I love playing offense.
FullContact is officially in this mode and today announced that they have acquired Cobook with Pot, Ski Passes and Dogecoin. Kaspars Dancis – the awesome CEO of Cobook – has a more seriously titled (and equally serious post) up at COBOOK + FULLCONTACT.
One of my basic strategies as an investor is to use targeted small acquisitions throughout the life of a company. In 2005 Fred Wilson called this approach the “venture rollup” and said nice words about me and it in his post when he said “My good friend Brad Feld is up to his old tricks. Brad is the master of the venture rollup.”
We’ve been investors in FullContact for about 18 months. They’ve got a real business at this point, are growing very fast, and working hard on their mission of creating One Address Book To Rule Them All. If you haven’t tried FullContact’s Address Book, you are missing out. The magic feature of “unified contacts” that they’ve been working on for over a year is up, running, and amazing.
Cobook is a perfect acquisition for us. The Cobook team has developed beautiful Mac and iOS address books. We’ve admired them for a while and decided a few months ago to join forces to have them accelerate our development on other platforms. The full team is moving from Latvia to Denver and is already hard at work integrating FullContact and Cobook.
If you’ve been watching what the companies I’m involved are up to, you saw this move in November when Yesware bought Attachments.me. And you’ll see it from companies I’m involved in again, and again, and again.
One of the super crazy fun companies we are investors in is Betabrand. At this point, half of my new wardrobe comes from them.
They are hunting for a new amazing UI/UX developer. But – to show how much they want someone, they’ve designed an incredibly hideous new look for their site.
They’ve got blink tags, Comic Sans, spinning boxes, Nyan cat cursors, Papyrus, an on fire Under Construction prompt, and really bad color overlays. It reminds me of a Geocities page I once created.
Help our friends at Betabrand out. If you are a UI/UX god or goddess, here’s what they are looking for. And – while you are at it – buy some new disco pants.
What better way to start off a new year than by closing a new investment. This morning we announced that we have closed a financing in OnTheGo Platforms via our FG Angels syndicate.
On October 1st, 2013 we announced that we’d be forming an AngelList syndicate called FG Angels and making 50 seed investments through AngelList by the end of 2014. We committed $2.5m from our Foundry Group funds for this effort and decided to max out the syndicate at $500k / investment, or $25m total. So $2.5m would come from us and $22.5m would come from syndicate participants.
We knew we had a lot to figure out around how the AngelList syndicate would actually work. We also knew that AngelList had a lot of work to do to get all the software and legal dynamics working properly. We’ve spent the last three months working with AngelList, our lawyers (Cooley), and a few other experts to make sure everything was set up the correct way. It was much more complicated than we expected, and we’ve learned a lot more about 506(b), 506(c), what the JOBS act made better, what the JOBS act made worse, and the general insanity of unscrambling new government regulations that purport to make thing easier, but actually make things harder.
But we’ve figured it out. And are psyched to have led a seed round in OTG Platforms. We’ve also got a healthy AngelList syndicate called FG Angels ready to roll. And we’ve got a second investment in the final stages of closing and a third one getting ready to launch. We expect to be in a 2 – 4 investment per month tempo for Q1.
The OTG Platforms gang has been incredibly patient with us. We were originally planning to announce things at the Defrag Conference in November but at the last minute realized that we’d blow all the 506(b) exemptions and generate a huge pile of work for everyone, so we held off until things closed. As we ran into issue after issue with the AngelList syndicate process and docs, they hung in there patiently as we worked it out, being willing to be the test case. They are just an awesome team – exactly the kind of people we love to work with.
The AngelList gang was equally amazing. We’ve loved what they are up to from the beginning. I’ve given Naval and Nivi lots of feedback over the years and have been active on a few non-tech angel investments through AngelList. We knew going in that the AngelList Syndicate process was a new thing and figuring out how to do it correctly, via a VC fund, was going to be a challenge. But we’ve mastered it and the AngelList team continues to be well ahead of the curve on all fronts.
Over time I’ll write more about what we’ve learned and what the issues are. But for now, congrats to OnTheGo Platforms – we are psyched to be partners with you. And thanks AngelList.
I’m fascinated with drones. I’ve never been a model airplane guy and my model rocket phase lasted about a month when I was 10. But drones feel like something different, since I can program them to do what I want them to go do, rather than have to control them with a controller. My current goal is to program a Taco Drone to go from the 2nd floor balcony outside of my office to T/ACO, hover for a few minutes while they attach lunch to it, and return to my balcony.
