Although few education startups have swayed the masses, VCs are once again backing tech companies focused on the sector.

Monday’s First Read has Demand Media in demand, the Winkle-fund, and where IS the wall between Silicon Valley and Stanford?

Game Closure, a Mountain View, Calif.-based maker of HTML5-based cross-platform game technology, has raised $12 million. Highland Capital Partners led the Series A round, with Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst and Charles River Ventures also participating. Highland’s Andy Miller has joined the company’s board of directors. PRESS RELEASE Game Closure today announced a Series A financing [...]

Venture firm Greylock has formed a dedicated team to help its portfolio companies recruit talented employees. Jeff Markowitz joined the firm to focus on executive level talent. And Dan Portillo has joined to focus on product and engineering recruiting, the firm announced Monday. Markowitz joins from Heidrick & Struggles, where he was the managing director of the venture capital practice. Portillo joins from Rypple, where he was the VP of customer success.

Investors may have poured $950 million into Groupon earlier this year. But that didn’t snag any of the newcomers so much as 5% of the fast-growing discount deal site.

That’s the takeaway from an initial reading of Groupon’s IPO filing. The document lists only two of the company’s venture investors — New Enterprise Associates and Accel Partners -– as principal shareholders. NEA, which backed Groupon’s first venture round in 2008, holds a $14.7% stake in the company. Accel, which invested in Groupon’s second round in 2009, among others, according to Thomson Reuters, owns 5.6 percent.

Among those not listed as principal shareholders are the firms that participated in Groupon’s last financing round of $950 million. The backers for that round, announced in January, included Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group, Maverick Capital, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures.

At the time of that announcement, my colleague, Connie

Tim Westergren, the founder of online radio network Pandora, wouldn’t discuss his company’s plans for a potential $100 million IPO, which Reuters reported last month is imminent, but he offered plenty of lessons for startups that are struggling to make a go of it. “Do what it takes, get people to work for free, and [...]

Big day over at Greylock Partners, which has closed a new fund, hired a big-name new partner and agreed to move its East Coast office from staid Waltham to trendy Cambridge.

Fund XIII came in at $575 million, which is significalty higher than the $500 million Greylock raised for its twelfth fund in 2006. Partner Bill Hellman says the added capital was the result of existing investors requesting more than their pro rata shares. Greylock doesn’t take pre-determined management fees — it operates on year-to-year budgets — which might help explain why liquidity-drained LPs were ready to open their pocketbooks for Greylock.

Greylock also announced that LinkedIn co-founder and executive chairman Reid Hoffman has signed on as a partner. LinkedIn is a Greylock portfolio company, having first raised money from the firm as part of a $10 million Series B round in 2004.

Arnon Dinur has joined Greylock as a partner in the firm’s Israel office. He previously spent seven years with SanDisk, as a senior vice president leading mobile strategy.

Here is his bio from the Greylock website: