San Jose Mercury News venture capital reporter Matt Marshall, who, together with colleague Michael Bazeley, has followed the valley money in their must-read SiliconBeat blog for two years, has quit the paper to form an independent website covering the same beat.
VentureBeat, a WordPress-powered blog which launched a few days ago, chronicles the same tech-centric start-up climate but allows Marshall to strike out on his own and likely rake in advertising dollars through John Battelle’s Federated Media agency.
Bazeley, the Merc’s internet reporter, will move away from SiliconBeat to take a job at the newspaper’s website. In a canny move that will surely cushion the prospect of quitting a paying job, Marshall’s VentureBeat coverage will be syndicated back to the paper.
Matt kindly agreed to be interviewed by me to provide some expert insight for a profile I wrote on Google backer and Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz when the Mountain View search site floated in 2004, so I want to wish him the best of luck.
