Category: Investments
Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app.
There are a lot of fun connections here for me. For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist. If you haven’t tried it – or haven’t played with it for a while – give it a shot. The evolution of the product over the last six months has been remarkable as it gets better every two weeks (the Gist teams’ release cycle).
The iPhone app has been out for a while and is a killer. I’ve seen the Android app – it’s equally cool and useful. Each of them connect up to the Gist service that lives in the cloud and connects together all of your contact information, builds an implicit social network based on your email traffic and friends lists, and surfaces a variety of content (including news as well as real-time stuff) for your contacts.
Learn that Name was a Startup Weekend Seattle project from a few months ago. Andrew Hyde, who is the community manager for TechStars, created Startup Weekend and I attended the first one in Boulder. It has become an amazing worldwide phenomenon that is now run by Clint Nelsen and Marc Nager. So – that’s linkage two for me.
The idea for Learn that Name came from Eric Koester, a lawyer in Cooley’s Seattle office. Eric has been super helpful on the Startup Visa initiative as well, working on an ABA brief for us that will hopefully be officially approved soon. Who said that lawyers weren’t a force for good in the world? So – that’s linkage number three.
TechCrunch’s article gives a little more history on the deal and how the proceeds (yes – there are proceeds) are being split up among the team members that participated in the Startup Weekend project. I know that at the very first Startup Weekend that I attended in Boulder there was a hope that some of these projects would spin out and either get commercialized or acquired. I’m proud to be involved in one of the first ones to have this happen. Oh – and Learn that Name when played within Gist’s iPhone app is a lot of fun.
Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud. The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t do anything. Standing Cloud – a company we provided seed funding for last year – is launching publicly this week with its Trial Edition and I think they’ve managed to make cloud application management “Pogoplug Simple.”
The Trial Edition makes it easy to test drive any of about thirty different open source applications on any of several cloud server providers. Register with your email address, log in, pick an application, click Install, and in about 30 seconds you’ll be up and running with a fully-functioning application accessible on the web. You don’t need an Amazon EC2 or Rackspace account, as with “appliance” providers. You don’t need to learn about “instances” and “images” and security groups. You don’t need to know how to install and configure a web server or MySQL, or download, install and configure software code. You don’t even need to configure the application itself – Standing Cloud plugs in default values for you. And it’s free.
Like the Pogoplug, the Standing Cloud Trial Edition doesn’t do anything that a motivated IT professional couldn’t do another way. It’s just a lot faster and easier. But for someone who is *not* an IT professional, it removes some rather high barriers to both open source applications and cloud computing.
The Trial Edition is just the beginning for Standing Cloud. Soon you will be able to host, manage, and scale applications with the same emphasis on simplicity. Give it a try and give me feedback.
Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to Know
I know I owe everyone a follow up to my post from last week titled The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents. To the many of you out there that emailed me in response, thanks for all of the thought, ideas, suggestions, and offers of help. More on that soon.
In the mean time, I noticed today that Dow Jones is running a seminar titled Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to Know. My partner Jason Mendelson is one of the panelists, along with several other notable lawyers and angel investors. If you are interested in this particular topic, I expect there will be a “robust” discussion as I know that the opinions between a few of the folks on the panel vary pretty widely. If you are interested, sign up here.
I love the Pogoplug. We’ve been investors in the company for about a year and it has been a blast working with the team. Pogoplug is in our Digital Life theme and has a lot of conceptual similarities to our previous investment in Sling Media (now part of EchoStar). We love products like the Pogoplug and the Slingbox “software that ships with a little plastic box that does magic stuff” that, in Pogoplug’s case, provides you access to any of your external hard drives from anywhere in the world on any device.
Today, there was a great review of the Pogoplug in Walt Mossberg’s column in the Wall Street Journal titled Get Your Storage Out of the Cloud. WSJ’s Katherine Boehret also has a nice short video review below:
I have several Pogoplugs – one at each house and at my office in Boulder. They are remarkable – they just work. If you have an external hard drive or are considering cloud storage for any meaningful amount of data, you owe it to yourself to grab a Pogoplug.
If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that I’m a huge believer that the way we interact with computers in 20 years will be radically different than how we interact with them today. I’ve put my money where my mouth is as Foundry Group has invested in a number of companies around human computer interaction, including Oblong.
For the past few years, every time someone talks about next generation user interfaces, a reference to the movie Minority Report pops up. Sometimes the writer gets this right and links it back to John Underkoffler, the co-founder of Oblong, but many times they don’t. Today the NY Times got it right in their article You, Too, Can Soon Be Like Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report’.
That’s a picture of John Underkoffler at Ted on Friday giving one of his jaw dropping demos of Oblong’s g-speak spatial operating environment. Lest you think this is science fiction, I can assure you that Oblong has several major customers, is generating meaningful revenue, and is poised to enter several mainstream markets with g-speak derived products.
The company has been steadily building momentum over the past few years since we invested. The TechCrunch article The iPad Is Step 1 In The Future Of Computing. This Is Step 2 (Or 3) gives you a little of the history. More of the history is at Oblong’s post origins: arriving here that go back to 1994. I personally have stories going back to 1984 when I first met John, but we’ll save those for another day.
While there is an amazing amount of interesting stuff suddenly going on around HCI (and we have invested in a few other companies around this), Oblong is shipping step 2 and about to ship step 3 while most are working on step 1. As John likes to say, “the old model of one human, one machine, one mouse, one screen is passe.”
When I wrote my post titled An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit I expected to write my little rant and be done with it. A month or so later Jason Calacanis picked up the mantle and started a Jihad against the idea of angel groups charging entrepreneurs to pitch to them.
