• The New York Times, Tuesday, June 14, 2011 12:07 PM

If a bit later than its VC rivals, Menlo Ventures is now convinced that social media is big business. "This is not a few-year trend, this is a decades-long trend," Shawn T. Carolan, a managing director at Menlo Ventures, tells The New York Times. "The digital social fabric that binds people will affect Internet services in many different ways."

As such, Menlo has brought on Shervin Pishevar -- an entrepreneur and angel investor with no formal venture capital experience -- whose main focus will be to create an incubator to nurture talent and identify investment opportunities early. At 23, Pishevar introduced a Web-based operating system called WebOS, following soon after with Webs, a publishing platform, and later SGN, which he sold in April to MindJolt. "As an angel investor, he has invested in roughly 40 start-ups including Aardvark, a social search service that was sold to Google, and Milo, a local shopping application that was sold to eBay for $75 million last year," according to The Times.

Despite its $4 billion in assets, Now, Menlo is "playing catch-up" in an online world increasingly dominated by Facebook, Zynga and Groupon - none of which it had the foresight to invest in.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »