DreamIt Ventures announces its NYC leader

Welcome to the VC Roundup, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.
Note: this VC roundup encompasses news from two weeks, not one.
MUST READS
In an email newsletter, DreamIt Ventures has announced that Mark Wachen will lead its 67th Ward incubator. According to Venturebeat, Wachen is an early-stage investor through Upstage Ventures and has invested in DreamIt alum SeatGeek. TechCrunch also revealed the other advisors to the New York incubator, which include lots of familiar faces from Philadelphia. The incubator announced yesterday that it is now taking applicants.
Pennsylvania state treasurer Rob McCord sits down with Technically Philly’s Christopher Wink. McCord served as a senior executive at Safeguard Scientifics and founded the Eastern Technology Fund.
LLR Partners announced it has invested in Avenues: The World School. Its flagship campus will debut in fall 2012 in New York. According to the press release, tuition, if the school opened today, would be about $35,000 to $36,000.
MIGHT ME WORTH YOUR TIME
Ben Franklin Technology Partners has released its 2010 annual report.
Our good friend Joey D writes about the role venture capital has in the woes of the Pennsylvania employee pension fund. The fund, according to DiStefano, “has become one of the most intensively managed public pension systems in the nation.”
Speaking of SeatGeek, the company was recently featured in Entrepreneur magazine. Ben Kessler, communications director at SeekGeek, was last week’s Exit Interview.
Michael Greeley, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston breaks down the latest VC numbers from an insider’s perspective. Greeley dives deeply into the latest national numbers and pulls out some gems. For example, the size of the average fund has nearly halved in the last ten years.
GIVE A GLANCE
Adobe has disclosed that it spent $58 million when it purchased Demdex, a portfolio company of First Round Capital and Comcast Interactive Capital.
Novatas Capital participated in a $5.5 million Series D equity round for Nistica, a supplier of networking modules.
Meet the First Round Capital company that turned down $100 million from Google.
SAP has spun out its venture arm.
First Round portfolio company Path has raised $8.65 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. Frist Round also hops into pharma. The firm was named in Truveris’ $3.8M Series A.