Andre Garrigo

  1. Viewing All "finance" Posts

  2. An Introduction to Stock & Options for the Tech Entrepreneur or Startup Employee, by David Weekly.

  3. Andreessen-Horowitz Invests In The Start Fund, Offers $50k To All Y Combinator Startups

    Andreessen-Horowitz has announced that it will invest in the Start Fund. The Start Fund offers $150 thousand to all Y Combinator graduates. Out of the $150 thousand offered, $50 thousand will now come from Andreessen-Horowitz. 

    Andreessen-Horowitz does not have the resources to surface over a hundred seed stage companies per year, but Paul Graham does. Y Combinator alumni are a proven bunch. Paul Graham has shown that he is capable of surfacing superstar startups such as Dropbox, AirBnB, Reddit and Heroku. In effect, Andreessen-Horowitz is now outsourcing its early stage investment selection to Paul Graham.

    Brilliant.

    The Start Fund was formed earlier this year with the sole purpose of investing in Y Combinator startups. It is a joint venture between Yuri Milner of DST Global and Ron Conway of SV Angel. No word yet on why Milner and Conway chose to take on a new partner.

  4. Union Square Ventures Invests In Duck Duck Go’s Search Algorithm

    Duck Duck Go has been competing with Google on search for the last four years. Up until now, the startup had been completely bootstrapped. But now Duck Duck Go is tweaking its business model. Founder Gabriel Weinberg has decided to raise money from Union Square Ventures. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Weinberg recently hired Duck Duck Go’s first employee. The decision to grow the company internally is based on Duck Duck Go’s recent external growth. Pageviews are up. Duck Duck Go is receiving about 300,000 search queries per day, which is up from the 200,000 received in June.

    USV partner Brad Burnham will join Duck Duck Go’s board. Jim Young from i/o ventures and Joshua Schachter from Tasty Labs also participated in the round, along with a few other angels. The money will be used to make new hires, which will allow for a faster release cycle. 

  5. Earlier today All Things D reported:

    Andreessen Horowitz has invested more than $80 million in Twitter via purchasing stock in private secondary markets.

    The move is an interesting one, since Andreessen Horowitz was not part of the recent $200 million round of venture funding at the San Francisco microblogging company, led by Kleiner Perkins at a $3.75 billion valuation.

    This evening the Wall Street Journal reported:

    Twitter is holding low-level acquisition talks at an estimated valuation of $8 billion to $10 billion.

    I can’t help but speculate that Andreessen Horowitz knew of Twitter’s ‘low-level’ acquisition talks prior to the Wall Street Journal making them public. It’s an interesting coincidence that sheds some light on the potential for information asymmetry to exist in private secondary markets.