-in hybrids on American roads by 2015.

By Scott Austin, January 8, 2010  This morning’s roundup of the latest venture capital news and analysis across the Web:  Ringing In The Decade - We’re only a few days into the new decade, but David Beisel of venture firm Venrock believes that Apple’s recent acquisition of mobile advertising start-up Quattro Wireless could be a decade-defining acquisition. (Venrock is not an investor in Quattro.) “In a decade where we’re going to see a proliferation of mobile device incarnations and media content manifestations, adding the ad network bow to the Apple quiver gives the company that ability to monetize not just at the core of what consumer experiences they control, but everywhere,” Beisel writes.

By Claire Cain Miller, January 3, 2010  After hibernating for the last year, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are beginning to stir.
Technology financiers raised about $14 billion to finance new companies in 2009, a sharp drop from $36 billion in 2007. But as the economic freeze begins to thaw, investors are once again writing checks to entrepreneurs.
Some of the ideas will become the big public companies of the future, following in the footsteps of one-time start-ups like Google, Cisco Systems and Amazon.com. Many more will fail because they are too early, late or unoriginal

By BRAD STONE and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, December 15, 2009  With its deal this month to buy the Web music service Lala, Apple may be pointing the way to the future of music.

In this future, the digital music files on people’s computers could join vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs in the dusty vault of fading music formats.

On November 19, 2009 at the Presidio Golden Gate Club in San Francisco, Astia presented the Fifth Annual Astia Global Awards sponsored by Fenwick & West LLP and Deloitte. They honored Venrock, Index Ventures and Quaker BioVentures for their investment in exceptional women innovators, their investors and mentors.

November, 2009  The last 15 months have been highly uncertain for both the venture capital industry and the companies they fund, but history shows that funding entrepreneurs takes patience and endurance. The first annual AlwaysOn Venture Capital 100 highlights the one hundred individuals who have backed the most profitable winners in the last four years.

Galen Moore, November 4, 2009  Who he is: Vice president, Venrock, where he invests in web companies; organizer of the quarterly Web Innovators Group conferences, a 400-strong gathering of web entrepreneurs.

By Matthew Trevithick, posted October 26, 2009  Electrification was named the "Greatest Engineering Achievement of the 20th Century" by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. The smart grid may soon prove to be the greatest engineering achievement of the 21st. Smart grids use information technology (sensors, communication networks, and user interfaces) to produce a wealth of data about the way electricity is consumed--in unprecedented high resolution. By applying this data and technology, we can revolutionize the way we consume electricity.

Annual listing of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America, published October 15, 2009  Deloitte's 2009 Technology Fast 500™ ranking presents the winners by industry category and rank. It also highlights the top 10 winners, as well as presents facts and trends by industry segment and geography.
Venrock active and alumni investments represent 8 of the 500 companies, including #2 Infinera, with Retail Solutions, Trubion and GENBAND in the top 65.

By Rachael King, October 5, 2009  Food producer Cargill is taking a carving knife to its electricity bills. At a plant in Springdale, Ark., where the company handles about 50,000 turkeys a day, electricity bills run more than $2 million a year. But Cargill thinks it can cleave $680,000 from the total by using its own generators on high-demand days.

October 5, 2009  Today many utilities are starting to modernize their electricity grids. These changes will eventually let both consumers and enterprise customers exercise more control over how they pay for and use power  Listen to this episode

By: David Pakman, Partner, Venrock Oct 1, 2009  For decades, companies have defined the channels their customers must use to contact them. But phrases like, "We are available by phone weekdays from 9am until 4pm Eastern Standard Time,” and “We will attempt to answer the emails we receive within 48 hours, but times vary based on incoming volume” are quickly becoming a thing of the past. The long-held notion that companies control the conversation is being challenged by social media.

September 22, 2009  (Editor’s note: Sean O’Malley manages Venrock’s entrepreneur in residence accelerator. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)

I was sitting down with a seasoned angel investor last week discussing what really matters for startups when he summed up his thoughts by saying “I’ve come to the conclusion that having a remarkable product is what really matters most. It’s what I look for before investing.”

By Michael Totty, September 14, 2009  Medical detective work may have just gotten a lot easier.

Just how difficult it is gets highlighted every time an infectious disease sweeps the globe, as the new strain of swine flu did earlier this year. Current methods of testing for disease-causing microbes are pretty effective at discovering whether an infected fluid or tissue sample contains a known virus or bacteria. But trying to detect previously unknown organisms is a whole different story

Heather Leonard September 17, 2009  New York is the home of the ad tech business, and the industry could actually receive a lift from Wall Street's meltdown. How?

"We've seen a lot of great engineering talent leave the banks," says Venrock partner David Pakman, "So there's been a lot of great technologists available in New York."

Brian Gormley, August 26, 2009  Venture capitalists invested more in health care than information technology last quarter for the first time in a quarter this decade. That shift is likely to correct itself as the economy improves, but there is a trend that does have legs: emerging opportunity at the intersection of both fields.

By Glenn Peoples, Nashville  September 1, 2009  News arrived last week that Mog and Rightsflow landed additional rounds of equity. One may wonder if investors are being lured into music again. The answer is both yes and no. Except for Spotify, few listening-based music startups have recently captured the fancy of investors. Lately, music-based companies that have landed venture capital do not have revenue models built upon licensing music from record labels. As a result, they do not have to deal with byzantine and expensive processes, lay out capital to obtain those licenses or shoehorn a business model into the constraints of those licenses.

August 24, 2009  Venrock, the venture capital firm that was originally established as the venture arm of the Rockefeller family, is bulking up its cleantech team. On Monday, it announced that Matthew Nordan, co-founder and former president of Lux Research, will join as vice president with a focus on energy, environmental and material technologies.

