Edsall described the Terps’ opening as a “Dream Job.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the move surprised college football fans on every end of the spectrum.
Mitchell Layton/Getty Images
There was a general consensus that Oklahoma was going to win the Fiesta Bowl. That being said, it wasn’t like UCONN rolled over. The Huskies rallied late in the season, winning four straight and entering their first BCS bowl in school history. They were playing in honor of the late Jasper Howard, who dreamed of making it to a BCS game.
Obviously, the loss left UCONN heavy hearted. They were simply outclassed by a bigger, faster, and significantly more talented Oklahoma team. One would think a loss of that magnitude would give Head Coach Randy Edsall a lot to think about. But apparently, he digested all the facts pretty quickly; leaving the Huskies for the University of Maryland literally 24 hours after losing in the Fiesta Bowl.
Edsall described the Terps’ opening as a “Dream Job.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the move surprised college football fans on every end of the spectrum. First, Maryland spent more than two million dollars just to terminate the contract of Ralph Friedgen. With that kind of money spent on the firing of a coach that went 8-4; the overwhelming assumption was that Maryland was getting a major coach. Names tossed around included Chris Petersen and Mike Leach.
But perhaps more interesting is where Maryland stands in the ACC. Maryland does not make nearly as much money from their football program as the rest of the ACC (sans Duke and Wake Forest). If anything, Edsall made a lateral move, to a strikingly similar modern program. The only real difference is the conference. And this is something the Big East has had a lot of trouble getting used to.
In 2006, Bobby Petrino led the Louisville Cardinals to a BCS game for the first time in the school’s history, and then unceremoniously left to coach the Atlanta Falcons (who he also departed from in controversial fashion). The next year, Rich Rodriguez led West Virginia, an offensive juggernaut with White and Slaton into the BCS, before ditching his alma mater for another maize and blue team. Last year, Brian Kelly literally left the Bearcats coach-less for their BCS game, in order to fill the void at Notre Dame.
So let’s add this up. In the last five years, four teams have won the Big East. All four of those teams’ coaches left, resulting in absolute chaos throughout the conference. And even though all of these coaches are doing it to seek greener pastures, there are two things that are worth mentioning. First, with the exception of Bobby Petrino, who somehow landed on his feet in Arkansas, the departed Big East coaches have had significant problems in their new environments, both on and off the field. Second, and more important, is the rate of exchange.
Since the 2005 departure of football powerhouses Miami, Boston College, and Virginia Tech, there is no other conference that has experienced coaching turnover quite like the Big East. In a country where football is the money sport, the Big East is literally the only major conference that has built itself around basketball success. Interestingly enough, the ACC’s decision to acquire BC, Virginia Tech, and Miami, were part of initiative to make the ACC a football conference again.
Try as they may, the Big East is not in a position to do that. Notre Dame has flat out refused to join the conference, so the Big East instead reached out to TCU, a school more than halfway across the country. TCU’s departure officially spells doom for the Mountain West, but also doesn’t do anything for the Big East. Because instead of moving to a conference where you can be a BCS team at-large with such a successful season, TCU has put themselves in a position where they can lose five regular season games, and still make the BCS. Hell, if an undefeated Cincinnati couldn’t get National championship consideration, you can be certain that TCU won’t either. And it’s simply because the focus is not on football.
Now, the truth is, that’s not always a huge problem. Football is literally six times more expensive to operate than the next most expensive college sport. So if you are the Big East, and basketball is the big ticket, it’s probably not a terrible idea to ride the basketball wave. The only problem is, coaches know that too.
Yesterday, I spoke to a former National Champion Football player at Boston College about the series of Big East exits, and his response was simple. “If you put every Head Football Coach from the Big East in a room and asked them to air grievances, the first thing they’d all say is, ‘we can’t get top talent here because we are a basketball conference.”
But if the understanding is that they aren’t a football conference, why is there an illusion that these are real football coaches? UCONN football was literally the only head coaching position that Edsall ever knew. And unlike Jim Harbaugh, who literally need one recruiting class to turn a 1-11 team into a national powerhouse in the Pac 10, Edsall needed 12 years, a lost of losing seasons, and three of the most significant athletic defections of the new millennium.
Perhaps coaches are doing what anyone else would do. They are striking while the iron is hot.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — at least for Silicon Valley startups in 2010.
While many smaller, lesser known newbies languished as venture capital investments declined overall, those that did score, scored big, and have kept themselves in the headlines ever since.
