The New Silicon Valley Douchebag
Anyone who was in the Valley during the late 1990s knows exactly the guy I'm about to describe. He wore blue shirts and khakis. He was a regular at the Bubble Lounge. He always insisted on grabbing the check, throwing down the dot com AmEx for everyone's drinks, making sure everyone knew he did and later bragging about dropping "several C notes last night." He was a business school drop out, who thought that gave him enough cool points to negate the fact that he was lame enough to enroll in business school in the first place. He hogged the Razor scooter at your cavernous loft-like office, was way too loud when he won at foosball, took up all the restaurant reservations and cabs in the city, drove up the rents to unsustainable levels and generally made everyone else's life miserable. Worse: He was frequently seen as the most important person in the startup. Thank God he left in droves once the bubble burst. Even better: He never came back. But as happens with hot markets, there's a new douchebag in town.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/c21ZzMt_4u0/
Recently I sat down with a well-connected Silicon Valley CEO who just raised a ton of money, and who knew of other startups raising even more. There is a new startup club of younger companies raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. I already knew a couple of them, but I started asking a few venture capitalists and now I have a pretty good list of who is in that club and who is trying to get in (see below). As we all watch the established Web companies go public (