August 21, 2009  Mass High Tech, The Journal of New England Technology, today announced the recipients of its 2009 All-Star Awards. Now in their 14th year, the All-Star Awards recognize 15 dynamic and influential leaders of New England’s innovation economy. 

Finance:  David Beisel, Vice president of Venrock

By Douglas MacMillan, August 19, 2009  After rumors of an impending deal leaked two days earlier, MySpace officially announced its acquisition of music startup iLike on Wednesday. Though terms of the deal were not disclosed, AllThingsD reported that the unit of News Corp. paid $13.5 million in cash upfront, and promised an additional $6 million to retain founders Ali and Hadi Partovi and other iLike talent.

August 18, 2009  This post is an “email interview” I did with Ray Rothrock of Venrock.   I sent Ray 10 questions on venture capital, what he looks for in his investments and the people he backs, as well as what are his favorite iPhone apps.  Enjoy.

August 18, 2009  You’ve heard time and time again that vision matters. But ‘vision’ is a loaded word.Everyone thinks they know what it means, but everyone’s definition varies slightly.

August 13, 2009  There's a cultural revolution afoot in the Boston innovation economy.

One culture is dying out, and another kind of culture is emerging.

Calisha Myers  August 12, 2009  Scoop:  Forty years old and going strong, Venrock is one of the oldest venture capital firms in the country. The firm began investing in healthcare in the 1980s, and was a Series A founding investor in five of the largest biotech companies ever created, including Centecor, Gilead, and Idec. The company has continued investing in the life sciences ever since. Its portfolio also includes Millenium Pharmaceuticals, Sirna Therapeutics, Fate Therapeutics, Ironwood and Achaogen.

By Bob Brown , Network World , July 17, 2009 Michael Jackson hanging with tweens, a live demo of a tool for tracking the nice and not so nice things people say about you on Twitter and a bedroom-based startup that's successfully flying under Google's radar. What more could a WebInno virgin ask for?

With technology conferences few and far between during the summer, I'd been keeping my eyes open for a local one to hit: WebInno was the lucky winner. The event was one in a string of monthly or so gatherings of the Web Innovators Group, the brainchild of venture capitalist David Beisel of Venrock.  The companies highlighted generally focus on the Web, including a good dose of mobile.

Jennifer Martinez |  July 30, 2009  While a good number of consumer mobile applications have tapped into the cloud, so far, only a handful of enterprise mobile applications have done the same. And the members of a panel of VCs at a “Mobilize the Cloud” event earlier this week at Google said they don’t think enterprise apps for mobiles will catch up any time soon. In fact, some think they never will.

By Ina Fried, July 23, 2009 PASADENA, Calif.-Of all the losses suffered by the music industry, one of the biggest may be the fact that nearly all of the investors that once were building digital music services have moved on.

"There are not a lot of entrepreneurs involved in this space," said David Pakman, a music industry veteran and now venture capitalist at Venrock Associates.

July 24, 2009  Congrats to Venrock partner, Bryan Roberts and 3 of Venrock's entrepreneurs for making the Future Health 100; Bryan Roberts #41; Todd Park #2; Jonathan Bush #30; Gio Collela #39.

Posted by Andrew Conry-Murray, July 22, 2009  Investments rose 15 percent in the second quarter of 2009, with IT earning the most VC dollars. But funding remains significantly low compared to previous years.

Venture investments in technology went up 15 percent in the second quarter of 2009 compared to the first quarter, rising to $3.7 billion from $3.2 billion.

By Brad Stone, July 21, 2009  There was a time when most aspiring musicians had the same dream: to sign a deal with a major record label.
Now, with the structure of the music business shifting radically, some industry iconoclasts are sidestepping the music giants and inventing new ways for artists to make and market their music — without ever signing a traditional recording contract.

By Tim Mullaney  July 21, 2009 (Bloomberg) -- Venture capital investment fell 51 percent in the second quarter as firms coped with the recession and a drought in initial public offerings, bringing funding for startups to the lowest level in 15 years.

By Claire Cain Miller, July 21, 2009  The venture capitalists who have been calling for investment to shrink to the levels of the early 1990s are getting what they wished for.

In the second quarter, venture capitalists invested $3.7 billion in start-ups, down from $7.6 billion in the same period last year, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

By Claire Cain Miller, July 6, 2009  SAN FRANCISCO — For a group accustomed to looking outward for the next big thing, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are getting very introspective these days.

Bernard Lunn, June 26, 2009  Venrock has quite a history as a VC firm. In the 1930s, Laurance Rockefeller pioneered early-stage financing by investing in the entrepreneurs who started Eastern Airlines and McDonnell Aircraft. In 1969, Venrock was founded to continue this heritage of investing in and building entrepreneur-backed companies, beginning with Intel. You will find a bunch of household names in its portfolio, such as Apple, as well as more recent Web tech ventures, such as CC Betty, BlogHer, Bungee Labs, and SlideShare. Venerable, perhaps, but not one to rest on its laurels, as Brian Ascher explained in our recent interview.

By Ty McMahan, June 3, 2009  Many variables factor into the success or failure of a company, but there is a basic formula of “how not to blow it,” a panel of players in the start-up community said Wednesday.
 
The most important variable: People.

From The Economist print edition  June 4, 2009   IN “KNIGHT RIDER”, a 1980s television show, Michael Knight fought for justice with the help of KITT, an artificially intelligent Pontiac Trans Am. The pair chatted amiably, with KITT sensing and reacting to nearby objects, navigating and looking up information about Mr Knight’s immediate surroundings and deadly adversaries. KITT could even drive itself. Thirty years on, many of the fantastical Pontiac’s features are becoming reality.

By David Lawsky, June 5, 2009  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - There will be fewer Venture capital firms -- the engines that transform Silicon Valley ideas into profitable companies -- over the next two years, as investment dries up and returns crumble, industry leaders say.

