We?re super excited to announce that Stephanie (?Steph?) Palmeri has joined SoftTech VC as Senior Associate, a brand new position in our firm which has grown 400% since January 1st. Steph is awesome: smart, workhorse, funny, New-Yorker, swear-proof, determined, Columbia MBA ? in no particular order. And we can truly say that serendipity is responsi...

Yesterday I saw this question on Quora: When did the term Super Angel first come into use? and couldn't help but adding my own 2 cents. I believe that the term "Super Angel" was used for the first time in the Startup Visa act. It defines the Super Angel as "an angel investor that has a track record of regularly participating in seed round investmen...

It is that time of the year: the Crunchies - Vintage 2010 - are upon us. Less than 48 hours remain for all companies and individuals to get the necessary votes to win their respective categories. A number of our founders are competing, we'd appreciate any help/vote you can send their way. Congratulations for their nominations: Best Internet Applica...

Almost seven years ago, in May 2004, I started SoftTech VC with a goal to get involved in a number of startups that were defining the "New" consumer internet space. Hustling my way into the first few deals I closed as an angel, I was lucky to meet amazing investors like Josh Kopelman, Brad Feld, David Hornik, Reid Hoffman and Jon Callaghan who gene...

Fred Wilson wrote a post this morning about the looong queues of people speakers face after panels or talks we give at conferences: The Panel Pile-Up. I am speaking at one or two events a week, and I am seeing that pile-up all the time. It takes me anywhere from 10 to 40 mins to get off stage or "free myself up". Once it took me over an hour to lea...

Almost three years ago, I was driving up University Avenue and stopped to grab a coffee at the Peet's Coffee across the Palo Alto store. It was 9AM and Robert Scoble and his son Patrick had just arrived to wait in line for their iPhones (as memorized by this post). They waited 33 hours. Fast forward to today, 1pm-ish: I was walking over to grab lun...

I want to take the opportunity of this second blog post of the year (!) to wish you and your families Happy Holidays and a Happy, Healthy and Wonderful New Year. For a recession year, 2009 was not all that bad: SoftTech VC II closed 15+ new investments, a number of our companies raised additional financing from great VC firms (Eventbrite, Curse, Ou...

I have made no mystery over the years that out of the 65 companies I have invested in over the past 5 years, Mint and its CEO Aaron Patzer, was one of the most exciting. It definitely met the ?3-asses? rule: a young, brilliant, kick-ass CEO (Aaron), a big-ass, phenomenal, market (personal finance) and a smart-ass product (mint.com). I met Aaron in ...

Well, I would certainly not have claimed it, but BusinessWeek has when putting together this list of usual, and not so usual, suspects that includes yours truly. You see, what always troubles me having investors being ?celebrated? is that our job is to help and support entrepreneurs, and make sure that the attention is focused on them, not us. Like...

Props to Kara Swisher for prompting me to open Ecto and work on a blog post, something I have not done in a long long time (almost 5 months since this announcement of my Seesmic investment). I won't even apologize to my 122K RSS subscribers (what ?) because I am not feeling apologetic at all. I have moved on from blogging - feeling the obligation o...

Even though it is still in closed alpha, Seesmic has started generating a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley, in France and in the Social Media ecosystem. I remember clearly when its founder, my dear friend Loic Le Meur, told me months ago about the idea of a video community that would be able to interact and exchange using short form videos - sort of a...

I have explained and written many times over about conferences I attend, speak at or help organize. They represent a unique opportunity to catch up with a vast number of contacts or companies in our industry, and meet (and get pitched by) startups by the dozen. At the Getting Funded panel of TechCrunch40, I even mentioned that ?getting mobbed at co...

After 3 years of angel investing in 20+ Consumer Internet startups (and profitably selling 5 of them), I am very excited, and humbled, to announce the launch of my very own VC fund, SoftTech VC II, L.P. Some of you may wonder what is actually the difference between what I have been doing until now ? after all I am still referred to as a VC by many ...

It took me a few minutes to start writing something after putting in this title ?Turning to page 40?. I re-read the many emails, Facebook private and wall messages, skype IMs, SMSs, twitter messages and greeting e-cards I received over the past 24 hours. I am grateful for all of these, a big Thank You to you all. One of my journalist friends nailed...

Robert and Patrick first in front of the Apple store in Palo Alto Originally uploaded by jeffclavier Robert has said that he was going to do it: well here he is with Patrick camping in front of the Apple store in Palo Alto since this morning 9:30am. For the short period of time I was there, a crew from CNBC and a reporter from the Red Herring showe...

Howdy! First, to all of you really anxious to follow me around (but don't feel obliged, really) twitter (here) is where my ?creativity? expresses itself these days. In short bursts of 140 characters max - which I found amazingly annoying but now really appreciate. May has been crazy busy at work, lots of good developments in the portfolio, and lots...

You might think that I am spending all my time speaking at, or attending, conferences and there are some weeks where that feels very true. This week is one of those, with a few back to back events that are worth mentioning. Monday 5/7 is the day of Startup Camp II, at the Westin San Francisco Market Street. I will hang out there for the day, and wi...

My most recent investment, Kongregate, announced its beta launch last night alongside the closing of a $1M seed financing. I am delighted to be part of a strong syndicate of angel investors, led by my good friend Reid Hoffman, backing gaming veteran Jim Greer and his team. Even though I don?t like these types of analogy, you could argue that Kongre...

The busy conference season is upon us again (just cleared TED 2007 which was an absolute blast), and I want to mention two events where I will be speaking in the coming month: WEB 2.0 EXPO / APRIL 15?18 (Moscone Center, San Francisco CA) The Web 2.0 Expo is a spin-off of the highly popular Web 2.0 conference (now called the Web 2.0 Summit), that wi...

Much has been written on, about and around Twitter ? with a clear acceleration over the past? three weeks ? Essentially the traffic on the site, and the number of mentions in the blogosphere seem to be highly correlated ? which is not surprising since a lot of the Twitterati are also highly visible bloggers. I had not paid much attention to Twitter...

Unless you have been away for a week in an Internet-deprived location, or don't bother reading blogs anymore, you are at least aware that a conference called Le Web3 took place in Paris (France) last week, and that a very profound and passionate controversy ensued - initially led by mostly negative feedback and subsequently by a wave of positive on...

My friend and European VC blogger Fred Destin made an amusing comment in one of his blog entries: Jeff Clavier has left the building, following a discussion I had had with Rick Segal at StartupCamp in the midst of the three sessions I led that day. I basically told Rick that I was in need of recapturing part of my life/time and blogging - both read...

It is all over the news so you don?t need a rehash: the rumors were true and Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65B in GOOG stock. There are several remarkable facts in this acquisition, and I only have a few minutes in between meetings (before meeting a company involved in online video something, just as it happens) to mention them: Copyright issu...

Update: we are trying for the first time to video stream the session at this address (QuickTime 7). Close to 300 video hosting, sharing and editing sites have been counted to date, serving hundreds of millions, if not billions, of videos a day. Video creation is also growing exponentially, and the availability of decent video recording capabilities...

A year ago (give or take 10 days) I wrote about Dogster Inc. ? the maker of the highly popular dogster.com and catster.com ? turning profitable, an unusual fate among Web 2.0 companies. It was still a very small business, but gave co-founders Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading a foundation to grow their company at the pace free cashflows w...