Lacy said that she has no intentions of ever selling PandoDaily and if she does, then she believes she has failed. She was heavily opposed to TechCrunch being sold to AOL at the time, but believed that Arrington deserved to get rich. Personally I’m excited for Sarah and the fact that another tech blog has received funding reaffirms the business model.

[PandoDaily]

Hoffman also currently serves on the board of 8 companies including Mozilla and Zynga. Hoffman also divides his time amongst three non-profits.

“I’ve never made a significant move, decision, without consulting him,” said Shopkick founder Cyriac Roeding about Hoffman.

Although Hoffman often received B’s and C’s in middle school, Hoffman was extremely focused as a child. When he was 5, he made his dad keep reading “The Lord of the Rings” to him in bed. His dad said “Apparently, I wasn’t reading fast enough” so the “bookmark moved further and further ahead.”

When Hoffman was 12, he showed up on a Friday at the offices of Chaosium, the game development company behind RuneQuest. RuneQuest was a fantasy role-playing game that was published in 1978. Hoffman gave the company a manual marked with suggestions in red ink. Hoffman was given a job and received a check a few weeks later for $127. “It changed my father’s view of what I was doing,” said Hoffman. “He realized I could make a living out of this.”

In 1985 when Hoffman enrolled at Stanford, he decided to major in symbolic systems. This was the studio between computing and human intelligence. He became friends with fellow student Peter Thiel at Stanford. When Netscape went public in 1995, Hoffman and Thiel watched what happened closely. Hoffman knew that social media was going to be huge, but his first company flopped. In 1997 Hoffman launched a company called SocialNet, which focused on online dating. SocialNet would pair people with similar interests, but nobody was interested in signing up. After Hoffman partnered with a newspaper in Arizona, only 2 customers had signed up.

Frustrated by the lack of growth, Hoffman quit SocialNet in 1999 to join Thiel at PayPal. At PayPal, Hoffman was the go-to guy for meeting with the credit card company executives that was not sure whether they trusted the payment services company or not. Hoffman managed all external relations. “He was the firefighter in chief at PayPal,” said Thiel. “Though that diminishes his role because there were many, many fires.”

After PayPal went public, Thiel and Hoffman both became multimillionaires. Thiel went out and bought a Ferrari, while Hoffman bought an Acura instead. He still drives that same Acura today. Hoffman decided to take the money he earned and invest in other start-ups.

LinkedIn currently has 135 million registered users across 200 countries. The company has been able to turn a profit in six out of the last seven quarters. However it took the company five years to turn its first profit. The first year was the hardest for LinkedIn because Friendster was the most popular social network and LinkedIn was considered dull.

“One of the things I thought of every week was, ‘What happens if we don’t make this? How do we die gracefully?’ ” said Hoffman.

In 2008 when the economy was tanking, a lot of people joined LinkedIn for their premium job and recruiting services. It was around then that Hoffman decided to replace former LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye with Jeff Weiner, a former Yahoo! executive.

LinkedIn has grown quite a bit in value since going public. LinkedIn’s membership has doubled annually for each of the last seven years. However LinkedIn cannot afford another bad quarter otherwise its share price would be slammed and they would lose talent to the next big thing in tech. Hoffman tries not to pay attention to the markets though. He said he has checked LinkedIn’s stock price only six times since May.

The islands would operate in international waters and would allow a Libertarian style of government that does not have welfare, minimum wage requirements, or weapons restrictions.

Thiel was to launch a floating office park off of the coast of San Francisco, California next year. He expects a full settlement of the island in 2019. Thiel and Seasteading aims to have 10 million floating residents by 2050.

[Digital Trends]

[AllThingsD]

Founders Fund Raises $250 Million for Third Venture Fund

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19 /PRNewswire/ – Founders Fund, the venture backer of companies including Facebook, Spotify, and SpaceX, has closed its third venture fund.  The Founders Fund III LP and its parallel funds were oversubscribed, reaching the firm’s cap of $250 million in commitments, making the Fund III suite the firm’s largest yet.  The substantial majority of commitments came from limited partners of the firm’s prior funds, joined by a small number of new investors.

