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Shervin Pishevar And Scott Stanford's New Startup Studio Sherpa Is Raising $150 Million For New Fund
As reported earlier this year, Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar and Goldman Sachs managing director Scott Stanford left their day jobs to build a new, company-building venture and VC fund called Sherpa. According to an SEC filing released today, Sherpa is raising around $150 million in funding. Of course, this is not a final number, and this could fluctuate as the funding closes.
The news of Pishevar and Stanford’s new venture was first reported by AllThingsD back in March. At the time, we heard that Sherpa was going to introduce a new model for building and creating companies through a mix and match of strategic corporate partnerships and working with well-known entrepreneurs.
Sherpa is divided into two parts: First, there will be The Foundry, which Pishevar at the time said will use funds and assets from a number of strategic corporations, combined with help from some well-known entrepreneurs to create new companies. There was also a corresponding fund that was created to invest in those new companies. The Sherpa Ventures Fund, as titled in the SEC filing, could be this fund.
This new hybrid model for both startup creation and investing is just part of the growing trend of company building happening in the VC world. Many entrepreneurs are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC (in Shervin’s case, he did join Menlo Ventures but left the firm to start Sherpa) to instead create a studio-like holding operation and fund.
Considering Pishevar’s experience as a serial entrepreneur (he’s founded — and sold — a number of startups) and Stanford’s background of coordinating and financing the IPOs of companies like Facebook and Zynga, it should be interesting to see what Sherpa has up its sleeve.
We’ve reached out to Pishevar for comment and will update accordingly.
Win A Ticket To DBX, Dropbox's First Developer's Conference
On July 9th, Dropbox kicks off its first developer’s conference. Tickets are no longer available for the invite-only one-day-event, but we have ten tickets to give away.
Dropbox told us that the three focuses of the one-day conference will be learning about newly launched features on its platform, giving developers a chance to meet and get help from Dropbox API engineers and designers, and highlighting what third parties have built on top of Dropbox so far.
Developer conferences have become all the rage with companies in the enterprise — a distinction Dropbox is chasing. Many think of it more as a consumer-facing cloud storage service with its magic folder where you can put files to make them accessible from anywhere. But Dropbox has spent the last year touting itself as a serious, secure backend for big operations.
Learn more about the conference here and follow @dbx2013 for the latest news and livetweeting at the event.
The conference was originally invite-only but registration is now closed to the public. The only way to get in now is to win one of these.
Here’s how to win.
1) “Like” our TechCrunch Facebook Page:
2) Then do one of the following:
- Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Or leave us a comment below telling us what you would build for Dropbox.
New Update Lets Google Glass View Websites And Listen To More Voice Commands
And Google Glass’ slow march toward market readiness continues. The development team shared a few details about an upcoming update on the official Glass Google+ page, and it finally unlocks some oft-requested features for all those Glass Explorers to start mucking around with.
The changelog is a pretty significant one — users will soon be able to initiate calls and send messages to Gmail contacts, and rather than having to navigate to the OK Glass launcher card before issuing a voice command, users can boss their headgear around without having to touch anything. But most importantly though, Google is now letting users view webpages through Glass.
The post makes it seem as though the touchpad mounted on Glass’ right side will be responsible for most of the navigation — users can swipe forward and backward along the panel to scroll up and down, and there are multiple navigation schemes to fiddle with. Thankfully, there’s one tailor-made for those who generally feel impervious to embarrassment: users can pan around their favorite websites by touching two fingers to the touchpad and moving their heads to and fro. You know, nice and discreet. It’s a little hard to visualize, but current Glass Explorers won’t have to wait too long to see it for themselves as the update is slated to go live over the next few days.
Frankly, it was only a matter of time before Google let those particular cats out of the bag — we’ve known that Glass had the ability to fire up a browser and listen to voice commands outside of that launcher card ever since an enterprising developer named Zhuowei Zhang uncovered a slew of so-called Glass Lab Experiments and shared them on GitHub. Naturally, there’s still plenty on that list that hasn’t been publicly implemented yet (think video stabilization and a Cliplet feature that records short snippets of video, to name a few), so expect a boatload of new updates between now and Glass’ tentative release date later this year.
Zynga Officially Names Microsoft's Don Mattrick As CEO, Pincus Stays On As CPO And Board Chairman
In an email to all employees, Zynga just announced that veteran executive Don Mattrick will be the gaming giant’s new CEO, and former CEO and co-founder Mark Pincus will now be its Chief Product Officer as well as remaining the Chairman of its Board of Directors. Mattrick comes from Microsoft in a sudden move, and was previously at Zynga competitor Electronic Arts.
Pincus explained in an email to staff and a blog post that “I’ve always said to Bing and our Board that if I could find someone who could do a better job as our CEO I’d do all I could to recruit and bring that person in. I’m confident that Don is that leader.” He also noted “Zynga has so much more potential ahead, the opportunity to be an Internet Treasure and deliver on our mission of connecting the world through games.”
Until today, Mattrick was Microsoft’s President of Interactive Entertainment. He most recently delivered the news that Microsoft would retreat following backlash in response to announcements that its new Xbox One would have digital rights management preventing users from freely swapping games and would require an Internet connection to play games.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to his employees saying “This is a great opportunity for Don, and I wish him success. Don’s directs will report to me and will continue to drive the day-to-day business as a team, particularly focused on shipping Xbox One this holiday. Thank you, Don, for setting us on a path to completely redefine the entertainment industry.”
As the new CEO he inherits a tough job of completing Zynga’s transition from a web-focused Facebook games company to a multi-platform developer with its own properties and a focus on mobile. The news leaked this morning via Kara Swisher to positive reactions from Zynga shareholders who boosted the company’s stock price 10.43% to $3.07. After hours the stock has gone up another 3.58% to $3.18 following the announcement.
Zynga is still struggling to recover from a disastrous IPO at the end of 2011 and a string of soggy games that have failed to bring in the users or dollars the way its old hits FarmVille and CityVille did. The question will be whether Mattrick can restore morale and get Zynga producing beloved games again while simultaneously laying off employees to make the company more financially sound.
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