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Happy full Olympics week!

I have to say, even among all the controversy with NBC and tape delays and Twitter accounts being suspended, I’ve really enjoyed the Games this year.

This morning, I started to cry when they told the story of Oscar Pistorius running the 400 meter race for South Africa…on prosthetic legs. It’s pretty freaking amazing what human beings can do when they put their minds to it. And, not only may he take home a medal, he’s teaching kids with prosthetic legs how to run and not let others treat them like they’re different.

I love that.

It’s been a very inspiring week from the Phelps/Lochte rivalry, Gabby Douglas taking home gold to Missy Franklin hugging her parents after her win and President Obama tweeting his congratulations.

Go Team USA!

And, speaking of Team USA, we have a couple of videos that pay tribute to the swimming and gymnastics teams.

5. Call Me Maybe – 2012 USA Olympic Swimming Team. I saw this video too late last week, as I’d already written Gin and Topics. So I saved it for today, which also risks you’ve already seen it. This is the swimming team singing, dancing, and swimming to Call Me Maybe. I’ve seriously watched it at least five times, even though the song is waaaaaay overdone.

4. Nationals Bullpen Reads Fifty Shades of Grey. Daria  Steigman sent this to me and I was crying from laughing so hard. It’s not very long and don’t forget to wait until the very, very end…even after the MLB logo.

3. Actors Read Yelp Reviews.  Actress Therese Plummer reads Yelp reviews…the good and bad including Indian food that made one reviewer “pee out my butt.” Holy cow. Thanks to Nicole Vernet for making sure I saw this!

2. The Smartest Dog in the World. I don’t know if I should be really impressed by this or pained by it. The smartest dog in the world is so well trained, he knows “touch” vs. “get” and, when he’s told to get the toy on the count of three, he doesn’t go near it, literally, until the guy says three. Thanks to Blair Minton for sending it along!

1. What Makes You Beautiful: A 2012 USA Gymnastics Team Parody. This is a riot! It’s to the tune of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” but some guys in a gym paying tribute to the women’s gymnastics team.

Happy weekend, everyone!

This sponsored post is produced by Vator.tv.

Venture Shift, a gathering of top VCs and angels exploring what is happening in the seed to later stages and hosted by Vator and Bullpen Capital is taking place in San Francisco on July 19th and you are invited. It’s a forum to talk about the startup-formation process, “exit” dynamics, and the strategies that create the “best” companies. Last year, the event sold out with more than 400 attendees.

Register now with the discount code “VB15” to get 15% off your ticket.

This year has brought many changes to the venture industry. Firstly, the JOBS Act – poised to enable start-ups to crowdsource funds from non-accredited investors, expand Regulation A and loosen IPO onramp provisions — was enacted this year and will become a reality in 2013. In addition, Facebook is scaring away potential tech IPO hopefuls from going public. Who’d thunk?

The start-up ecosystem is in flux and will continue to evolve and affect the way entrepreneurs build their companies and investors allocate their funds. Knowing how to build, given the restraints and new opportunities, and what to expect from today’s investors is essential to founders and all entrepreneurs.

Kate Mitchell, founder and Managing Partner at Scale Venture Partners, is a big proponent of the JOBS Act and one of the biggest tech influencers who convinced lawmakers to embrace this initiative. She’ll be giving a keynote on just how the JOBS Act will affect fundraising and start-ups. There will also be a number of new high-profile VC firms from 500 Startups to Felicis Ventures to Floodgate, just to name a few. And, of course there will also be entrepreneurs sharing their fundraising stories.

Among the confirmed speakers include Dave McClure (500 Startups), Kate Mitchell (Scale Venture Partners), Chris Hulls (Life360), John Tayman (Byliner), Alexander Mouldovan (Marketo), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate), Corey Reese (Ness Computing), Dave Samuel (Freestyle), Dave Whorton (Tugboat), Duncan Davidson (Bullpen Capital), Ezra Roizen (Ackrell Capital), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), Jessica Alter (Founder Dating), Lawrence Coburn (DoubleDutch), Marcus Ogawa (Quest VP), Matt Ocko (Data Collective), Michael Neril (WIN), Noah J. Doyle (Javelin Venture Partners), Renata Streit Quintini (Felicis), Rich Levandov (Avalon Ventures), Richard Melmon (Bullpen Capital), Rick Marini (BranchOut), Stewart Alsop (Alsop Louie Partners), Trevor Kienzle (Correlation VC).