So where did VCs put their money in ‘10? VentureBeat teamed up with venture capital analytics and reference researchers VC Experts to bring you the top 10 largest single investments in tech startups in 2010 — and why they had so many investors foaming at the mouth.
1. Twitter
Microblogging darling and San Francisco-based startup Twitter claims the crown for the largest single venture capital funding in 2010, after it scored a tidy $205 million infusion and $3.7 billion valuation on Dec. 12. The interest in the company is understandable: over the last year Twitter users sent 25 billion Tweets and added more than 100 million new registered accounts. During the same period, the company grew from 130 people to more than 350 today and is rumored to be looking for new digs in its hometown — as well as an IPO that could come as soon as this upcoming summer. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the round.
2. Zynga
White-hot social gaming company Zynga raised $147.4 million on June 14 from Japan’s SoftBank, as it started its push into the lucrative and game-crazed markets of Asia and pulled away from the pack as the clear leader in the gaming community. The maker of FarmVille, and more recently, CityVille, now boasts 261.6 million monthly active users of Facebook, a massive spike from its 198 million monthly active users in November. Founded in 2007, Zynga has more than 1,300 employees, with some recent valuations show that Zynga could be valued above $5 billion, larger than Electronic Arts, one of the largest video game publishers in the world.
3. Groupon
Groupon, a social buying startup that offers deep discounts on daily deals in conjunction with local merchants, has been an eye-catcher all year for investors, grabbing $135 million on April 19 from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies as it began a year of raging growth and notoriety. The Chicago startup quickly became the dominant player in the daily-deal space. It snubbed a $6 billion buyout offer from search behemoth Google and is now rumored to be seeking a $1 billion round of financing — making Groupon a company to watch well into next year and beyond.
4. Ustream
Live video streaming company Ustream, which supplies content to web sites and cell phones, on Feb. 1 raked in $75 million in a second round of venture funding led by Tokyo-based Softbank. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company immediately put the funding toward expanding its presence in Japan, China, Korea and India. VentureBeat has used Ustream technology to broadcast live video from the Consumer Electronics Show, using equipment that allows a single person with a video camera and Ustream broadcasting pack to upload live video to a web site. Users can also interact with each other in real-time by using the Ustream Social Stream. The service currently has over 45 million monthly unique visits with an average of 20 to 30 minute viewing time per stream and most recently captured headlines for breaking viewing records during the Chilean miner rescue.
5. Boston-Power
Boston-Power, maker of advanced lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage applications, landed $66.4 million in a fifth round of funding on June 10, a major score for a company on the brink of mass commercial scale in the emerging automotive and utility sectors. The company said it would use the money to double its workforce, as well as grow its manufacturing center in Taiwan, and add to its sales, marketing and R&D operations. Existing investors Foundation Asset Management and Oak Investment Partners both led the round, which included investments from previous backers Venrock Associates and Gabriel Venture Partners.
6. OnLive
Games-on-demand company OnLive raised $60 million in a strategic round of funding from BT, the former British Telecommunications, on May 13, as part of a plan to expand its games on demand service to Europe. OnLive’s rivals include Otoy, Gaikai, InstantAction and GameStreamer. OnLive, founded by entrepreneur Steve Perlman, has more than 20 games available from game publishers such as the former Electronic Arts Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive and THQ. OnLive’s basic technology is compression, then a video is sent back over the broadband line to the user’s computer. OnLive’s goal is make that computing appear to happen in the cloud rather than on the user’s own computer.
7. Livescribe
Smartpen maker Livescribe, which launched at the DEMO conference in 2008 scored $44.8 million on Sept. 22, as the company pushed to further develop its product. Livescribe’s pens let students and professionals record lectures and link the playback of those lectures to written text. If you want to play back a section of a lecture, you simply tap on the written text. You can also use the pens to run writing-related apps and to get quick answers to math problems or translate foreign words. Crosslink Capital led the round, joined by Scale Venture Partners, Qualcomm, TransLink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital and existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lionhart and Aeris Capital.
8. Tremor Media
Video ad network Tremor Media pulled in $40 million on April 28, which the company said it would use to improve its Acudeo ad delivery platform to identify individual website visitors’ demographics on the fly, rather than needing to lump entire sites’ audiences into buckets. Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund, Triangle Peak Partners, Canaan Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, SAP Ventures, European Founders Fund, Masthead Venture Partners and DFJ Growth.
