Principal Mozilla Engineer Mike Hanson Departs, Joins Greylock As EIR
Posted by Rip Empson, under Apple, Cisco, EIR, greylock, Mike Hanson, mozilla, TC, Venture Capital
Greylock Partners announced tonight that it has added a new member to its team, with Mike Hanson joining the firm this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Hanson joins Greylock from Mozilla, where he has been a principal engineer at Mozilla Labs for the last three years, playing a central role in conceiving the company’s distributed identity verification system, also known as BrowserID, and developing APIs and apps for Firefox’s apps platform — among other things.
Prior to Mozilla, Hanson was a principal engineer at Cisco, working on app delivery, particularly device virtualization, clustering, as well as data center strategy. Hanson also co-founded and was the chief architect at Reactivity and spent several years at the Apple Research Lab working on Sherlock, perhaps better known as the precursor to Spotlight. He also counts 16 patents to his name.
“In the Studio” rolls into the dog days of summer by welcoming a guest who, originally trained in computer science, went on to found a large consumer website, worked in venture capital on Sand Hill Road, and after helping out his would-be business partner learn the ropes of “hacking” the fundraising process, set out on a journey to build what a platform for startup investing and other related activities that has been gaining momentum and strength over the past few years.
A designer’s eye can change the world, but some don’t know how to build a company. So today, veteran Facebook designer
Facebook and Zynga’s post-IPO performances may have scared many companies off public markets for the time being, but liquidity is still available to certain smaller, private companies. SecondMarket took a look at the privately-held companies that continue to offer shares on the marketplace and found that they have an average valuation of $329 million and about 200 employees.
Lately investing in
The recent results of Zygna, Groupon, and even the mighty Facebook on the public markets in the U.S. have served to highlight a couple of major issues for European startups. One is a little jealously: there remain few viable IPO markets in Europe for tech stocks, hence why you see so many moving to the US – usually NASDAQ – when they get big, as happened with Yandex and Qlik Technologies. The second is annoyance: many solid European tech companies are now at a point where they have solid, revenue generating businesses, built on a lot more than hype and user numbers alone. And in the last year we’ve seen these companies start to look for ways to break-out.
Dow Jones VentureSource has released some figures about European venture capital which we should all take a look at and chew over. The headline news is something that you might not have predicted a few years ago. Given that bigger European tech companies have been largely drawn from the Enterpise/B2B space, it’s significant that consumer Internet companies are now leading the charge. But the trends also show that European tech companies are suffering from too few exit opportunities which is leading to later-stage financing rounds and less deal activity.
Hacking, viruses,
The ridesharing-disruptive car service space in the U.S. is about to get a little more crowded: 