Register now with the discount code “VB15” to get 15% off your ticket.

Filed under: Entrepreneur, VentureBeat

Bullpen Capital, the Silicon Valley-based early stage venture capital firm, is raising $35 million for what appears to be its second fund, according to regulatory documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Bullpen Capital was founded in late 2010 and is aimed at making follow-on investments in startups that have already received angel funding. Even though the firm is quite young, its portfolio has already had some hits: Bullpen’s investments have included Assistly, which was acquired by Salesforce, and FlashSoft, which was acquired by SanDisk.

According to the new SEC filing, Bullpen is now looking to raise $35 million for what appears to be its second fund, Bullpen Capital II. No money has been raised for the fund yet, the filing says. Bullpen’s founders and partners Duncan Davidson, Paul Martino, and Richard Melmon are all named in the document.

It’s a step down in size from Bullpen’s first fund, for which the firm targeted a $50 million raise back in December 2010.

We’ve reached out to Bullpen for comment on the new raise and its plans for Bullpen Capital II. We’ll be sure to report back once we receive more details.

Enterprise mobile startup DoubleDutch has raised $2 million in Series A funding, the company is reporting today, in a round led by Bullpen Capital and including Mike Maples’ Floodgate Fund, as well as Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. The funding follows the company’s previous raise of $1.2 million a year ago, led by Lightbank.

The startup, which makes mobile productivity applications for business customers, currently has two products on the market: Hive and Flock. The former, a CRM engagement app, lets employees update their CRM system on the go using an attractive touch-based interface for entering things like deal stage, size, and personal notes, and it even records location as one of the elements that can be captured. The product was designed with a mobile-first mindset, using things like touchable sliders which can be dragged adjust numbers related to the deal. The data created in the app can also be synced back to the company’s in-house CRM system, like Salesforce, for example.

Meanwhile, Flock is a white label platform that allows companies to build a social, branded app for their events, tradeshows or conferences.

DoubleDutch, which was founded in March 2010, is currently profitable, and is expecting revenues of $5 million. Last year, the company noted that it was serving customers including Cisco, HP, Gannett, TED and Adobe. Other customers include Lowe’s, RightNow, UBM, CDW, IDG, and Roche.

The company is now hiring (“mobile like a fox“) in San Francisco, hoping to double staff to 25 by year-end. Also in the works? More apps, of course.

About a year ago, Tello debuted a Yelp-style forum for rating the customer service at local businesses. Now the SaaS and mobile application company has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and Bullpen Capital.

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Tello,, a SaaS and mobile app that allows customers to give businesses realtime feedback on customer service, has raised $2.7 million in new funding led by True Ventures and Bullpen Capital. The company, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, previously raised $1 million in seed funding from Dave McClure, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Russ Siegelman, Marc Goines, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, and Shervin Pishevar.

On the consumer side, Tello is a free web and mobile service that aggregates ratings for businesses (business listings are aggregated from Localeze) from across the web and allows users to post comments about their experience at a business. Users can provide feedback on specific employees, recommend an employees and share a positive or negative story about the employee. Via iPhone and Android apps, users can select a specific business, choose and employee at the business and rate the service with a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

With Tello’s mobile apps, people can even specify employee names and provide specific feedback on an individual.

Today, Tello is also launching Tello for Business, a new service that helps businesses of any size improve by enabling instant feedback via customers’ mobile devices. Tello for Business allows businesses to be immediately notified of feedback and can respond instantly to acknowledge praise or resolve issues in real-time. The basic version of Tello for Business is free to businesses with up to 3 locations, while the premium version is $99 per location per month, and adds the ability for businesses to respond both publicly and privately to the ratings.

Tello for Business customers can view detailed dashboards with a live ratings feed that provide customized views of customer feedback, business metrics and employee ratings. Until now, Tello has been manually forwarding any complaints or requests to the business, so giving businesses the ability to manage customer feedback in realtime should be attractive to consumers using Tello as well.