9. Jive
Business social networking company Jive Software reeled in $30 million on July 21 as it continued to make its mark as a leader in its niche. With 3,000 customers and more than 15 million users, the Portland, Ore., startup uses social networking within your company, community tools for interacting with your customers, and monitoring features to track what people are saying on sites like Twitter. The investment was led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital, the only venture investor in Jive up then. The news made headlines at the time for another reason: the last time Kleiner and Sequoia teamed up on a deal of this size (larger than $30 million) was more than a decade ago, when they invested in Google, a bet which has more than paid off.
10. Tumblr
Blogging platform Tumblr showed that people are still interested in long-format ruminations (or at least those bigger than Twitter’s 140 characters) by snagging $30 million on Dec. 12 after opening a new office in New York City and expanding its staff to 16 people. Tumblr, a social media network made up of millions of personal and business blogs, is seeing massive traffic growth, with activity on the network of Tumblr blogs skyrocketing over the first half of the year to reach around 2 billion pageviews this fall. Investors were clearly paying attention — this round was led by Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures, all well-known Silicon Valley star watchers.
Next Story: On the GreenBeat: Molycorp stock rises on rare earth scarcity, Verizon launches smart home pilot Previous Story: Apple to announce Verizon iPhone within next few weeks?
robert shumake detroit
The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...
Progressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
robert shumake detroitThe population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...
Progressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
robert shumake detroit
Edsall described the Terps’ opening as a “Dream Job.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the move surprised college football fans on every end of the spectrum.
Mitchell Layton/Getty Images
There was a general consensus that Oklahoma was going to win the Fiesta Bowl. That being said, it wasn’t like UCONN rolled over. The Huskies rallied late in the season, winning four straight and entering their first BCS bowl in school history. They were playing in honor of the late Jasper Howard, who dreamed of making it to a BCS game.
Obviously, the loss left UCONN heavy hearted. They were simply outclassed by a bigger, faster, and significantly more talented Oklahoma team. One would think a loss of that magnitude would give Head Coach Randy Edsall a lot to think about. But apparently, he digested all the facts pretty quickly; leaving the Huskies for the University of Maryland literally 24 hours after losing in the Fiesta Bowl.
Edsall described the Terps’ opening as a “Dream Job.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the move surprised college football fans on every end of the spectrum. First, Maryland spent more than two million dollars just to terminate the contract of Ralph Friedgen. With that kind of money spent on the firing of a coach that went 8-4; the overwhelming assumption was that Maryland was getting a major coach. Names tossed around included Chris Petersen and Mike Leach.
But perhaps more interesting is where Maryland stands in the ACC. Maryland does not make nearly as much money from their football program as the rest of the ACC (sans Duke and Wake Forest). If anything, Edsall made a lateral move, to a strikingly similar modern program. The only real difference is the conference. And this is something the Big East has had a lot of trouble getting used to.
In 2006, Bobby Petrino led the Louisville Cardinals to a BCS game for the first time in the school’s history, and then unceremoniously left to coach the Atlanta Falcons (who he also departed from in controversial fashion). The next year, Rich Rodriguez led West Virginia, an offensive juggernaut with White and Slaton into the BCS, before ditching his alma mater for another maize and blue team. Last year, Brian Kelly literally left the Bearcats coach-less for their BCS game, in order to fill the void at Notre Dame.
So let’s add this up. In the last five years, four teams have won the Big East. All four of those teams’ coaches left, resulting in absolute chaos throughout the conference. And even though all of these coaches are doing it to seek greener pastures, there are two things that are worth mentioning. First, with the exception of Bobby Petrino, who somehow landed on his feet in Arkansas, the departed Big East coaches have had significant problems in their new environments, both on and off the field. Second, and more important, is the rate of exchange.
Since the 2005 departure of football powerhouses Miami, Boston College, and Virginia Tech, there is no other conference that has experienced coaching turnover quite like the Big East. In a country where football is the money sport, the Big East is literally the only major conference that has built itself around basketball success. Interestingly enough, the ACC’s decision to acquire BC, Virginia Tech, and Miami, were part of initiative to make the ACC a football conference again.
Try as they may, the Big East is not in a position to do that. Notre Dame has flat out refused to join the conference, so the Big East instead reached out to TCU, a school more than halfway across the country. TCU’s departure officially spells doom for the Mountain West, but also doesn’t do anything for the Big East. Because instead of moving to a conference where you can be a BCS team at-large with such a successful season, TCU has put themselves in a position where they can lose five regular season games, and still make the BCS. Hell, if an undefeated Cincinnati couldn’t get National championship consideration, you can be certain that TCU won’t either. And it’s simply because the focus is not on football.
Now, the truth is, that’s not always a huge problem. Football is literally six times more expensive to operate than the next most expensive college sport. So if you are the Big East, and basketball is the big ticket, it’s probably not a terrible idea to ride the basketball wave. The only problem is, coaches know that too.
Yesterday, I spoke to a former National Champion Football player at Boston College about the series of Big East exits, and his response was simple. “If you put every Head Football Coach from the Big East in a room and asked them to air grievances, the first thing they’d all say is, ‘we can’t get top talent here because we are a basketball conference.”
But if the understanding is that they aren’t a football conference, why is there an illusion that these are real football coaches? UCONN football was literally the only head coaching position that Edsall ever knew. And unlike Jim Harbaugh, who literally need one recruiting class to turn a 1-11 team into a national powerhouse in the Pac 10, Edsall needed 12 years, a lost of losing seasons, and three of the most significant athletic defections of the new millennium.
Perhaps coaches are doing what anyone else would do. They are striking while the iron is hot.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — at least for Silicon Valley startups in 2010.
While many smaller, lesser known newbies languished as venture capital investments declined overall, those that did score, scored big, and have kept themselves in the headlines ever since.
So where did VCs put their money in ‘10? VentureBeat teamed up with venture capital analytics and reference researchers VC Experts to bring you the top 10 largest single investments in tech startups in 2010 — and why they had so many investors foaming at the mouth.
1. Twitter
Microblogging darling and San Francisco-based startup Twitter claims the crown for the largest single venture capital funding in 2010, after it scored a tidy $205 million infusion and $3.7 billion valuation on Dec. 12. The interest in the company is understandable: over the last year Twitter users sent 25 billion Tweets and added more than 100 million new registered accounts. During the same period, the company grew from 130 people to more than 350 today and is rumored to be looking for new digs in its hometown — as well as an IPO that could come as soon as this upcoming summer. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the round.
2. Zynga
White-hot social gaming company Zynga raised $147.4 million on June 14 from Japan’s SoftBank, as it started its push into the lucrative and game-crazed markets of Asia and pulled away from the pack as the clear leader in the gaming community. The maker of FarmVille, and more recently, CityVille, now boasts 261.6 million monthly active users of Facebook, a massive spike from its 198 million monthly active users in November. Founded in 2007, Zynga has more than 1,300 employees, with some recent valuations show that Zynga could be valued above $5 billion, larger than Electronic Arts, one of the largest video game publishers in the world.
3. Groupon
Groupon, a social buying startup that offers deep discounts on daily deals in conjunction with local merchants, has been an eye-catcher all year for investors, grabbing $135 million on April 19 from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies as it began a year of raging growth and notoriety. The Chicago startup quickly became the dominant player in the daily-deal space. It snubbed a $6 billion buyout offer from search behemoth Google and is now rumored to be seeking a $1 billion round of financing — making Groupon a company to watch well into next year and beyond.
4. Ustream
Live video streaming company Ustream, which supplies content to web sites and cell phones, on Feb. 1 raked in $75 million in a second round of venture funding led by Tokyo-based Softbank. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company immediately put the funding toward expanding its presence in Japan, China, Korea and India. VentureBeat has used Ustream technology to broadcast live video from the Consumer Electronics Show, using equipment that allows a single person with a video camera and Ustream broadcasting pack to upload live video to a web site. Users can also interact with each other in real-time by using the Ustream Social Stream. The service currently has over 45 million monthly unique visits with an average of 20 to 30 minute viewing time per stream and most recently captured headlines for breaking viewing records during the Chilean miner rescue.
5. Boston-Power
Boston-Power, maker of advanced lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage applications, landed $66.4 million in a fifth round of funding on June 10, a major score for a company on the brink of mass commercial scale in the emerging automotive and utility sectors. The company said it would use the money to double its workforce, as well as grow its manufacturing center in Taiwan, and add to its sales, marketing and R&D operations. Existing investors Foundation Asset Management and Oak Investment Partners both led the round, which included investments from previous backers Venrock Associates and Gabriel Venture Partners.
6. OnLive
Games-on-demand company OnLive raised $60 million in a strategic round of funding from BT, the former British Telecommunications, on May 13, as part of a plan to expand its games on demand service to Europe. OnLive’s rivals include Otoy, Gaikai, InstantAction and GameStreamer. OnLive, founded by entrepreneur Steve Perlman, has more than 20 games available from game publishers such as the former Electronic Arts Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive and THQ. OnLive’s basic technology is compression, then a video is sent back over the broadband line to the user’s computer. OnLive’s goal is make that computing appear to happen in the cloud rather than on the user’s own computer.
7. Livescribe
Smartpen maker Livescribe, which launched at the DEMO conference in 2008 scored $44.8 million on Sept. 22, as the company pushed to further develop its product. Livescribe’s pens let students and professionals record lectures and link the playback of those lectures to written text. If you want to play back a section of a lecture, you simply tap on the written text. You can also use the pens to run writing-related apps and to get quick answers to math problems or translate foreign words. Crosslink Capital led the round, joined by Scale Venture Partners, Qualcomm, TransLink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital and existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lionhart and Aeris Capital.
8. Tremor Media
Video ad network Tremor Media pulled in $40 million on April 28, which the company said it would use to improve its Acudeo ad delivery platform to identify individual website visitors’ demographics on the fly, rather than needing to lump entire sites’ audiences into buckets. Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund, Triangle Peak Partners, Canaan Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, SAP Ventures, European Founders Fund, Masthead Venture Partners and DFJ Growth.
9. Jive
Business social networking company Jive Software reeled in $30 million on July 21 as it continued to make its mark as a leader in its niche. With 3,000 customers and more than 15 million users, the Portland, Ore., startup uses social networking within your company, community tools for interacting with your customers, and monitoring features to track what people are saying on sites like Twitter. The investment was led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital, the only venture investor in Jive up then. The news made headlines at the time for another reason: the last time Kleiner and Sequoia teamed up on a deal of this size (larger than $30 million) was more than a decade ago, when they invested in Google, a bet which has more than paid off.
10. Tumblr
Blogging platform Tumblr showed that people are still interested in long-format ruminations (or at least those bigger than Twitter’s 140 characters) by snagging $30 million on Dec. 12 after opening a new office in New York City and expanding its staff to 16 people. Tumblr, a social media network made up of millions of personal and business blogs, is seeing massive traffic growth, with activity on the network of Tumblr blogs skyrocketing over the first half of the year to reach around 2 billion pageviews this fall. Investors were clearly paying attention — this round was led by Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures, all well-known Silicon Valley star watchers.
Next Story: On the GreenBeat: Molycorp stock rises on rare earth scarcity, Verizon launches smart home pilot Previous Story: Apple to announce Verizon iPhone within next few weeks?
robert shumake detroit
robert shumakeThe population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...
Progressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
robert shumakeThe population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...
Progressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
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robert shumake detroitThe population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...
Progressive rock legends Pink Floyd have re-signed with their longtime record label EMI.
The people over at Fox News have caused many laughs, cries and broken television screens in 2010 and usually in that order. The network has created so many blunders and mistakes that its mere existence as a news agency is in of itself ...
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake
Edsall described the Terps’ opening as a “Dream Job.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the move surprised college football fans on every end of the spectrum.
Mitchell Layton/Getty Images
There was a general consensus that Oklahoma was going to win the Fiesta Bowl. That being said, it wasn’t like UCONN rolled over. The Huskies rallied late in the season, winning four straight and entering their first BCS bowl in school history. They were playing in honor of the late Jasper Howard, who dreamed of making it to a BCS game.
Obviously, the loss left UCONN heavy hearted. They were simply outclassed by a bigger, faster, and significantly more talented Oklahoma team. One would think a loss of that magnitude would give Head Coach Randy Edsall a lot to think about. But apparently, he digested all the facts pretty quickly; leaving the Huskies for the University of Maryland literally 24 hours after losing in the Fiesta Bowl.
Edsall described the Terps’ opening as a “Dream Job.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the move surprised college football fans on every end of the spectrum. First, Maryland spent more than two million dollars just to terminate the contract of Ralph Friedgen. With that kind of money spent on the firing of a coach that went 8-4; the overwhelming assumption was that Maryland was getting a major coach. Names tossed around included Chris Petersen and Mike Leach.
