Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Andrew Chung is heading to Khosla Ventures, where he will focus on the cleantech and information-technology. At Lightspeed, he oversaw investments in biofuel company Solazyme, solar company Stion, and clean coal company Coaltek, among others. Chung will help fill the shoes of cleantech partners Jim Kim and Alex Kinnier, who left Khosla last month.
Zynga plots its mobile stategy
Zynga wants to get into your pocket. As the publisher of games like, “Word with Friends,” a Scrabble-clone popular on Apple devices and since February, on Android platforms, Zynga, known as the top games publisher on Facebook, is likely trying to reduce its reliance of Mark Zuckerberg and co’s platform.
“You should play and you should pay,” says David Ko, the former Yahoo executive who moved to Zynga in November to spearhead its mobile push.
In a recent interview, Ko told Reuters that Zynga’s mobile strategy has two parts: Creating mobile versions of existing Web titles like ”FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” and, having users play games on their mobile devices before anywhere else, like on “Words with Friends.”
from Commentaries:
Start-ups better off with angels than VCs
Self-financed angel investors are often found where venture capitalists fear to tread. They typically provide seed financing to start-ups that is counted in the thousands or tens of thousands instead of the millions VCs have to throw around.
A newly released academic study (52-page Acrobat file) finds angel investors also cut the start-ups they invest in better deals, both in early financing rounds and in cases where the company eventually makes its way to an initial public stock offering.
If our conjecture is correct, then an entrepreneur may be better off avoiding a venture capitalist altogether and going to an angel to obtain their financing.
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While venture investors are prone to underprice IPO firms, reducing the
proceeds from the offering, angel investors have incentives more aligned with non-venture capital, pre-IPO shareholders.