Founder and CEO Joe Beninato tells us that the new funding will be used for growth, specifically hiring for the engineering and product team as well as for sales and marketing. The funds will also be used to acquire businesses to join Tello.

Family safety startup Life360, which makes a freemium mobile security app by the same name, is today announcing it has secured $3.5 million in Series A funding. The round included investment from Fontinalis Partners, Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture51, Bullpen Capital, Social Leverage and Eghosa Omoigui’s EchoVC Partners, as well as existing investors LaunchCapital, Seraph Group and Mark Goines.

The latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $5 million. The company says it will use the new funding to move into other verticals, including cars and homes.

For those unfamiliar with Life360, the app provides a number of features targeted towards families, including family locator services, private “check-ins,” alerts, neighborhood safety notices, identify protection, and more. Some of the features are available for free, while others are available for the app’s premium subscribers.

The move to freemium caused a big uptick in growth, as Jason Kincaid reported back in January. At the time, the company was nearing 1 million signups. Now it has over 10 million.

With the additional investment, the company says it’s expanding its focus beyond mobile, with plans to automatically link vehicles and homes to the service, without requiring additional hardware. This would allow users to enable vehicle tracking and home monitoring features which would be accessible via their mobile phone.

Currently, Life360 is available on the Android and iPhone platforms, but is listed as “coming soon” to both Windows Phone and BlackBerry. You can grab a copy for yourself from here.

The venture capital industry is going through a ton of disruptions lately. One of the better explanations I’ve heard recently of what is going on comes from Duncan Davidson, a managing partner at Bullpen Capital who gave a great talk on the subject at TechCrunch Tokyo last week. I interviewed him backstage on video, where he summarized his views.

Just as there are now legions of “lean startups” which require less capital to build a product, Davidson argues that a “lean finance model” is also needed. “We are in the era of cheap. The whole concept is keep the company as lean as possible until the company validates its market, then you shovel the money in.”

Tech startups don’t need $5 million A rounds when $2 million to $3 million will do. So A rounds now get bypassed until a company proves itself and then you see these huge later-stage rounds. Or sometimes the startup gets sold for $30 million to $50 million, which is okay, since it didn’t have to grow into a huge valuation to begin with.

In this view, we are not really seeing a Series A Crunch (where the growing number of seed-funded companies are failing to find series A money). Rather, they are getting smaller amounts to see them through until acquisition or a later mega-round where the big VCs throw their weight around. “I call it a shovel-in round,” he says. “We go under the A.”

He notes that now half of all of the first institutional money going into startups is now “coming from a new breed of super angels.” This is a dramatic change from just two years ago,when less than 10 percent of the money was coming from super angels (see slide below).

The big-name VCs will still do okay. In the first half of this year, 7 top-tier firms commanded 80 percent of all the money going to venture capital. It’s the middle tier firms that are scrambling for survival.

This post is sponsored by VatorTV

There are some rumblings that cash may be drying up for tech startups. Does that mean a shakeout is on the horizon, and angel investor hobbyists are going to go back to their day jobs? Are the nose-bleed valuations at the later stages sustainable? The ecosystem is changing and affecting the way entrepreneurs build their companies and investors allocate their funds. Knowing how to build, given the restraints and new opportunities, and what to expect from today’s investors is essential to founders and all entrepreneurs.

Get first-hand knowledge about what’s happening across the venture landscape from top-notch seed- to late-stage investors as they share their experience at Venture Shift NY.

Venture Shift NY, hosted by Vator and Bullpen Capital, will be held on November 17 at Le Poisson Rouge in New York and will kick off at 4 pm with an open wine bar until 10 pm.

To get your 15% VentureBeat discount, use code “VB15?. Get your tickets before they sell out. Register here.

