Google Ventures is almost here

Rich Miner, creator of Android, is moving to jump start Google's latest venture, Google Ventures, which will provide capital to startups.

Google has been working on this for quite some time. In 2007, Business Week reported that Google is going to take on a new role as a Venture Capitalist. WSJ reported last year in July about Google's new venture capital arm.

TechCrunch thinks Google Ventures is a bad idea and that "Starting a venture fund is not really the best use of Google’s capital." I disagree with TechCrunch mostly because I think it can be an effective way for Google to outsource innovation and give some of the big billions back to startups.

LinkedIn's Billion Dollar Valuation

LinkedIn has raised $53 million valuing the business social network at over a billion dollars. In the video below, you can watch LinkedIn investors including David Sze (Greylock Partners), Jeffrey Glass (Brain Capital Ventures), David Cowan (Bessemer Venture) and Mark Kvamme (Sequoia Capital). Jeff Glass will join LinkedIn's board.


I got a chance to meet Adam Nash (Sr. Director of Product and Engineering of LinkedIn) at Graphing Social Patterns. What I liked in his presentation was the fact that LinkedIn is not trying to be everything, instead focusing on its core market: business networking.

“My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if your user the value per subscriber of then LinkedIn’s $1 billion got a market valuation. On per-subscriber revenue basis, LinkedIn seems a tad overvalued, especially considering that their traffic is range bound, and the number of active uniques is showing a slight slump.”- Om Malik (GigaOm)²

Some say we are in a bubble but the bubble is here to stay, at least for some time. If Facebook is valued at $15 billion, why can't LinkedIn, one of the rare breed of social networks in the sense that it is profitable, be valued at a billion. Go LinkedIn!

More coverage:
1 Techcrunch
2 Is LinkedIn worth a billion dollars?

RockYou! raises $35 million

Following Slide, RockYou! has raised an impressive $35 million in Series C funding led by DCM venture capital firm. RockYou! is now claiming that their reach is bigger than Slide.

Slide:

RockYou!: