The Venture Alley - A blog about business and legal issues important to entrepreneurs, startups, venture capitalists and angel investors.

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  The short list of Silicon Valley female CEOs at well-known tech companies just got a little longer.  Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn M. Rusli of The New York Times Dealbook broke the story today that Yahoo has named Marissa Mayer as CEO (its fifth CEO in five years).  Mayer comes to Yahoo from a prominent executive role at Google, having been hired originally as employee number 20 and the first female engineer at Google.  Yahoo's press release announcing Ms. Mayer's appointment as President, CEO and a member of the board of directors, states that the "appointment of Ms. Mayer, a leading consumer internet... More

CONTRIBUTED BYTrent Dykestrent.dykes@dlapiper.com John Melloy’s article entitled “The Dictators of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google Stripping Shareholder of Power” highlights an interesting trend among tech companies that have gone public in the past several years – implementing dual-class voting structures. The general idea behind these dual-class voting structures is to keep control in the hands of the individuals (usually the founders) who supposedly know what is best for the company and to shield a company from potential public company shareholder activism and hostile takeovers. Control is maintained by either giving the founder shares more votes per share than the shares issued to... More

CONTRIBUTED BYTrent Dykestrent.dykes@dlapiper.com Earlier this week, I attended the TechNW 2011 conference organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). The conference was very informative and full of interesting presenters and topics. The corporate development panel discussion moderated by Tom Huseby (General Partner and founder of SeaPoint Ventures) was particularly interesting for startups (and relevant to my practice). The panelists were Neeraj Arora (Principal, Corporate Development at Google), Ryan Aytay (VP of Corporate Development at Salesforce.com), Ryan Cooper (Corporate Development Director at Microsoft), and Amin Zoufonoun (Director of Corporate Development at Facebook), all companies that have grown a great deal through partnerships... More