Permuto, a new company bringing the same level of performance and measurability of search engine marketing to display advertising, officially launched today at the Shop.org conference. Shaukat Shamim, CEO and co-founder of Permuto, spoke with Doug for about an hour on Tuesday and you could tell they were launching something special.

Wall Street Journal - Venture Capital Dispatch
An inside look from VentureWire at high-tech start-ups and their investors.

Will One Of These Start-Ups Emerge As The Next Cisco?
By Scott Austin, June 8, 2009, 7:02 PM ET

The week of Oct. 6, 2008, is often referred to as “Black Week,” when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 18% in its worst-ever weekly decline.

In the aftermath, venture capitalists tightened their purse strings to reflect the new reality. Sequoia Capital held a now-famous meeting on Oct. 7 for portfolio companies in which a PowerPoint presentation titled “RIP: Good Times“ underscored the importance of cutting costs. Young start-ups struggled to attract new investors as investment levels plummeted in the coming weeks.

But some venture firms continued on fueling new companies, perhaps mindful that Cisco Systems Inc. raised money from Sequoia about two months after the 1987 stock-market crash. The best start-ups are often funded in times like these, venture capitalists often say, because these companies know how to keep operations lean and mean from the start.