All Things Digital

TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs.

Over recent months, though, there’s been an odd development: Certain posts by entrepreneurs critical of VCs are being quietly removed and then replaced with more favorable comments. On its face, it looks like a whitewash. Or maybe it’s not so troubling. You decide.

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Clouds are gathering over Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet companies. The sale of social-networking company Bebo comes at a time when private investors are changing their tune. They’re no longer pumping money into start-ups at the same huge valuations they were doing last year.

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Silver Lake Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif., buyout firm that bought Seagate, Flextronics, Gartner and other companies before turning them around, has finished raising its third fund at $9.3 billion in capital, according to LBO Wire. It’s much larger than the firm’s previous fund, raised in 2004, of $3.6 billion.

The pace at which the private equity industry keeps raising money is astonishing. The amount of capital swashing around among the world’s investors is huge, and these investors have little choice but to earmark it for various asset classes, such as stocks, bonds and alternative investments–including private equity.

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TheFunded, the site that lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists, has just unveiled a new feature that could bring a whole new level of transparency to the cloaked world of financing deals. It now lets entrepreneurs submit the terms of their funding deals to the site, so that other entrepreneurs can see them–and make sure they’re not getting a raw deal for their own company. Until now, this sort of resource hasn’t been made available. VentureBeat got an early look at the new feature yesterday.

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Every time we hear from one of the numerous Chinese video sites, they compare themselves to YouTube in its early days. But a closer look at the data suggests the video phenom in China just isn’t comparable.

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