June 2, 2009  The hardest thing about being a venture capitalist is saying "no," reports David Pakman, a serial entrepreneur who joined venture capital firm Venrock as a partner last year. He talks about the transition in this episode of The Deal's Behind the Money online video show.

Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer  May 5, 2009  After about 30 years, the U.S. biotech industry turned its first profit in 2008, but that symbolic achievement will be short-lived and overshadowed by a financial crisis that threatens many Bay Area startups, according a report being issued today.

BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 04/30/09 -- The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) today honored five pioneering life sciences investors with Lifetime Achievement Awards and the venture capital firm Warburg Pincus with its Outstanding Service Award at the NVCA 2009 annual meeting in Boston. The Lifetime Achievement recipients were James Blair, Domain Associates; Brook Byers, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Jean Deleage, Alta Partners; Anthony Evnin, Venrock; and Grant Heidrich, Mayfield Fund. Accepting the Outstanding Service Award on behalf of Warburg Pincus was the firm's co-president Joseph Landy.

By Brian Gormley, May 1, 2009  The health care venture capital business has changed drastically since it got started in the early 1970s, but one thing should never change: the venture investor’s mandate to take risks.

That was a key message delivered by veteran life sciences VCs speaking at a panel during the National Venture Capital Association’s annual meeting in Boston on Wednesday. The five panelists, all recipients of an NVCA 2009 lifetime achievement award, said the industry had expanded dramatically and become more institutionalized over the past 30 years. Some changes that have occurred over that time are welcome, such as the influx of professionals with doctoral or medical degrees.

Posted Apr 22nd 2009  by Tom Taulli  Venrock is one of the top VCs in the world. Some of its early-stage investments include Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), just to name a few.

This week, I had a chance to meet up with one of Venrock's partners: David Pakman. Prior to this, he was the CEO of eMusic and the co-founder of Myplay.

Wade Roush, March 11, 2009  Soon there will be no point in writing up stories about the Web Innovators Group meetings organized by Venrock’s David Beisel. Last night’s gathering in Cambridge was so crowded that it seemed everybody who could conceivably be interested in reading about the event was actually there.

By Ty McMahan, March 6, 2009  Venture capitalists are singing the blues when it comes to digital music start-ups.
At the Billboard Music and Money Symposium in New York Thursday, several investors spoke hesitantly about putting money into this space. They see two major hurdles for digital music start-ups: the threat of litigation from music labels over licensing rights and a lack of innovative revenue streams.

By Brian Gormley, March 6, 2009  Health-care venture capital firms have pushed dozens of businesses onto Nasdaq in recent years, but now, some investors are thinking of taking public companies private.
Not long ago it was a given that going public was almost always good for a young drug and medical-device concern. Being public gives a company wider access to investors, the thinking went, and affords its venture backers a chance to exit.

By Claire Cain Miller, March 4, 2009  The venture capital firm Venrock has a new target: late-stage and public health care companies. The firm has raised a new $194 million fund to dedicate to these deals.

Ryan McBride, February 26, 2009  The story of FetchDog begins with a small group of pet owners who saw a need for an online hub for people like them to buy merchandise, read about trends, and socialize. And the founders of the Portland, ME-based firm, besides their affinity for pets, are also what one investor called a “dream team” of business veterans with experience in the veterinary products, direct marketing, e-commerce, and entertainment industries. That puts some bite behind the bark of the firm’s business.

Luke Timmerman, January 20, 2009  Yesterday, we ran a couple of in-depth interviews about the future of biotech with two San Diego CEOs—Optimer Pharmaceuticals CEO Michael Chang and Phenomix CEO Laura Shawver. I asked them the same five questions about the outlook of the industry that I asked leaders in Boston, so you can compare the bi-coastal views of the year ahead. In a nutshell, I’d say people are being realistic about tough times ahead, but certainly aren’t ready to give up and cry in their beer.

Today’s interviews are with a large San Diego-area lab supplier (Life Technologies) and from a prominent venture investor in San Diego companies (Venrock Associates). Here are the highlights:

Luke Timmerman, January 27, 2009  The big story in pharmaceutical-and-biotech land yesterday was New York-based Pfizer’s $68 billion bid to acquire Madison, NJ-based Wyeth (NYSE: WYE). Wyeth is known for having more biotech expertise than many of its Big Pharma brethren, generating billions in sales from biotech products like its pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (Prevnar) for infants, as well as its partnership with Amgen to market the world’s best-selling biotech drug, etanercept (Enbrel) for rheumatoid arthritis.

By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY, February 16, 2009  SAN FRANCISCO — It's boom — and bust — for Silicon Valley companies these days. Literally.

Facing their worst economic climate since the dot-com bust in the early 2000s, high-tech companies are treating 2009 with dread — but also with a tinge of optimism if they act smartly.

Luke Timmerman, February 5,2009  As venture-backed tech and life sciences companies around the country are hunkering down to figure out how to survive the downturn, the same can be said for the venture backers themselves. That was one of the interesting observations I heard during a recent interview in San Francisco with Bryan Roberts, a partner who specializes in healthcare investing for one of the oldest and most successful venture firms in the country, Venrock Associates.

Edited by Evan Hessel and Elizabeth Corcoran, January 29, 2009  Venture capitalists are still the Johnny Appleseeds of the technology world. Last year, VCs raised $28 billion money and poured roughly the same into companies. The contraction of the U.S. economy, however, made it tough for new companies to reach the public market: Only six venture-backed companies had IPOs in 2008, down from 86 companies in 2007.

By David Ewing Duncan, Janaury 19, 2009  No high technology sector has been riskier for investors than biotechnology, which means that many of the hundreds of companies anxiously trolling for investors at J.P. Morgan's annual biotech conference in San Francisco last week faced a bleak future.

