First Round Capital has expanded its Dorm Room Fund to the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area. The fund will have $500,000 in capital and a 10-student investment team, according to a tweet from Josh Kopelman, First Round partner and founder.

Venture capitalists in most regions of the country put less money to work in 2012 than 2011. Not in the Pacific Northwest. There, money dispatched to emerging companies rose a startling 35%.

The hardest thing for entrepreneurs to do is nothing. These Type A personalities have a deep need to act. But great things don’t come along all that often, and picking projects carefully may be the best advice in today’s excitable technology markets.

For the ninth straight quarter, venture capital firms did more up rounds than down rounds for Silicon Valley-based startups in Q3, according to a report by law firm Fenwick & West. During the quarter, up rounds exceeded down rounds 70% to 15% with 15% flat, the report states. In Q2, up rounds exceeded down rounds 61% [...]

I heard two things recently. “Silicon Valley is a multi-inning game, relationships matter.“ And. “I am all business, I don’t care about relationships.” The first statement came from a seasoned venture capitalist with 20 years of experience. His point is relationships matter because you play with the same people over and over again. The second [...]

Venture capitalists in general wrote fewer checks in the third quarter, but investment enthusiasm varied widely from region to region. New York, Texas and the Pacific Northwest logged strong performances, despite an overall 12% decline in dollars going to startups nationwide, according to a peHUB analysis of MoneyTree Report data. New England, the Midwest, the [...]

In an age where seemingly everyone in the startup community now blogs, tweets and leaks his or her news, stretching the truth has become de rigueur. But I’d argue that it’s creating distrust; it’s also distorting the way that founders, the real engine of Silicon Valley, see the world.

What can be done about it, if anything? Earlier today, I asked neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris, whose new Kindle essay, “Lying,” explores our fundamental inclination to lie and self-promote. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Q: In your essay, you say your interest in lying was piqued as a Stanford freshman in a popular ethics course. What was so life-changing about it?

A: The course is surprisingly simple in its format and content. Basically, 10 people sit around giving [professor] Ron Howard — a pioneer in management science — examples of lies they think worth telling, and he just …

By now you know venture investors turned more active in the second quarter, with a substantial uptick in dollars flowing from their checkbooks to startups. What you may not know is that New York was one of the cheapest places to do a deal in this ebullient period. And that New England didn’t waste time [...]

Silicon Valley is tops–no doubt about it. But back East, there’s a fight shaping up for the country’s second-best VC city. However, a close examination of first quarter data show Silicon Valley regained ground as the center of the venture business while New York continued to give New England a run for its money. The [...]

I couldn’t help reposting the news from Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog that Russian investor Yuri Milner purchased a $70 million home in Silicon Valley. This isn’t because the news is surprising. It’s not a shock that Milner would want a base of operations in California’s venture heartland. This founder of the Moscow investment firm DST [...]