Vinod Khosla invests in Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund

Michael Arrington revealed at an education focused Startup Weekend event in Seattle that Vinod Khosla - the well-known venture capitalist and entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Microsystems, is one of the investors in his new firm – CrunchFund which is an early stage venture capital firm founded last month by him and Patrick Gallagher, after his infamous exit from TechCrunch which he founded in 2005.Arrington, wearing his green ‘UNPAID BLOGGER’ t-shirt broke the news while he was interviewing Khosla at the event. The firm has already raised its inaugural $20 million fund in September of 2011 and is backed by TechCrunch current owner AOL, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

During the interview, Arrington called Khosla as a “badass” and Khosla also admitted that he’s not really known as a polite guy, but he comes by it honestly. “I sort of had a habit at age 12 of insulting priests in India, because it was fun for me. I was a troll,” Khosla said. “There is fun in that. If there’s a lot of conventional wisdom, challenging it is fun.”

CrunchFund has already made investments of over a million dollars each in - Bitcasa and Prism Skylabs.

Bitcasa provides secure, unlimited storage on any device. Users can view their entire lifetime of photos, listen to their entire music library, store all of their files and important documents – and still have room for the contents of the Library of Congress. The data will always be accessible and shareable from any device as Bitcasa uses streaming instead of traditional upload/download, files are available quickly.

Prism Skylabs brings physical spaces online, creating new places for people and businesses to understand and engage each other. The company is changing how businesses use video and how consumers experience physical spaces online. In the longer term, Prism Skylabs’ goal is to transform the world’s multi-hundred billion-dollar camera network investments into a platform for online-to-offline commerce that creates new revenue streams and new opportunities for businesses to engage customers.

Watch a short video of the interview from YouTube below.

- Chandan Raj

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