We recently invested in 3D Robotics so I went online and bought a 3DR Iris quadcopter. We got an early version a month or so ago and some of the gang in my office – especially Dane, Nick, and Eugene – have been flying it around. Dane appears to have mastered it since his instructions to me included stuff like “don’t press that button” and “don’t move that lever.”
Yesterday he brought the Iris up to my place in Keystone for me to play around with. It was at the end of a longer meeting on another project we are working on. I wanted to just program the drone to do stuff, but Dane insisted that I learn how to fly it manually first. So I did.
The results were predictable – a tree jumped out and got in the way.
In comparison, here’s how it’s supposed to work. Now if someone would finish up that jetpack I’ve been waiting for.
If you think Amazon Prime Air is neat, you’ll love the new Amazon Prime Ground.
Spheros and Quadcopters are available with shipping still in time for Christmas.
Yesterday Amy and I contributed $10,000 to the MakerBot Academy campaign which is on a mission to put a MakerBot 3D printer in every school in the United States.
We did it via a contribution on Donors Choose, one of our favorite non-profit contribution sites.
We specifically finished out the funding for five MakerBots for the following teachers in their classrooms:
Amy and I are planning to give a lot more to this campaign, but we decided to do something tangible right now by finishing off several of the campaigns on Donors Choose.
For those of you who have asked in the past “what can I do for you Brad?”, here’s an easy one. Just go on the MakerBot Academy Donors Choose page and make a contribution of any size to one of the campaigns. You’ll be helping the next generation.
Jackson Pollock is one of my favorite abstract expressionists. So, when Sphero decided to dance around in NY City and do an art project, he immediately came to mind.
If you wonder how kids describe a Sphero, this short video will make you smile. And then laugh. And then smile some more. One of these kids needs to be on The Voice.
Sphero says, “buy me, buy me, buy me.”
We recently invested in littleBits. It’s another of our investments that traces its roots to the MIT Media Lab. It’s also another investment we are making with our friends from True Ventures. It’s another one that mixes hardware and software in a delightful way that is part of our human computer interaction theme. And yet another investment in New York.
But it’s the first company we’ve invested in that did a promotional video for their product (the Synth Kit) with Reggie Watts.
Ayah Bdeir, the CEO of littleBits, has blown my mind with her vision of where she is going to take this company. Phase 1 of littleBits was, in the company’s words, creating a “library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping, learning, and fun.” Today there are over 50 different bits that you can buy right now, individually or bundled in different kits.
This, by itself, is awesome. But the next phase of where Ayah is taking the company is just awesome. And, as a result, I predict you will have some littleBits somewhere in your world before you realize it. And, since Thanksgiving is just around the corner, we’ve got a kit to make a programmable lazy susan for your table if you need one.
Remember, the machines have already taken over. Get on board if you want to be able to play with them.
I’m a seed investor in MobileDay, a Boulder-based company that has helped its users make over two million mobile-based conference calls in the past few months. Its popularity comes from One-Touch Dialing where users press a big green button that shows up on their phone just before a conference call and they’re in. I use it every day – for every call – and am no longer in conference call hell on my iPhone as I go from my calendar to my dialer back to my calendar back to my dialer as I try to remember what the next number in the conference call sequence is. But – this is a show vs. tell type app – just go try it on MobileDay iPhone or MobileDay Android.
When MobileDay wanted to figure out how to make money, they went on the road to talk to big companies. They already knew who has lots of users of MobileDay, so they visited them and said, “You already have hundreds of employees using our product – how can we work together?”
MobileDay quickly found out that mobile had disrupted the control that companies used to have over the cost of conference calls. People moved away from land lines and toward mobile, but conference calling hadn’t caught up.
MobileDay knew that they could save time. One-Touch Dialing proved that. But here was a chance to save money also. If MobileDay could make their big green button also dial the cheapest number automatically, companies could save an enormous amount of money.
Enter Least Cost Dialing (LCD). With LCD enabled, the MobileDay app automatically inserts the company’s lowest-cost conference phone numbers. Every dialing sequence is based on the employee’s location, and LCD can reroute calls through the company’s internal voice or data network. MobileDay will provide the same capability for international calls which will create awesome savings opportunities.
While LCD is in the background saving money, One-Touch is up front making conference calls simple. It’s a great victory for both users (ease of use) and the CFO (massive cost savings for a small monthly fee.)
As MobileDay tackles this huge opportunity, they are hunting for senior mobile developers (iOS and Android), enterprise sales experts, and a great product/support person. If you want to be part a pioneer in the mobile enterprise game, email me and I’ll pass on your resume.