Here’s the agenda:

4:00 to 5:10 – Networking, snacks

5:10 to 5:20 – Opening remarks: Bambi Francisco from Vator and Paul Martino from BullPen

5:20 to 5:50 – Panel No. 1: How angels and super angels/micro-cap VC funds are changing the stakes and creating a new ecosystem
Daniel Garrie (Pulse Advisory), Roger Erhenberg (IA Ventures), David Tisch (TechStars), Owen Davis (NYC Seed), John Borthwick (Betaworks), moderator: Bruce Taragin (Blumberg Capital)

5:50 to 6:15 – Keynote: Barry Silbert, CEO and founder, SecondMarket

6:15 to 6:45 – Panel No. 2: Money finds a way: How secondary markets have opened up new financing options
David Cundey (Credit Suisse), Dani Hughes (Divine Capital), Spencer Punter (Capital Dynamics), John Avirett (Greenspring), Ward Breeze (Gunderson), Ed Zimmerman (Lowenstein), moderator: Duncan Davidson (Bullpen)

6:45 to 7:00 - Floating Point 1 – Billy Chasen, CEO and co-founder, Turntable.fm

7:00 to 7:35 – Snacks, drinks and networking

7:35 to 7:50 – Floating Point 2 – Michael Lazerow, CEO and founder, Buddy Media

7:50 to 8:20 – Panel No. 3: Has the traditional VC industry been forced to pivot by the rise of angels, super angels, incubators, etc? (New vs Old)
James Robinson (RRE), David Teten (ff Venture Capital), Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), Gil Beyda (Genacast), Bobby Ocampo (Grotech), moderator: Rich Melmon (Bullpen)

8:20 to 8:45 - Keynote: Mark Suster, Partner, GRP

8:45 to 9:15 – Panel No. 4: Super angels, micro-VC, incubators, options buyers: Which early-stage strategy is best?
Lee Hower (Next View), Tony Florence (NEA) Lewis Gersh (Metamorphic), Micah Rosenbloom (Founder Collective), Vic Singh (ENIAC Ventures), moderator: Ezra Roizen (Ackrell Capital)

9:20 to 10:00 – More networking time

Filed under: enterprise, VentureBeat

The following post is sponsored by Vator.tv.

There are some rumblings that cash may be drying up for tech startups. Does that mean a shakeout is on the horizon, and angel investor hobbyists are going to go back to their day jobs? Are the nose-bleed valuations at the later stages sustainable? The ecosystem is changing and affecting the way entrepreneurs build their companies and investors allocate their funds. Knowing how to build, given the restraints and new opportunities, and what to expect from today’s investors is essential to founders and all entrepreneurs.

Get first-hand knowledge about what’s happening across the venture landscape from top-notch seed- to late-stage investors as they share their experience at Venture Shift NY.

Venture Shift NY, hosted by Vator and Bullpen Capital, will be held on November 17 at Le Poisson Rouge in New York and will kick off at 4 pm with an open wine bar until 10 pm.

To get your 15% VentureBeat discount, use code “VB15″. Get your tickets before they sell out. Register here.

Here’s the lineup of speakers:
Mark Suster, Partner at GRP
Barry Silbert, Founder and CEO of SecondMarket
Billy Chasen, CEO and co-founder of Turntable.fm
Michael Lazerow, CEO and founder of Buddy Media
Howard Morgan, Managing Partner at First Round Capital
David Tisch of TechStars
James Robinson, Partner at RRE
Tony Florence, Partner at NEA
Owen Davis, Partner at NYC Seed
David Cundey at Credit Suisse
Brian Hutchings of Gunderson
Gil Beyda, Founder & Managing Partner at Genacast Ventures
Roger Ehrenberg, Founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures
Daniel B. Garrie at Pulse Advisory
Lewis Gersh, Managing Partner at Metamorphic Ventures
Rick Heitzmann, Founder and Managing Director of FirstMark Capital
Spencer Punter of Capital Dynamics
Lee Hower, General Partner of NextView Ventures
Bobby Ocampo of Grotech Ventures
John Avirett of Greenspring
Ezra Roizen of Ackrell Capital
Micah Rosenbloom of Founder Collective
Bambi Francisco, Founder, Vator
Paul Martino, Founder, Bullpen Capital
Duncan Davidson, Founder Bullpen Capital
Rich Melmon, Founder, Bullpen Capital

Remember, get your VentureBeat discount tickets using VB15 before they’re sold out. For companies interested in having a presence at the show, the best deals are in the demo tables, which include a table to demo your services/product, three tickets to the event, and logos on TV screens.

Filed under: VentureBeat