Mr. Stephen Venuto,
a partner who works out of both the Silicon Valley and San Francisco offices, is a member of the Technology Companies group.
Mr. Venuto’s practice focuses on advising high-growth technology and media companies and their founders, advisors and investors. Mr. Venuto was Facebook’s first attorney and is widely recognized as one of the leading startup attorneys in the country. The American Lawyer recently named Mr. Venuto “Dealmaker of the Year”, recognizing his corporate work and representation of Instagram in its sale to Facebook, and quoting a prominent board member as saying that Mr. Venuto “is an outstanding lawyer, but he’s also an outstanding business partner . . . [He] is someone who cares about everybody [who’s] involved in a company.” In September of 2013, the Daily Journal named Mr. Venuto to its list of Top 100 Lawyers in California. In February of 2014, the Daily Journal named Mr. Venuto to its inagural Top Emerging Companies Lawyers list.
Numerous standout technology companies and their founders have turned to Mr. Venuto for representation including Asana, Bleacher Report (sold to Time Warner), Facebook, Instagram (sold to Facebook), Mailbox/Orchestra (sold to Dropbox), Ooma, Pinterest, ResearchGate and Quora. Mr. Venuto also works with new media companies including Brit & Co., Full Picture Productions (executive producer of Project Runway), Say Media, U2, Upworthy and Zuckerberg Media. He provides general corporate legal counseling and represents companies at all stages of their life-cycle.
Most of Mr. Venuto's clients are in fast-growth fields related to information technology, social networking, gaming, mobile applications, media and entertainment. He is an experienced business and legal advisor who has completed hundreds of venture capital financings and numerous public offerings, mergers, acquisitions and licensing transactions in these areas.
VentureBeat once referred to Mr. Venuto as the only lawyer in Silicon Valley who can code. That is an exaggeration, but he does have extensive programming experience. Mr. Venuto created and was the systems operator of several bulletin board systems in the 1980s; as early as 1994, he was an early HTML programmer and editor at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (the first legal-oriented Web site on the Internet); and in 2003 created and ran his own Web site focused on wine.
Mr. Venuto is currently the head of the firm's Corporate Business Unit in the United States, and was previously chairman of the firm’s Technology Companies Group. Before joining the firm, Mr. Venuto was an attorney at Venture Law Group.