By Deena Beasley, January 16, 2009  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Lack of access to equity and debt markets has sparked a surge in deal-making on the part of development-stage biotech and healthcare companies faced with a sour economy and dwindling finance options.

Rebecca Buckman  January 15, 2009  When Carol Bartz swept into the chief executive's suite at tech firm Autodesk in 1992, she took over a classic, chaotic engineers' paradise. Employees disdained project deadlines and performance reviews. The software concern funded outlandish projects, like a company that wanted to dispose of industrial garbage in space. Dogs sat in on meetings

By Pallavi Gogoi, USA TODAY, December 26, 2008  First Wind has big plans, and they involve getting listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

On July 31, the developer and operator of wind farms filed to sell stock to the public on Nasdaq and raise $450 million to pay off current investors and help finance future wind power projects.

The problem is that the market for IPOs, or initial public offerings of stock, has virtually shut down. First Wind hasn't announced any plans to cancel its offering, and declined to comment. But so far this year, 86 IPOs have been canceled, and there were only six new stock listings from venture-backed companies, the lowest since 1977.

Posted by Alex.Lindahl December 7, 2008 The Web Innovators Group (WebInno) is a conference/meetup that showcases startups and entrepreneurs in the Boston area. Their goal is to "support entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the field by holding events which foster community interaction...meetings provide a forum for entrepreneurs from self-funded/early-stage startups to present new services to their peers, as well as an opportunity for everyone in the community to share and exchange ideas."

Global Telecoms, September-October, 2008  To mark this 100th issue of Global Telecoms Business, we asked for your suggestions of the most influential people in the telecoms industry. Alan Burkitt-Gray introduces the GTB 100.

December 3, 2008  If yesterday's angel investing panel was cautiously optimistic about the future of growth investment in startups, this morning's AlwaysOn Venture Summit discussion was more dramatic, forecasting deep lows that will lead to stellar highs once the public markets recover and exit windows reopen. But the panelists' long-term bullishness was also balanced with considerable hostility toward what they perceived as a politically correct, hyper-regulatory environment that will strain exits and drive new listings overseas, slowing firms' returns and crippling venture capital as an asset class.

Investor interview by Bambi Francisco,  December 1, 2008  It's definitely a buyer's market today, whether the asset class is a house, a stock, or a startup.

"Right now, folks are a bit paralyzed, taking a wait-and-see attitude to how it shakes out" said Brian Ascher, venture capitalist at Silicon Valley venture firm Venrock. Ascher doesn't see entire firms shutting down, much like what happened during the 2000/2001 bubble burst, but VC firms will be far more selective and prudent.

Innovation show by Bambi Francisco  November 24, 2008  Recently, Glam Media, an advertising network focused on female and male-oriented sites, launched Glam App Network. Essentially, it's a widget that any publisher can embed onto their site to enrich their site with content, and revenue. Glam Media is one of the most innovative and leading ad networks. Who better to be our guest host on Vator Box, than Brian Ascher, venture capitalist at Venrock, which invested in Adify, an ad network acquired for $300 million by Cox Enterprises. Ascher is on the board of Adify.

Sramana Mitra, November 21, 2008  One of the greatest inefficiencies the U.S. faces is the $250 billion a year that it spends on health care administration, trying to resolve the information flow between providers, patients and insurers. Archaic systems and processes cause disputes, paper pushing, numerous phone calls and injustice.

Vator News, November 21, 2008  One of the biggest mistakes startups make is ramping up too fast, resulting in spending too much time and resources on managing, and less time on building a product. Another mistake is staffing up before knowing if a product really has demand.

This is one of the lessons Brian Ascher learned after working with a number of portfolio companies as a venture capitalist at Venrock.

James Erik Abels, November 19, 2008  Earlier this week, former eMusic Chief Executive David Pakman started as a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock. The 39-year-old firm hired Pakman to help build up a digital media investment practice by putting someone in the heart of the world's media capital: New York City.

Deborah Gage, November 18, 2008  Taking startups public has become nearly impossible in the current economy, and investors are being forced to become ever more creative.

Take Inside Venture, a new organization from Silicon Valley that plans to match qualified institutional buyers with startups that normally would be headed for an initial public offering.

The group is backed by Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara and will screen health care and technology startups with help from several Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have joined the board, including DCM, Venrock and NEA.

November 16, 2008  When I was growing up, it was commonplace to get lyrics as part of an album or CD. Without those lyrics, how could I possibly sing along to the songs? Today, I rarely buy albums. Rather, I buy singles on iTunes or download singles from Napster. If I really care, I Google the lyrics.

There is a database, however, of 800,000 lyrics on the Internet. The provider is LyricFind, a company that's been around since 2000 and licenses lyrics to CBS' Last.fm, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, Shazam, and many others.

In this segment of Vator Box, brought to you by Liquid Scenarios, Venrock venture capitalist Brian Ascher is our guest host. Ezra Roizen joins me as always. 

By Fred Aslan (Contributor), Start Up, October, 2008  A look at recent exits challenges the widely held view that device investments have lower return potential than biotech investments. However, a close inspection of the risk/return profile reveals that device investors are taking on more risk than ever.

GigaOM  Bryan Roberts, Tuesday, October 14, 2008  By now Sequoia’s “RIP” slide deck and the ensuing blog coverage have been consumed by every entrepreneur and investor in the tech universe. It hit a nerve. Perhaps it provided a wake-up call, or simply confirmed people’s worst fears. For first-time entrepreneurs, or for those who have forgotten what happened just seven or eight years ago, this sort of shock therapy could be effective.

Peter Kafka | October 1, 2008  One minor mystery solved: eMusic CEO David Pakman's next job. He's headed to Venrock, the VC arm of the Rockfeller family, we've confirmed (thanks to the reader who steered us in the right direction after we asked for help).

