Technology

Early-stage venture capital firm Shasta Ventures has brought on three new faces to beef up its enterprise software and security portfolio amid a big push to &go deeper& into cybersecurity, per Shasta&smanaging director Doug Pepper.

Balaji Yelamanchili (above left), the former general manager and executive vice president of Symantecenterprise security business unit, joins as a venture partner on the firmenterprise software team. He was previously a senior vice president at Oracle and Dell EMC. Pepper says Yelamanchili will be sourcing investments and may take board seats in &certain cases.&

The firm has also tapped Salesforce former chief information security officer Izak Mutlu (above center) as an executive-in-residence, a role in which he&ll advise Shasta portfolio companies. Mutlu spent 11 years at the cloud computing company managing IT security and compliance.

InterWest board partner Drew Harman, the final new hire, has joined as a board partner and will work closely with the chief executive officers of Shastastartups. Harman has worked in enterprise software for 25 years across a number of roles. He is currently on the boards of the cloud-based monetization platform Aria, enterprise content marketing startup NewsCred, customer retention software provider Totango and others.

&Thereno area today thatmore important than cybersecurity,& Pepper told TechCrunch. &The business of venture has gotten increasingly competitive and it demands more focus than ever before. We aren&t looking for generalists, we are looking for domain experts.&

Shastasecurity investments include email authentication service Valimail, which raised a $25 million Series B in May. Airspace Systems, a startup that built &kinetic capture& technologiesthat can identify offending unmanned aircrafts and take them down, raised a $20 million round with participation from Shasta in March. And four-year-old Stealth Security, a startup that defends companies from automated bot attacks, secured an$8 millioninvestment from Shasta in February.

The Menlo Park-based firm filed to raise $300 million for its fifth flagship VC fund in 2016. A year later, it announced a specialty vehicle geared toward augmented and virtual reality app development. With more than $1 billion under management, the firm also backs consumer, IoT, robotics and space-tech companies across the U.S.

In the last year, Shasta has promoted Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Nitin Chopra and Jacob Mullins from associate to partner, as well as added two new associates, Natalie Sandman and Rachel Star.

Target is no stranger to running startup accelerators. The company today operates itsTarget + Techstars program, the beauty-focused Target Takeoff, and the India-based Target Accelerator Program. Now itadding a fourth business accelerator to the mix with the launch of Target Incubator. The new program is aimed at Gen Z entrepreneurs and its only real require is that the businesses involved are doing some sort of good.

As Target puts it, the businesses simply need to be making things &better for people or the planet.&

That broad requirement could cover a range of businesses, including those with new product ideas, new technology, or new services. Target says these could be things that impact everything from how you get your groceries to greenhouse emissions.

The businesses themselves don&t have to be too far along, either. All Target is asking is the company has taken some steps to try to get traction, but the business itself doesn&t have to have already publicly launched. It just needs to be more than &an idea& and it needs to be established as a legal entity. The founders must also still retain majority ownership (51%+) to be considered.

The retailer says it will select eight businesses for the program, with up to two members per business directly participating in the new incubator.

These &Gen Z&-focused entrepreneurs will then participate in virtual programming one hour per week from late April through June 2019, followed by a two-month in-person incubator program at TargetHQ in Minneapolis from mid July through early August 2019.

While there, they&ll receive mentorship from Target leaders and other businesses; participate in workshops, learning sessions and team-building events; be able to access subject matter experts across industries; and participate in other founder growth and development opportunities, Target says.

Applications opened up Monday and will close on October 29, with offers doled out on December 5, following a round of finalist interviews.

The businesses selected will also receive a $10,000stipend from Target.

And the retailer will cover travel and accommodations for the interviews, plus travel and housing for those attending the eight-week program, which wraps with a demo day.

For Target, being involved with startups gives it the chance to invest in businesses at an early stage, which can ultimately benefit Targetown bottom line, help it keep up with trends & especially those that draw in younger shoppers & and aid in its battle with Amazon.

The company has already established itself as a company that wants to work with emerging brands, through moves like its investment in online mattress company Casper, as well as through partnerships with digital-first brands likeBevel, Harry&s, Bark, Who What Wear, Native, Quip, Rocketbook, GIR, NatureBox, Hello, and others. It also last year acquired same-day delivery service Shipt, a still-emerging company that allowed it to get into the hot grocery delivery market.

Beyond working with new and digital-first brands, Target wants to reach businesses doing &good.& Today, many younger shoppers & those Target dubs as &Gen Z& & are driven to stores by more than just price. They often want to feel happy about their purchases because they believe in the companymission, or because it supports sustainable businesses, for example. Target Incubator will give the retailer a first look into those kinds of businesses now, too.

Nintendo has set a strange new precedent with the release of Legend of Zelda SP on the Switch: itessentially the original NES game but with Link starts loaded up with good gear and cash. In a way itno different from a cheat code, but the way itexecuted feels like a missed opportunity.

The game itself (SP stands for &special&) is described by Nintendo in the menu as a &souped up version& of the original: &Living the life of luxury!& Ita separate entry in the menu with all the other NES games you get as part of the companysubscription service.

You&re given the white sword, big shield, blue ring and power bracelet, plus 255 rupees to replace that shield when a Like-like eats it. Basically they&ve given you all the stuff you can find on the overworld (including max bombs and keys), but no items you&d get from inside a dungeon. You also have six hearts, and traveling around a little bit I determined these were awarded by raiding nearby hidden areas, not simply assigned. Secret passages are already revealed, and so on.

Because it skips the title screen and save game selection it seems like someone must have essentially played through the game to this point (or more likely edited the values in game RAM) and then walked to the classic starting point and made a save state that automatically loads when you start or reset the game. This means the only way to save is to use the Switchbuilt-in save states, not the rather inconvenient save method the game used.

Itplain enough that this will be a less frustrating way to explore this famously difficult game, but it seems untrue to Zeldaroots. I understand perhaps gifting the player some of the impossible to find things like a heart hidden inside a random block here or there. Getting some bombs to start is great too, and maybe even the rings (warping is helpful, and the game is pretty punishing, so damage reduction is nice). But the white sword

For one thing, a player experiencing the game this way misses out on one of the most iconic moments in all gaming — &Itdangerous to go alone. Take this!& Then the ritual lifting of the wooden sword. And then setting out into the world to die again and again.

And for me, the white sword was always sort of a rite of passage in the game — your first big step toward becoming powerful. You earned it by finding those extra heart containers, perhaps after asking in vain after it before you were ready. Once you have it, you&re cutting through enemies like butter.

To make it the default sword and to skip these steps seems like it causes the player to miss out on what makes Zelda Zelda.

To be fair, itnot the only version of the game you can play — the original is available, too. But it seems like a missed opportunity. Why not just have a save game you can load with this stuff, so you can continue playing as normal Why not have the option baked into the launch of the original Zelda — have a couple secret save states ready with differing levels of items

Nintendo has the opportunity to introduce a new generation to classic NES games here, having provided a rather bare-bones experience with the NES Classic Edition. Why not enhance them Include the manual, god mode, developer commentary This is the legacy the company has been stewarding for decades, and what better than to give it the respect it deserves

I&m probably overthinking it. But this Zelda SP just seems like a rushed job when players would appreciate something like it, just not so heavy-handed. Itnot that these games are inviolable, but that if they&re going to be fiddled with, we&d like to see it done properly.