This Week in Venture Capital with Jason Calacanis

I was on This Week in Venture Capital today with Jason Calacanis talking about the big VC deals at the moment and talking about the VC industry. It’s a new show that Jason has created along the lines of his popular series including This Week in Startups. I think this one will become popular, too. It’s designed to be an engaging way to catch up on the quick venture news of the week.

It’s about a 30 minute video (or about as long as it normally takes to read my rambling posts! ;-) ). I’d embed the video but it doesn’t seem to allow you to do this so here’s the link the This Week in Startups, Inaugural show.

We covered the following and much more:

- FourSquare (rumors of both an $80m pre money or a $100 million acquisition). I was asked if I would pay $80 million. My answer: “no.” I believe that the team is high potential but the valuation seems stratospheric to me for the stage of the company. But I’d love to be wrong and see them all make a ton of money. I also agree with Charlie O’Donnell that they won’t sell to Yahoo! now (or ever). I believe that the “check in” game model has a shelf life but that FourSquare is smart enough to be working on future gaming aspects.

- Box.net (raised $15 million led by Scale Venture Partners and included DFJ and USVP . Didn’t discuss much but I love the online document collaboration area that Box.net serves including players like Dropbox, Drop.io, DocStoc, Scribed and SlideShare.

- Quora (funding led by Benchmark at a crazy valuation: $86 million). Crazy valuation. But from what I understand A+ team and obviously backed by a great firm. I can only imagine that there’s an inside story here I don’t know about. Q&A delivers amazing SEO juice that I’ve seen at several recent companies so I get that. Plus, maybe they’ve got some mega Facebook deal in the works?

- Gdgt (led by Spark, True Ventures) — Love the idea. People spent a ton of time researching which gadgets to buy. The Web 1.0 sites still dominate. And SEO juice of sites with no value makes searching for real product feedback suck.

- Burstly (Led by … me! ;-) )- I’ve already written about why I invested in this company so won’t go on and on again.

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Also in the video:

- Is it a good idea for VC’s to pay stratospheric prices?

- IPO market is back. We discussed some of the recent IPOs.

- Talked about the roles of partners, venture partners, associates and principals in a VC

- Why VC’s who have “dial out” programs to early-stage startups damage their reputation

- My blog and what it’s done for my deal flow

- and much more