September 29, 2008  In a medical emergency, quickly tapping a vein to deliver medication or other fluids can mean the difference between life and death. But in millions of cases a year, doctors and emergency personnel can't get an intravenous line started because of collapsed veins or other problems. The standard alternatives to an IV are time consuming and raise the risk of possibly deadly complications.

September 24, 2008  Venture capital firms that have lasted for decades in an industry not known for longevity say a key factor in building a long-term business is to nurture young venture professionals -- and eventually make room for them at the top of the firm.

September 18, 2008  Editor's note: The following is an op-ed piece by Dev Khare, vice president of VC firm Venrock in Palo Alto. Dev frequently blogs on this topic at http://www.nextwala.com.]

In parallel to the Web and mobile devices, a new marketplace for applications and services is becoming accessible to entrepreneurs and developers — the Digital Car.

Over the last five years, consumers around the world have started bringing their own “off-deck” communications and infotainment solutions into their cars, including mobile phones, personal navigation devices, iPods, satellite radios, DVD players and more. The market for in-car electronics and services has surged to $27 billion over an installed base of 210 million cars, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

September 17, 2008  This Monday evening at the Cambridge Royal Sonesta brought about the19th Boston Web Innovators Group meetup. The Web Innovators Group is a venue where startups (mostly) or established companies can show off new and innovative (one would hope) web-based products and services.

By Edward Iwata, USA TODAY, August 27, 2008

Nearly a decade ago, he moved to the New Mexico desert to co-found a small venture-capital firm called Flywheel Ventures. His aim: to find the next generation of start-ups where few others were looking.

Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer, Sunday, August 17, 2008  While Swiss drug giant Roche mulls whether to raise its offer price for biotechnology powerhouse Genentech, many prized Genentech professionals are also calculating what Roche would have to offer them to stay on after the takeover.

Companies listed in the SAI 25 have been chosen and valued by our editorial team, with help from our readers, industry executives, and the SAI 25 Advisory Board. Our Advisory Board includes venture capitalists and executives in the US, Europe, and Asia. Collectively, the members of our Advisory Board have analyzed, invested in, and/or built thousands of digital businesses over the past 15 years.
The SAI 25 Advisory Board:
David Siminoff, General Partner, Venrock. David is a partner at the global VC firm Venrock. He was previously president and CEO of Spark Networks, a network of dating sites, and he has founded, invested in, and/or advised numerous digital start-ups over the past 15 years. In the 1990s, David was the lead media analyst at Capital Research. David's wife Ellen was employee No. 6 at Yahoo.

Viewpoint August 13, 2008, by Rich Moran
We resisted for as long as we could. We, of course, being those late adopters to social networking who wondered why there was so much fuss over Facebook. How could those kids spend so many hours on the social network? Why don't they just call or send an e-mail? In the beginning, we logged on to make sure our children's profiles were not riddled with facts and photos that would prevent them from ever holding an elected office.

July 30, 2008  When it comes to online video innovation, "big media is the tail of the dog," says Rich Moran, a partner with Venrock, the venture investing fund of the Rockefeller family.  Rich has had a long career as a media consultant as a partner at Accenture where he advised a number of clients including News Corp.

Tom Taulli, August 1, 2008  Quite often, I get PowerPoint presentations targeted at investors (known as "investor decks") from founders who send them to me for overall critiques. (I invest in early-stage deals from time to time. I'm also on several boards.) Unfortunately, many of them fall short of the ultimate goal—that is, getting investors interested in pulling out their checkbooks.

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. - July 22, 2008  The next big thing in venture capital is small investments, according to a panel of Silicon Valley investors who appeared at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference on Tuesday.

By David Kirkpatrick, senior editor  June 11, 2008  NEW YORK (Fortune) -- As the iPhone 3G emerges, Apple's mobile device has captivated the leaders of the tech industry. That's the most certain conclusion Fortune reached after surveying 325 industry leaders who will be attending our Brainstorm Tech conference July 21-23.

July 11, 2008  Following on from last fortnight’s look at the use of maps in online journalism, today’s SPOTLIGHT post examines the rise of geotagging.

We’ll be looking at current applications of geotagging technologies by journalists in the US and the UK and will supply the usual list of resources for further information and practical guidance.

This post will also consider location-based media and the potential future uses of geographic information systems (GIS) in online journalism and will cast its eye around its present popularity in the social media world.

Wade Roush, July 3, 2008  If you’re feeling like it’s been a long time since the last Web Innovators Group gathering in Cambridge, you’re right. The series has been on hiatus since the last meeting on April 2. The main reason: organizer David Beisel, a vice president at venture firm Venrock, got married and went honeymooning. (Congratulations, David!)

PricewaterhouseCoopers Start Up Show with host Steve Bengston, June 26, 2008

By Robert Buderi, June 23, 2008  We’ve written several times about the Web Innovators Group meetings put on by Venrock vice president David Beisel, including this interview with Beisel himself. The monthly Web Inno get-togethers include three or four “main dish” talks by local entrepreneurs launching new Web services, coupled with three to five “side dish” presentations by firms manning tables around the room. Lately, the meetings have included cell phone voting so the audience can convey their favorites among the main dish presenters.

Posted June 12, 2008 by Ed Ring  After visiting the GM technical center last April, which resulted in the feature story “GM’s Volt EREV,” it was clear the next big step for the Volt would be to get the actual production design batteries into prototypes and onto the test track.  That step has been taken, with an official announcement by GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz on his post of June 5th on the GM FastLand blog entitled “At Last: Behind the Wheel of Volt Test Mule.”

June 3, 2008  AlwaysOn is proud to present its second annual Hollywood IT list. This industry insider list features the top entertainment executives and dealmakers who really get IT— that is, information technology and its growing impact on the entertainment and media economy. Last year, we picked 12 people we felt were pioneering the use of technology—to distribute and market their companies’ traditional entertainment products as well as to create new content.  This year, we expanded the vision of the Hollywood IT list to fit the growing number of execs who embracing innovative entertainment trends.