But perhaps more interesting is where Maryland stands in the ACC. Maryland does not make nearly as much money from their football program as the rest of the ACC (sans Duke and Wake Forest). If anything, Edsall made a lateral move, to a strikingly similar modern program. The only real difference is the conference. And this is something the Big East has had a lot of trouble getting used to.
In 2006, Bobby Petrino led the Louisville Cardinals to a BCS game for the first time in the school’s history, and then unceremoniously left to coach the Atlanta Falcons (who he also departed from in controversial fashion). The next year, Rich Rodriguez led West Virginia, an offensive juggernaut with White and Slaton into the BCS, before ditching his alma mater for another maize and blue team. Last year, Brian Kelly literally left the Bearcats coach-less for their BCS game, in order to fill the void at Notre Dame.
So let’s add this up. In the last five years, four teams have won the Big East. All four of those teams’ coaches left, resulting in absolute chaos throughout the conference. And even though all of these coaches are doing it to seek greener pastures, there are two things that are worth mentioning. First, with the exception of Bobby Petrino, who somehow landed on his feet in Arkansas, the departed Big East coaches have had significant problems in their new environments, both on and off the field. Second, and more important, is the rate of exchange.
Since the 2005 departure of football powerhouses Miami, Boston College, and Virginia Tech, there is no other conference that has experienced coaching turnover quite like the Big East. In a country where football is the money sport, the Big East is literally the only major conference that has built itself around basketball success. Interestingly enough, the ACC’s decision to acquire BC, Virginia Tech, and Miami, were part of initiative to make the ACC a football conference again.
Try as they may, the Big East is not in a position to do that. Notre Dame has flat out refused to join the conference, so the Big East instead reached out to TCU, a school more than halfway across the country. TCU’s departure officially spells doom for the Mountain West, but also doesn’t do anything for the Big East. Because instead of moving to a conference where you can be a BCS team at-large with such a successful season, TCU has put themselves in a position where they can lose five regular season games, and still make the BCS. Hell, if an undefeated Cincinnati couldn’t get National championship consideration, you can be certain that TCU won’t either. And it’s simply because the focus is not on football.
Now, the truth is, that’s not always a huge problem. Football is literally six times more expensive to operate than the next most expensive college sport. So if you are the Big East, and basketball is the big ticket, it’s probably not a terrible idea to ride the basketball wave. The only problem is, coaches know that too.
Yesterday, I spoke to a former National Champion Football player at Boston College about the series of Big East exits, and his response was simple. “If you put every Head Football Coach from the Big East in a room and asked them to air grievances, the first thing they’d all say is, ‘we can’t get top talent here because we are a basketball conference.”
But if the understanding is that they aren’t a football conference, why is there an illusion that these are real football coaches? UCONN football was literally the only head coaching position that Edsall ever knew. And unlike Jim Harbaugh, who literally need one recruiting class to turn a 1-11 team into a national powerhouse in the Pac 10, Edsall needed 12 years, a lost of losing seasons, and three of the most significant athletic defections of the new millennium.
Perhaps coaches are doing what anyone else would do. They are striking while the iron is hot.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — at least for Silicon Valley startups in 2010.
While many smaller, lesser known newbies languished as venture capital investments declined overall, those that did score, scored big, and have kept themselves in the headlines ever since.
So where did VCs put their money in ‘10? VentureBeat teamed up with venture capital analytics and reference researchers VC Experts to bring you the top 10 largest single investments in tech startups in 2010 — and why they had so many investors foaming at the mouth.
1. Twitter
Microblogging darling and San Francisco-based startup Twitter claims the crown for the largest single venture capital funding in 2010, after it scored a tidy $205 million infusion and $3.7 billion valuation on Dec. 12. The interest in the company is understandable: over the last year Twitter users sent 25 billion Tweets and added more than 100 million new registered accounts. During the same period, the company grew from 130 people to more than 350 today and is rumored to be looking for new digs in its hometown — as well as an IPO that could come as soon as this upcoming summer. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the round.
2. Zynga
White-hot social gaming company Zynga raised $147.4 million on June 14 from Japan’s SoftBank, as it started its push into the lucrative and game-crazed markets of Asia and pulled away from the pack as the clear leader in the gaming community. The maker of FarmVille, and more recently, CityVille, now boasts 261.6 million monthly active users of Facebook, a massive spike from its 198 million monthly active users in November. Founded in 2007, Zynga has more than 1,300 employees, with some recent valuations show that Zynga could be valued above $5 billion, larger than Electronic Arts, one of the largest video game publishers in the world.