The result is the Open Angel Forum. I participated in the second event last week in Boulder. I thought it was spectacular and the twitter stream from #OAFCO reflected this sentiment. About 20 active (at least four investments in the past year) early stage investors (angels and seed stage VCs) attended. Six entrepreneurs presented their companies in short seven minute pitches. Five sponsors underwrote the food and drink at the event. There was plenty of networking before and after. That was it – small, intimate, and highly relevant to all.
Most of the presenters wrote blog posts about the event which will give you a great feel for what they experienced.
- Odojo – My Experience presenting at The Open Angel Forum
- FaceFile – Open Angel Forum Colorado
- Grogger – OAF: Things Getting Better for Entrepreneurs
- TeamSnap – TeamSnap presents at Open Angel Forum
- Kijubi – Kijubi @ Open Angel Forum in Boulder Colorado
The events continue with Open Angel Forum San Francisco on March 4th and Open Angel Forum New York City on April 8th. If you are an entrepreneur or an angel investor in either city, check them out.
My friends at NewsGator had a great 2009 – enterprise social computing came into its own and they were at the front of the pack. If an organization uses SharePoint and is interested in social computing, NewsGator Social Sites is a must have product.
Yesterday, NewsGator acquired Tomoye. The two companies are highly complimentary – Tomoye adds a set of SharePoint related community and social computing products to the mix as well as a fantastic government-centric customer base including organizations like the Federal Reserve Bank, The United States Army, Defense Acquisition University, The United States Air Force, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and U.S. Agency for International Development. Eric Sauve, the founder/CEO of Tomoye, has built a really nice business that I’m excited to welcome into the NewsGator family.
CMSWire has a nice article summarizing the deal. If you are interested in enterprise social computing and want to get connected to the folks at NewsGator, feel free to drop me an email – I’d be happy to introduce you.
The Open Angel Forum is coming to Colorado and having it’s first event in Boulder on 2/3/10. David Cohen – the CEO of TechStars – has written an extensive post titled Open Angel Forum – Colorado bound! which includes all the background leading up to this, along with information about:
- Attending OAFCO as an angel investor
- Presenting at OAFCO as an entrepreneur
- Sponsoring the event if you are a service provider
Each event will only have 10-15 angels in attendance – all will be active investors. We’ll have five companies presenting. It will be an intimate event – if you want to get a feel for the chatter check out the twitter stream on Open Angel Forum take a look at Mark Suster’s post on the Inaugural Open Angel Forum.
I’m made angel investments in over 75 companies since 1994 and had a number of magnificent outcomes including NetGenesis (IPO), Critical Path (IPO), Harmonix (acquired by MTV), and Nutrisystems (IPO). Yeah – plenty of my angel investments haven’t gone anywhere, but in all cases I’ve had an awesome time working with entrepreneurs to create amazing new companies.
My relationship with David Cohen and TechStars has reinforced this for me as I’ve seen many of the young TechStars companies raise money from angels, go on to raise money from institutional VCs, or be acquired. I’ve also seen a renaissance in the super angel category with folks like Jeff Clavier at SoftTechVC, Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, the First Round Capital guys, Ron Conway, and David Cohen start to “institutionalize” this category.
One of my deeply held beliefs is a key part of the role of an angel investor is to help the entrepreneur – and operate in support of the entrepreneur. I’ve always despised the “pay to pitch”schemes that some angel groups have (where the entrepreneur has to pay to pitch) and wrote a post titled An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit. This started a bunch of noise around this issue which Jason Calacanis amplified – resulting in him creating the Open Angel Forum. I count myself as a proud supporter of this effort and co-collaborator in OAFCO with David Cohen.
If you are an angel investor in Colorado, send David Cohen an email and come help us support new entrepreneurs. If you are an entrepreneur in Colorado looking for angel investors, apply to come to the first OAFCO event.
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Yesterday I had a good conversation with Nivi, the co-author of the great Venture Hacks blog. He recently added me to AngelList, a directory of angel and seed investors that Nivi curates. Our discussion covered a variety of things, including trying to define the parameters that qualifies someone to call themselves an angel investor.
Historically, I’ve always said that someone can call themselves an angel investor only if they actually make angel investments! I’ve been exposed to many “angel investors” who have actually never written a check for an equity investment. These non-angels come in many shapes and sizes and often end up either offering to become “advisors” for equity (or worse – a retainer), “brokers” (where they help you raise money for a percentage raised), or employees (where the end up trying to get a job). Now, there is nothing wrong with this, other than them presenting themselves as “angel investors.” Oh, and some people just like to be in clubs with other people who presumably make investments hang out.
My historical viewpoint was an angel investor is defined as someone who makes at least one equity investment in a seed or early stage company each year of at least $25,000. So, if an angel investor has been investing for four years, they have at least four separate investments of at least $25,000 each for a total of at least $100,000 invested. Basically, if you can’t (or don’t) invest at least $25,000 per year, I don’t think you should call yourself an angel investor.
As we worked through the StartupVisa stuff, we realized this wasn’t a high enough threshold for the type of angel investors we thought should be able to sponsor a Startup visa. So, we came up with the definition of a “Super Angel.” A Super Angel is an angel investor who has been investing for at least three years and has made at least two equity investments of at least $50,000 each in each of the three years. This is a total of at least six equity investments totaling at least $300,000. Most of the people I consider Super Angels are substantially above this threshold.
What do you think of these definitions? Too strict or too loose? Any other thoughts on how to qualify someone as an angel investor?