Over the past few months we’ve been posting about the "themes" we invest in at Foundry Group over on our Foundry Group blog. I thought – with the most recent announcement of our investment in Smith & Tinker (our most recent human computer interaction (HCI) investment) – it was worth reviewing our current themes.
For a view on how we think about themes, start with our post What Is "Thematic Investing?" We then cover four of our current themes:
- Human Computer Interaction
- Implicit Web
- Glue
- Digital Life
We also put up a post titled Did Darwin Skip Over Email? explaining our desire to find another investment on our long standing theme around email (and SMTP). We are also continuing to scour the world for RSS-related stuff (yes – we love protocols – ad hoc or otherwise).
While we don’t limit ourselves to only investing in these themes, we rarely wander outside them and will usually only do so with someone we’ve worked with in the past. We are always working on a set of new top secret themes that intrigue us. Some of these will see the light of day; others won’t. In all cases, they keep our brains busy.