3. Groupon
Groupon, a social buying startup that offers deep discounts on daily deals in conjunction with local merchants, has been an eye-catcher all year for investors, grabbing $135 million on April 19 from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies as it began a year of raging growth and notoriety. The Chicago startup quickly became the dominant player in the daily-deal space. It snubbed a $6 billion buyout offer from search behemoth Google and is now rumored to be seeking a $1 billion round of financing — making Groupon a company to watch well into next year and beyond.
4. Ustream
Live video streaming company Ustream, which supplies content to web sites and cell phones, on Feb. 1 raked in $75 million in a second round of venture funding led by Tokyo-based Softbank. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company immediately put the funding toward expanding its presence in Japan, China, Korea and India. VentureBeat has used Ustream technology to broadcast live video from the Consumer Electronics Show, using equipment that allows a single person with a video camera and Ustream broadcasting pack to upload live video to a web site. Users can also interact with each other in real-time by using the Ustream Social Stream. The service currently has over 45 million monthly unique visits with an average of 20 to 30 minute viewing time per stream and most recently captured headlines for breaking viewing records during the Chilean miner rescue.
5. Boston-Power
Boston-Power, maker of advanced lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage applications, landed $66.4 million in a fifth round of funding on June 10, a major score for a company on the brink of mass commercial scale in the emerging automotive and utility sectors. The company said it would use the money to double its workforce, as well as grow its manufacturing center in Taiwan, and add to its sales, marketing and R&D operations. Existing investors Foundation Asset Management and Oak Investment Partners both led the round, which included investments from previous backers Venrock Associates and Gabriel Venture Partners.
6. OnLive
Games-on-demand company OnLive raised $60 million in a strategic round of funding from BT, the former British Telecommunications, on May 13, as part of a plan to expand its games on demand service to Europe. OnLive’s rivals include Otoy, Gaikai, InstantAction and GameStreamer. OnLive, founded by entrepreneur Steve Perlman, has more than 20 games available from game publishers such as the former Electronic Arts Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive and THQ. OnLive’s basic technology is compression, then a video is sent back over the broadband line to the user’s computer. OnLive’s goal is make that computing appear to happen in the cloud rather than on the user’s own computer.
7. Livescribe
Smartpen maker Livescribe, which launched at the DEMO conference in 2008 scored $44.8 million on Sept. 22, as the company pushed to further develop its product. Livescribe’s pens let students and professionals record lectures and link the playback of those lectures to written text. If you want to play back a section of a lecture, you simply tap on the written text. You can also use the pens to run writing-related apps and to get quick answers to math problems or translate foreign words. Crosslink Capital led the round, joined by Scale Venture Partners, Qualcomm, TransLink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital and existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lionhart and Aeris Capital.
8. Tremor Media
Video ad network Tremor Media pulled in $40 million on April 28, which the company said it would use to improve its Acudeo ad delivery platform to identify individual website visitors’ demographics on the fly, rather than needing to lump entire sites’ audiences into buckets. Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund, Triangle Peak Partners, Canaan Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, SAP Ventures, European Founders Fund, Masthead Venture Partners and DFJ Growth.
9. Jive
Business social networking company Jive Software reeled in $30 million on July 21 as it continued to make its mark as a leader in its niche. With 3,000 customers and more than 15 million users, the Portland, Ore., startup uses social networking within your company, community tools for interacting with your customers, and monitoring features to track what people are saying on sites like Twitter. The investment was led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital, the only venture investor in Jive up then. The news made headlines at the time for another reason: the last time Kleiner and Sequoia teamed up on a deal of this size (larger than $30 million) was more than a decade ago, when they invested in Google, a bet which has more than paid off.
10. Tumblr
Blogging platform Tumblr showed that people are still interested in long-format ruminations (or at least those bigger than Twitter’s 140 characters) by snagging $30 million on Dec. 12 after opening a new office in New York City and expanding its staff to 16 people. Tumblr, a social media network made up of millions of personal and business blogs, is seeing massive traffic growth, with activity on the network of Tumblr blogs skyrocketing over the first half of the year to reach around 2 billion pageviews this fall. Investors were clearly paying attention — this round was led by Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures, all well-known Silicon Valley star watchers.
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