Sherpa Ventures Starts $150M Fundraising With $15M Infusion From TPG

Sherpa Ventures - a new early-stage venture firm recently founded by well-known Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar, formerly of Menlo Ventures, and former Goldman Sachs tech banker Scott Stanford - has started off its efforts to raise $150 million for its initial fund with a $15 million commitment from private equity giant TPG Capital, according to sources close to the situation.

The pair declined to comment on the new funding anchor for Sherpa, which has apparently already made more than two dozen investments in startups since its creation earlier this year. They include BackOps, a cloud-based company that offers back-office services like accounting, human resources and financial reporting; and Munchery, a gourmet-meal delivery service.

Along with Sherpa, Pishevar and Stanford also are working on a second part of their new business, called Sherpa Foundry, a business aimed at helping major strategic corporations gain a digital edge with their existing assets.

Interestingly, TPG recently made a big investment in Uber, the red-hot travel-logistics company. Pishevar has been a close adviser to co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick.

As I noted in a February post about their new endeavors, the pair's efforts will certainly be interesting to watch:

Indeed more than many in the tech scene, the incessantly networking Pishevar is perhaps well suited to such an ambitious effort like Sherpa. He's has worked closely with a lot of Web 2.0 s hottest startups, such as Uber, Fab and Warby Parker, while also leading Menlo's investment in Tumblr.

An active angel investor, he has also started a number of companies, such as the Social Gaming Network, which was merged with MindJolt.

And Stanford is equally well known in Silicon Valley, having shepherded a wide variety of high-profile deals for the banking giant, while heading its global Internet investment banking business from San Francisco as a managing director. He's been at Goldman for a dozen years and has been involved in investments in Facebook, Zappos and LinkedIn. Before banking, he worked at pioneering search company, LookSmart.

Former Twitter, Facebook Product Pro Josh Elman Becomes Partner at Greylock

Venture capital firm Greylock Partners announced on Wednesday that Josh Elman, a Silicon Valley veteran of mainstream consumer tech companies, has been promoted to become the firm's newest partner.

Elman joined Greylock as a principal almost two years ago, after his time at Twitter as a product manager, where he lead the growth team for the microblogging service.

Before that, he was a product manager working on Facebook Platform, leading the launch of Facebook Connect, the product used on many, many websites today (including this one). And before that, he spent time in product management positions at both Zazzle and LinkedIn.

"I believe in investing in stuff that I know," Elman said in an interview. "That means I'll likely be looking at consumer tech, with a focus on looking for companies that find the best ways to connect people with one another."

He has worked with local social network Nextdoor, for example, on growth, product and strategy decisions.

"I think the fact that we're still so early in the days of mobile - with the rise of smartphones and tablets - we're just at the beginning of how we do that connecting," Elman said.

Elman will be based in Greylock's Menlo Park, Calif., office.

U.S. Opposes Tech Companies' Requests to Disclose Surveillance

The U.S. Department of Justice is formally opposing requests by technology companies to disclose more information about the frequency with which they are contacted by the U.S. government to give up user data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Responding to petitions from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and LinkedIn, the government shut them down, as expected, because it said disclosures would pose a risk to national security. It's unclear when a ruling will come in the secret court inside the Justice Department headquarters where the case is being held.

"Such information would be invaluable to our adversaries, who could thereby derive a clear picture of where the Government's surveillance efforts are directed and how its surveillance activities change over time," the brief said. "If our adversaries know which platforms the Government does not surveil, they can communicate over those platforms when, for example, planning a terrorist attack or the theft of state secrets."

Google said in a statement today, "We're disappointed that the Department of Justice opposed our petition for greater transparency around FISA requests for user information. We also believe more openness in the process is necessary since no one can fully see what the government has presented to the court."

And Microsoft: "We will continue to press for additional transparency, which is critical to understanding the facts and having an informed debate about the right balance between personal privacy and national security."