By Rich Moran June 2, 2008  Nothing is final yet, but the relationship between Yahoo! and Microsoft has become as complicated and confused as a college romance.At this point, it's hard to tell how they feel. Do they want to get married (acquisition)? Do they want to date, but it's OK to date others (specific asset buy)? Or maybe they want to "just be friends," the time-honored code language for really breaking up (walking away from the deal).

May 28, 2007  Highest-ranking healthcare investor on the Forbes Midas List talks investment opportunities.

By LAURA M. HOLSON Published: May 24, 2008  Neeraj Choubey has not worked at the troubled cellphone maker Motorola for seven years. But from the number of calls and e-mail messages Mr. Choubey, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has gotten in recent weeks, you would think he had never left his old colleagues.

PricewaterhouseCoopers Start Up Radio Show, May 15, 2008, with Rich Moran

April 16, 2008  Forbes.com Video Network  Security experts say consumers remain vulnerable to attack.

By LAURA M. HOLSON  Published: April 15, 2008  A story that Dan Scheinman, a senior vice president at Cisco Systems in San Jose, Calif., likes to tell illustrates the cultural divide between Hollywood and his Silicon Valley.

April 9, 2008  Yesterday, I moderated a panel at AlwaysOn’s Venture Summit East in Boston, called “Is There Still Upside in the Internet?”

Short answer: Always and forever, as long as there are venture capitalists with bags of other people’s money and enough rat holes to shove the cash down!

In all seriousness, it was a great discussion, centering on the lack of exit for start-ups via IPO, the slowing down of the M&A scene and a need to build businesses that have strong revenue outlooks.

 April 10, 2008  Forbes.com Video Network,  VoIP is a growing opportunity for hackers to steal corporate secrets.

By KATIE HAFNER, Published: April 4, 2008  SAN FRANCISCO — At Ritual Coffee Roasters, a cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District, the aesthetic is early socialist but the clientele are latter-day capitalist.

Beneath the huge modified hammer and sickle painted on the wall behind the counter, body piercings are outnumbered only by the laptops open throughout the room. As latte sippers pore over the latest draft of a business plan, bang out a little code or post to a blog, it is not hard to overhear snippets of dialogue with a decidedly capitalist bent: “We could make money off that,” and “Have you talked to them about a deal?”

By Rich Moran, April 1, 2008  These are turbulent times: Bear Stearns, tough credit, long returns, and everyone worried. A time when everyone is once again, focused on cost. What can we cut? Where are there some savings? Are there any heads we can let go?

March 31, 2008  In 2004, in mid-career, already having grown and sold two companies, and after an extensive investigation into the energy-related applications of nanotechnology, Matt Trevithick joined the Venrock team.  Venrock was started in the 1930’s by Laurance Rockefeller, with their first big hit being an investment in McDonnell Aircraft Company.  Since then, Venrock has scored again and again, making early investments in Apple, 3Com, and Intel, to name just a few.  Venrock recently announced Venrock V, a $600M fund, and they have over 2.0 billion under management.

Heather Stewart, March 16, 2008   Pressure is mounting on the world's central banks to take concerted action to halt the slide in the dollar before it wreaks havoc on the European and Japanese economies, write Heather Stewart and Nick Mathiason.
The euro hit a record high at near $1.57 on Friday, and the dollar fell below the ¥100 mark against the yen for the first time since 1995. 'The question is whether central banks will intervene to stop the dollar falling, because there is a lot of space for it to fall,' said Ohad Finkelstein of venture capital firm Venrock. 'You now can't rule out the three-dollar pound.'

PricewaterhouseCoopers Radio show, March 20, 2008 with Steve Bengston

By Wade Roush, March 28, 2008   If you’ve been to the bimonthly Web Innovators Group meetings at the Royal Sonesta ballroom in Cambridge, you know that the menu always consists of three or four “main dish” talks by local entrepreneurs launching new Web services, along with three to five “side dish” presentations by companies who set up tables around the room. And you probably know that the chef de cuisine—the man who tastes all the ingredients and selects the evening’s menu—is David Beisel, a vice president at venture capital firm Venrock.

By Marc Graser, March 3, 2008  With Hollywood's interest in new media at an all-time high, the William Morris Agency has partnered with venture capital firms Accel Partners and Venrock, as well as AT&T, to create an investment vehicle to help launch Internet-based businesses.

March 19, 2008
Now Playing, on Forbes.com:  Green Car Innovation
New technology to make standard cars more fuel efficient.

March 19, 2008,  Forbes.com, by Ray Rothrock 
What kind of car will you be driving in the next decade? What will we see people driving on the highways on our way to work? The hope is that they'll be "green." To get there, I predict we will see increased engine efficiency and advances in plug-in hybrid electrics before we reach an effective and well-priced all-electric car.

By Richard A. Moran
Published: March 4 2008

February 19, 2008  In a panel moderated by Mofactor’s John Szeder, a group of investors which included Richard Moran from Venrock, Richard Wong of Accel Partners, Mitch Lasky from Benchmark Capital, and Brad Farkas from i-Hatch Ventures discussed the unique environment that mobile gaming presents for venture capital firms.

By Laura M. Holson, March 3, 2008  Hollywood and Silicon Valley have something of a Mars/Venus problem: the two sides are talking but they don’t speak each other’s language. A new venture involving a phone company may just add Pluto into the mix.

On Monday, the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, will announce that it is teaming up with the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Accel Partners and Venrock to invest in digital media start-up companies based in Southern California. What makes the combination unusual, though, is the addition of AT&T as a limited partner.

Kerry A. Dolan, Burlingame, January 24, 2008  Bryan Roberts has demonstrated an enviable knack for picking winners among early-stage health care companies. Three of the first four investments he made after joining venture capital firm Venrock in 1997, when he was just 30, are now public companies with market capitalizations exceeding $1 billion. Two of them went public last year.

