Top of the Morning

• For-shame education: Two quick follow-up to yesterday's item on the PE-backed, for-profit law school whose students are largely unable to pass bar exams:

Kim Vander Moffat, a managing director with Sterling Partners who once served on the Infilaw board, is no longer listed on the Sterling website. The self-muted firm didn't return a request for comment. Infilaw minority investor ABRY Partners is no stranger to failing its for-profit ed students. The Boston-based firm also owned a piece of Marinello Schools of Beauty, which closed down last spring after losing federal student aid access. Also worth noting that Infilaw equity and debt investor Ares Capital Corp. once was a lender to JTC Education Holdings, whose Medtech for-profit college chain shut last summer after also losing federal education aid (although, for the record, Ares did not still hold JTC notes at the time of the closure).

• Flyover capital: The National Venture Capital Association this week sent a letter to Capitol Hill, arguing that the Volcker Rule has had a negative impact on VC fund formation, particularly in under-served regions like the Midwest.

My initial reaction was to dismiss this as political pandering to Trumpland, and I've not found data to support (or reject) the idea that Midwestern VCs were harmed by Volcker. But, anecdotally, several Midwestern VCs insist to me that small, regional funds were disproportionately backed by regional banks and insurance companies that followed Volcker (unlike, say, Goldman Sachs, which largely ignored it).

"I recently spoke with Steve Steinour, the CEO of Huntington Bank, who would love to do venture capital again," says Mark Kvamme, the former Sequoia Capital partner who now leads Ohio-based Drive Capital. "I'd think the same would be true of Fifth-Third or KeyBank or any of the others who used to be LPs until Volcker. Silicon Valley doesn't need extra capital, but funds and startups around here do."

• Credit where due: Steven Shekane has quietly stepped down as executive director of Morgan Stanley Credit Partners, in order to launch a new opportunistic credit fund for private equity firm Constitution Capital Partners (which did not return a request for comment).

• Coming attractions: Word is that Cloudera is expected to file its public S-1 at some point today, which means it could list by the first week of May. Earlier reports suggested that the big data software company will seek a valuation close to the $4.1 billion it last got from the private markets, although we obviously won't see that info in the initial filing.

• Today in passive aggressive: Earlier this week we noted that the new White House Office of American Innovation (to be led by Jared Kushner) sounds a lot like the existing U.S. Digital Service. Yesterday we received a formal statement from acting USDS administrator Matt Cutts (ex-Google), supposedly about the establishment of this new office:

"The USDS was created with the objective to deliver better services to the American people through technology and design. We look forward to meeting that promise and continuing the important work of improving our government's public-facing services -- however, whenever, and wherever that need arises."

You might notice that the statement never actually mentions the Office of American Innovation.

• Tech nerding: Three years ago I wrote a Fortune magazine column about VC interest in blockchain technologies, arguing that the most interesting use cases had little to do with money:

"What's really fascinating, however, is that the distributed-ledger concept has all sorts of theoretical applications that don't specifically concern payments... What if your web searches no longer needed to go through Google's servers? It sounds crazy, but few predicted that the technology behind email would eventually destroy record stores."

Yesterday, JavaScript creator and Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich announced that he has launched Brave, which is seeking to introduce "blockchain-based digital advertising." In other words, someone with real tech cred is trying to (eventually) disrupt Google's core business.

• Have a great weekend!