Yahoo's response: ""We are disappointed with the Justice Department's decision to bar us and other Internet companies from publicly disclosing the specific number of user data requests that we receive from the U.S. Government under national security statutes. Yahoo and many other technology firms have made the commitment to share the number and type of government requests we receive for our users' data through regular reports. The U.S. Government's decision to block our ability to share with our users more granular information related to national security requests ultimately breeds mistrust and suspicion-both of the United States and of companies that must comply with government legal directives. As we've said before, the United States should lead the world when it comes to transparency, accountability, and respect of civil liberties and human rights. We urge the U.S. Government to reconsider this decision and grant our petition for greater transparency around national security requests for user data."

And LinkedIn weighed in: "LinkedIn deeply respects and supports the U.S. government's strong interest in, and its obligation to protect, national security. However, we believe this interest must be weighed against transparency and accountability. We firmly believe that what we are seeking - the disclosure of the number of U.S. national security-related requests that we receive - is consistent with national security interests, the law and our commitment to transparency."

In its brief, the government rejected the companies' arguments about First Amendment rights and said that public debate around surveillance was a justification for more transparency.

It said: "Contrary to the companies' argument that they have a First Amendment right to disclose this sensitive national security information, it is well-settled that prohibitions on the disclosure of classified information, such as the ones contained in this Court's orders, satisfy the First Amendment. The Government has a compelling interest in protecting such national security information from disclosure, and the prohibitions on disclosure are narrowly tailored to protect that interest."

And, regarding all the public outcry since the Edward Snowden disclosures about widespread data collection: "Although the Government has attempted to release as much information as possible about the intelligence collection activities overseen by this court, the public debate about surveillance does not give the companies the First Amendment right to disclose information that the Government has determined must remain classified."

Oh, and for good measure, the Justice Department also said that decisions about declaratory relief were out of the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where the dispute is being held.

Here's the brief:

Motion Declaratory Judgement 131002

Investment Adviser and Entrepreneur

I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression [sic] amongst mankind ... To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.

- From the LinkedIn profile summary of Ross Ulbricht, who was arrested Tuesday as the alleged Silk Road mastermind "Dread Pirate Roberts"

LinkedIn's Mobile Update Telegraphs Its Interest In Endorsement Data

LinkedIn has updated its iPhone app with the ability to create endorsements for your connections right from your smartphone or tablet. The move demonstrates how important LinkedIn feels that this endorsement data is to its growing trove of signals.

The app has also been updated to look more 'iOS 7-ready' and has a new on-boarding guide for users that haven't used the mobile app before. The LinkedIn newsreader app Pulse for iPhone also gets a refresh which adds background downloading and a new look on iOs 7.

But the biggest change is the emphasis on endorsements in the main LinkedIn app, and the additional connective tissue that this adds to its products on all platforms. In a blog post announcing the new ability today, LinkedIn positions endorsements as something that can and should be done on the fly. Previously, these kinds of personal recommendations have only been accessible from the web and were a fairly involved affair. You could draw a fairly clear connection between endorsements and the references you see on a resume. Thorough, in-depth explanations of why someone is good at what they do.

Adding them to mobile, along with the language in the release, indicates that LinkedIn wants to ramp up the gathering of these endorsements. Faster, lighter notes about why someone should be considered an expert sounds like a good supplemental source of data that LinkedIn can use to index and recommend workers.

Though endorsements have been around since late last year - and LinkedIn says that over 2B of them have been given to day - adding them to mobile introduces a new dynamic.

In some ways this sounds like what Geeklist has been doing with developers and tech folks for a while. Geeklist allows users to create 'brag cards' of achievements and accomplishments that can be summed up in just a couple of sentences. If LinkedIn is able to turn endorsements into this kind of quick-fire card stack that can be flipped through by users and indexed by LinkedIn itself, it might have something interesting on its hands.

Specifically, a source of endorsements that's more human and parseable. LinkedIn has gained a reputation for being overly complex and dry. A layer of humanity and shareable 'brag points' could do something to offset that.

These moves fit in with LinkedIn's efforts to make online resumes feel more at home on mobile. Messaging services for networking and content are two clear facets of LinkedIn's current product push, but this seems to dovetail nicely with the shifting perception of LinkedIn as a job search site, rather than a 'connection' resource.