Founders Fund is managed by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, and Sean Parker, all of whom were company founders before becoming venture capitalists.   Founders Fund seeks to eliminate the traditional tensions between venture capitalists and start-ups through a unique, founder-friendly approach.  ”Our goal is to provide as much support for a company as it requires, without interfering with an entrepreneur’s vision for that company,” said Peter Thiel.  ”In our experience that leads to the best returns for our investors.”  ”Founders Fund has been an incredible partner for Quantcast; they’ve offered outstanding advice and guidance while giving us the freedom to grow the business in the ways we think best.  Quantcast’s tremendous growth testifies to the effectiveness of that model,” said Konrad Feldman, CEO of Quantcast, the audience insights and targeting company backed by Founders Fund.

Fund III intends to leverage the firm’s experience in consumer-internet, as well as to expand its investments in companies pursuing revolutionary solutions to major science and engineering problems.  ”As companies like Spotify make clear, consumer internet continues to present tremendous opportunities,” said managing partner Sean Parker, who previously served as the founding president of Facebook and co-founder of Causes (both Founders Fund investments), and who also co-founded Napster and Plaxo. “And as the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 demonstrates, ambitious engineering projects can also generate terrific value,” said Luke Nosek, a Founders Fund managing partner and a director of SpaceX.

According to Ken Howery, “Despite years of cynicism and low returns in the industry, our companies show that there are compelling opportunities in several categories for bold investors.”  ”I worked with the partners of Founders Fund when I was at PayPal, and their expertise in consumer internet is second to none.  Having worked with them at Palantir and now at RoboteX, I can say that they are the rare VC that understands both consumer-side and hard engineering and that they invest with conviction,” said Nathan Gettings, CEO of RoboteX, which makes multi-purpose robots used by police agencies, SWAT teams, and civilian users.  Gettings is also CTO of Founders Fund portfolio company Palantir, the analytical software firm that helped track down the perpetrators of the attacks on the Dalai Lama’s computers.

“We’re delighted that our limited partners have backed us for a third fund,” said Howery, “and we’ll use that fund to continue supporting transformational companies.”

ABOUT FOUNDERS FUND

Founders Fund is managed by seasoned entrepreneurs Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek (co-founders, PayPal) and Sean Parker (founding president, Facebook; co-founder Plaxo, Causes, Napster) to support early-stage companies.  Founders Fund has made early investments in some of the most prominent ventures of the past decade, including Facebook, Causes, Palantir Technologies, Quantcast, and SpaceX.  The firm, headquartered in San Francisco, pursues a founder-friendly investment strategy that provides maximum support and minimum interference to world-class entrepreneurs.

Halcyon plans to sequence complete human genomes in less than 10 minutes at a cost of $100. This is a much smaller price and smaller amount of time than currently existing genome sequencing labs. Nosek will continue to lead The Founders Fund’s genomics investing division. Peter Thiel will be joining the board of directors at Halcyon Molecular too.

Halcyon will be competing with 23andme, a genomics company founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Halcyon even received a $2 million aberration corrected STEM electron microscope on loan from the U.S. DoE.

For example, if you want to endorse the new Ray-Ban sunglasses you bought, you are encouraged to tag them in a picture of yourself wearing them to a website where others can buy it. The brands will appreciate the free endorsement too. Udorse even has several partners. If sales are made by your referral picture, then you get a cut too.

Udorse even allows you to connect your Facebook Photos to your Udorse account, making it easier to tag the photos initially. The person that highlights the item receives a 25% commission fee if another person purchases the item. As of yesterday Armani and American Apparel partnered with Udorse. Udorse was founded by Geoffrey Lewis and Trevor Austin.

Video demo available after the jump.

Facebook told Twitter that their stock was worth about $8-$9 billion.  And the Twitter team knew that employees were selling stock at $2-$4 billion.  Then Facebook offered Twitter $100 million in cash and the rest in stock.  Facebook would make $100 million for Twitter by selling stock to outside investors.  Twitter would have agreed if Facebook offered stock in the form of what the shares would earn on the open market.

Thiel did not reveal how much he thinks Facebook is worth.  “It’s worth more than people think it is,” is what Thiel had to say about Facebook.  Facebook is still open to acquiring other companies.

[via BW]