By Richard Waters, Jan. 21, 2008  A US investment boom in alternative energy and other new "clean" technologies is threatening to put Europe in the shade in a field it has traditionally dominated.

January 16, 2008  PricewaterhouseCoopers Start Up Show with your host Steve Bengston

The International Association of Nanotechnology invites entrepreneurs to present their business plans for free at the Emerging Tech Investment Forum 2008 on Jan. 23-24, 2008 in San Jose.

Participating premier venture capitalists will include those specializing in clean tech; biotechnology; nanotechnology; aerospace; medical devices and instruments; and pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Fred Aslan of Venrock, Rich Helfrich of Alameda Capital and Nicola Corzine of Band of Angels will be among some of the attending VCs.

Morning Edition, December 12, 2007 · At the last really huge holiday party I attended, a young woman who reported to me jumped up on stage just as the B-52s song Love Shack began filling the hotel ball room. There were thousands of people there, and the crowd went wild.

Posted by Carleen Hawn, November 30, 2007  Veteran VC Ray Rothrock, of Venrock, said something refreshing to me yesterday: “Venture Capital is really all about pattern recognition. We look for patterns it the market, patterns in entrepreneurs, cultural patterns at the startups pitching us.”

By Rusty Weston, November 14, 2007  In the burgeoning marketplace of self-optimization gurus no one is hotter than the ubiquitous Tim Ferris. For someone who purports to only work four hours a week, he apparently classifies the other 36 hours of self-promotion as rest and relaxation.
Granted, you have to be willing to see beyond Ferris' bluster; he asserts that languages can be learned in a couple of months, kickboxing championships won with half a year's training. I could go on about him, but there is an exploding field of Ferris literature available to you with a Google search.
On the other end of the spectrum, meet Rich Moran, like Ferris a renaissance man - venture capitalist (Venrock), author & wine maker - who last year released his sixth book, Nuts, Bolts & Jolts. A close observer of startups, management (he's on lots of boards) and the Silicon Valley scene, Moran favors work/life balance but is clearly more conventional than the younger Ferris.

By Katie Fehrenbacher, posted November 26, 2007  Matt Trevithick, a VC helping lead Venrock’s cleantech investments, tells me to Google his name and I’ll find a distant relative – Richard Trevithick –- who invented the first working steam locomotive. I did; he does. Like his inventor ancestor, Trevithick, the venture investor, is driven to change the face of transportation — no less than help “make the internal combustion engine obsolete,” he says.

The Web Innovators Group series is a fantastic opportunity to hear brief presentations from local Web 2.0 startups before they’ve reached the stage of acquiring venture funding. David Beisel at Venrock sends word that the first WebInno meeting of 2008 will be held at the usual place (the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge) at the usual time (6:30 pm) on Tuesday, January 29. The identities of the “main dish” and “side dish” presenters have yet to be announced. Register here.

By Scot Kirsner  |  October 28, 2007  Entrepreneurs visiting a venture capitalist to ask for money sometimes feel like kids asking Dad for an allowance. Ordinarily, they're not in the power position

The new valuation of Facebook, with CNBC's Julia Boorstin and Venrock's David Siminoff, October 25, 2007

The Associated Press October 17, 2007  The large pharmaceutical companies, facing a slowdown in their own development pipelines, are laying big bets on small, private drug companies early in the product development stage.

This trend, highlighted recently by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s purchase of Adnexis in late September for $430 million in cash, is driving up valuations for those startups at the same time that Wall Street is raising the hurdles for them to go public. Investors in initial public offerings increasingly are shying away from companies that don't have products in the later stages of development.  

Stephen Wellman, Oct 18, 2007  Welcome another edition of Take 5, my regular feature where I ask an industry insider five questions about their company and the mobile business market as a whole. For this issue I sat down with Neeraj Choubey, Vice President with venture capital firm Venrock. Our topic today: Top trends in mobility.

NEW YORK, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. said on Monday it would pay $430 million for Adnexus Therapeutics, a privately held biotechnology company whose lead product is a cancer drug in the earliest stages of human trials.

NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Athenahealth Inc (ATHN.O: Quote, Profile, Research) shares more than doubled in their market debut on Thursday, making it Wall Street's best performing first day issue year to date.

Wade Roush, September 11, 2007  Ifyou’re hungry for a taste of Web 2.0 technology, Boston style, just attend one of the Web Innovators Group meetings, hosted every other month or so by David Beisel, a vice president in the Cambridge office of Menlo Park, CA-based venture firm Venrock. Last night’s gathering, the 14th in the series, filled the second-floor ballroom at Cambridge’s Royal Sonesta hotel and spilled into the lobby. Designed as a combination of three six-minute “main dish” presentations and several 30-second “side dish” talks, the forums give entrepreneurs from early-stage Web startups a chance to show off what they’re doing to their peers. But the meetings are also massive social-networking events, and they’re growing at a pace that unmistakably signifies a mini-Renaissance in consumer Internet services underway in the Boston area.

Boston Business Journal - September 14, 2007  Bigger isn't always better, especially when you're an entrepreneur trying to raise just enough money to get your idea off the ground.
In the past, seeking smaller seed dollars -- say, below the $3 million mark -- from Greater Boston's big name venture capital firms was a tough row. As firms grew and became loaded with larger sums of money to invest, it became harder for them to justify deals that were under $5 million. But recently, with the cost of starting certain technology centered businesses dropping, many VCs are singing a different tune, quietly handing out smaller rounds of cash as small as $75,000.

By Aaron Ricadela, September 4, 2007  Just as it has done to companies in the software, publishing, and advertising industries, Google is becoming a thorn in the side of venture capitalists. The owner of the world's largest Web search engine is scooping up young tech outfits for a relative pittance, giving itself first dibs on hot-growth technologies and in some cases boxing VC funds out of potential big-bang acquisitions and initial public offerings.

By Jonathan Guthrie, August 29 2007   An idea that Europeans are hopeless at high-tech start-ups has taken root alongside older stereotypes of humourless Germans, food-obsessed Frenchmen and sexually repressed Britons. Europeans gaze longingly at the US, where geeky technologists set up big cutting-edge businesses such as Google, Ebay and YouTube, apparently without effort. “Why can’t we do that?” mutter politicians and academics.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff  |  August 11, 2007:  CAMBRIDGE -- With an Xbox that projects onto the wall, beer in the fridge, and a caffeinated techno soundtrack playing in the background as burgers sizzle on the grill outside, a dozen entrepreneurs are hard at work building Boston's next Web start-ups in a Central Square loft dubbed Betahouse.

By Scott Duke Harris, Mercury News, 08/10/2007: Once upon a time on the Web, there was a lot of talk about "burn rate" - a phrase describing the way start-ups like Webvan and Pets.com went through venture capital like a blowtorch. Many flamed out.
Today, the operative phrase is "bootstrapping." In "Web 2.0," a term reflecting the medium's maturation into a dynamic, cost-effective business platform, penny-pinching entrepreneurs simply don't need venture funding as much as they used to.

Written by François Schiettecatte, Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 8:48 PM PTBOSTON: On July 9th, I attended the 13th Web Innovators Group meeting in Boston. The meetings, which are are organized and hosted by David Beisel of Venrock and held every other month, provide a forum for startups in the Boston area to present themselves to the tech community and to potential investors. They’re also a great place to network.

By Ray Rothrock 08.13.07:  New Electrons Powering the Planet
There is a tremendous opportunity in what I call “new electrons” to help drive a substantial change in the energy source of modern society. New electrons are technologies and techniques that efficiently harness and store energy and electricity. New electrons, in Venrock’s view, is the most promising area of venture investing. New electrons could have a major impact because they significantly reduce emissions from fossil fired electric plants and make better use of all the fuels currently produced.

NPR, Morning Edition July 18, 2007 · This summer is shaping up to be one of the worst for travel. Canceled flights more than doubled in June, and frequent business travelers like Rich Moran, who know airports like the back of their hand, are feeling the stress perhaps more than most.

(Fortune) -- July 5, 2007  Dear Annie: I am the head of what I thought was a pretty strong, cohesive team. But I just heard from one of the people who reports to me that another subordinate went to my boss and said she could do my job better than I can. I'm not sure if there's some kind of ax to grind between these two subordinates, but this troubles me, since the person who allegedly badmouthed me is my top performer. (I jumped through flaming hoops to get her an extra 2% bonus last year.)

June 20, 2007  YoungStartup Ventures kicked off the second day of its New York Venture Summit Wednesday morning with a panel dubbed "Trend Spotting: What VCs Are Investing in Now." Early-stage investing is the healthiest it's been since 2000, agreed the panelists, including Fred Aslan of Venrock Associates, Daniel Ciporin of Canaan Partners, Charles Scott of Intel Capital and Todd Pietri of Milestone Venture Partners. 

June 27, 2007
Online video startups pitched venture capitalists this afternoon at the Web Video Summit being held today and tomorrow in San Jose. Voddler CEO Jim Cantalini pitched VantagePoint Venture Partners' Duncan Davidson, ThinkEquityPartners' Anton Wahlman and Venrock's Eric Copeland.

The newest wave of tech entrepreneurs is focused on transforming our mobile phones into truly personal computers
by Aaron Ricadela, March 26, 2007

MENLO PARK, Calif.-(Business Wire)-May 17, 2007  Venrock, the premier venture capital firm originally established by the Rockefeller family, today announced David Beisel and Ilya Levtov have joined as vice presidents to grow Venrock's media initiative. Beisel will be based in Venrock's Cambridge office, while Levtov will work at the Menlo Park office.

San Diego, May 14, 2007 - - BIO Conference Panel Has Advice For Entrepreneurs
Phenomix Corp. Chief Executive Officer Laura Shawver laughs today when she remembers sporting a mouse on slides for company presentations for first-round venture capital financing in 2002.

San Diego, May 11, 2007 -- William H. Rastetter, former chief executive of Idec Pharmaceuticals, has a new title. As of Friday, he's a member of the Entrepreneur Hall of Fame of Connect, a local technology business association.

May 8, 2007, Boston, MA.  Bryan Roberts, Venrock managing general partner, talks to Rebecca Knight, Financial Times, about venture capital at BIO 2007.

Menlo Park, Calif.--April 25, 2007 (BUSINESS WIRE)--Venrock today announced the formation of Venrock V and will invest $600 million in entrepreneurs with breakthrough ideas in technology, healthcare, media and energy.

The challenges which exist between the CEO and the Board can be easily seen – and overcome – if you know what to watch for.

The Mechanics Bank, a family-owned Richmond bank, added Patricia Cochran, CFO of VSP (Vision Service Plan), and Richard Moran, a partner at venture firm Venrock Associates, to its board.

April 24, 2007 David Siminoff, the media investor who made billions in the 1990s for Capital Research with timely bets on technology/media investments like Time Warner’s (TWX) America Online, Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY), is joining the venture capital firm Venrock Associates as a general partner.

It may take them a while, but the fabulously wealthy from Dot-com boom eventually realize they miss the action. David Siminoff, the Silicon Valley investor who made billions in the late 1990s by making early investments in America Online, Yahoo and eBay, is the latest to return.

At first blush, private equity and biotech make for an odd marriage. The biotech industry is famous for unstable cash flows and massive research-and-development budgets that produce many more flops than blockbusters. Private equity players aren't known for their patience, either, and successful drugs often take decades to come to market.