Gawker: valleywag, dmitry shapiro

Once again, Vanity Fair leaves geeks at the kids' power table

Owen Thomas — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Preeminent among the magazine world's kingmaking power lists is Vanity Fair's New Establishment, which appears in the October issue — on newsstands in L.A. and New York today, but not in the Bay Area for another six days. Silicon Valley gets similar short shrift: The names who make it there are predictable bigs like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, or Hollywood-crossover types like Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee turned movie producer. Walt Mossberg, now employed by New Establishment perennial Rupert Murdoch, also squeaked in. The consolation prize Vanity Fair offers: Its "Next Establishment" list, reserved for the likes of Twitter's Ev Williams. It's a marvelous piece of New York media trickery — flatter the geeks by making them feel included, but corral them into a side room so the real power brokers aren't offended by comparison. True, the "Next Establishment" suggests that these are people who might matter in the future. But in saying that, Vanity Fair's editors are also sending the message that right here, right now, its "Next" nominees are nobodies. On this year's list:

Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
Max Levchin, Slide
Robin Li, Baidu
Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
Elon Musk, SpaceX
Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
Mika Salmi, MTV
Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
Quincy Smith, CBS
Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
Evan Williams, Twitter
Andrew Zolli, PopTech

Another $40 million and Veoh will work, founder promises

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:40:31 EST

Veoh founder Dmitry Shapiro has hired investment bank Bear Stearns to find him another $40 million in venture capital. Shapiro's Veoh, an online-video site, took $26 million only last spring in a round led by Goldman Sachs. If Shapiro finds a $40 million ~~sucker~~ investor, that would set Veoh's value at $150 million. A ~~preposterous~~ surprising amount for a company with flat traffic and content pulled straight from Hulu.

Can a Yahoo rescue Veoh from its pirate founder?

Owen Thomas — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:05:36 EDT

Veoh, the overhyped, piracy-riddled online-video site, has hired Steve Mitgang, a former SVP at Yahoo. Mitgang, one of the myriad of Yahoos who's taking credit for its Project Panama online-ad system, may be a suit well-suited to make Veoh friendlier to advertisers. Not an easy task.

First step: Figuring out how to shut down increasingly crafty uploaders, who are putting copyrighted shows on Veoh and labeling them with nonsensical names to escape the reach of movie and music companies' takedown notices. And to do so, he'll have to batttle former CEO and founder Dmitry Shapiro, who's becoming Veoh's "chief innovation officer." As such, he'll no doubt continue to mouth platitudes about respecting copyright — and then come up with "innovations" like VeohTV, a piece of software which makes it easy to grab video from anywhere on the Web and store it on a user's hard drive, where, again, it's hard for media lawyers to find it.