I’ve heard from several people that NetNewsWire on the iPhone is awesome. While I’m not a Mac user, I’m anxiously awaiting my new iPhone (Ross promises that I’ll have it – along with Exchange sync – on Monday). In the mean time, I’m psyched that my friends at NewsGator have once again harnessed the software wizardry of Brent Simmons to create a fully-features RSS Reader – based on NetNewsWire – that runs on the iPhone. If you have an iPhone you can get it for free at the AppStore now. I know I will on Monday.
I’ve been really pleased with the way NewsGator’s widget business has taken off. Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about "how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business." The answer to that is "they won’t – but they’ll use the infrastructure they’ve build – which is rock solid, scalable, and unique – to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content."
NewsGator now has over 100 paying customers for their widget business. Over the past 30 days, they’ve served almost 19 million unique users over 250 million widget views. They’ve also served over 44 million API calls to paying data partners (a total over over 385 million API calls if you include all the free clients out there, including NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and NewsGator Go! that call the API on a regular basis.) This is in support of 2.8 million feeds and 211 million articles over the past 30 days. The overall NewsGator feed archive now stands at 2.1 billion articles. Non-trivial!
Today, NewsGator – with AFP – announced a new initiative called The Road to Beijing – the 2008 Games widgets. This is an Olympics game news widget with a twist – NewsGator will guarantee you a $0.20 CPM for distribution of the widget on you site! You’ll get co-branding on the widget, traffic, great Olympics content, and a guaranteed CPM.
Jeff Nolan – who runs this part of NewsGator’s business – has a long blog post up at NewsGator and AFP Olympics Widgets, Guaranteed CPM – explaining how it all works. Join NewsGator and APF on The Road to Beijing and make some money while you are at it.
Earlier this year we made a seed investment in a new company called Gnip. Yesterday, Gnip launched their first service – a free centralized callback server that notifies data consumers (such as Plaxo) in real-time when there is new data about their users on various data producing sites (such as Flickr and Digg). I’ve written my version of the overview on the Foundry Group blog in my post titled Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards, there are a couple of posts up already on the Gnip blog, and a number of people have already written about Gnip including TechCrunch, TechCrunchIT, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Dave Winer, and Joe Smarr (Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect). Rather than repeat what Gnip is here, I’m going to tell you how this investment came about.
It started in 2004. I got an IM out of the blue from someone named bpm140 (my IM addresses are easy to find – AIM/Y!: bfeld; Skype: bradfeld; MSN: brad@feld.com.) bpm140 asked me if I’d be willing to take a quick look at a business plan he had. I IM’ed back that he should email it to me – I got it 30 seconds later.
I took a look and scheduled a call. It was a plan for an educational game thing that I didn’t really get but I was intrigued by some of the stuff in it. I talked to bpm140 (Eric Marcoullier) and gave him some feedback. After talking for a little while I told him it wasn’t my thing, but he should feel free to holler if he thought I could be helpful.
Over the next few months I periodically got IMs from Eric. We’d have quick interactions – usually around a specific question – and he shared with me a new idea he was working on. He and his partner Todd Sampson (who I only knew through Eric’s references to him) had this idea for a thingy (this was before little lines of javascript that you put on a blog were called widgets). You put this thingy on your blog and it gave you statistics of how many times someone clicked on a link. I’m a stats junky so I loved it. Eric said it would cost $3 / month. I told him it was stupid to charge for it, but I’d prepay for a year for $25. He took my money.
Over the next few months I gave him plenty of feedback on this new thing he was calling MyBlogLog. The UI of the stats service was hideous, but the popup link data on my blog was awesome and the stats were killer. By this point I had invested in FeedBurner, so I introduced Eric to Dick Costolo – FeedBurner’s CEO. More feedback ensued.
One day, I got a familiar bpm140 IM saying something like "we came up this amazing idea to turn your blog into a social network." All I needed to do was put a little different piece of javascript on my blog. I did and the old version of the MyBlogLog widget – with names only and a really yucky font appeared on my blog. For those of you that remember it, it was one of those amazing widgets that you suddenly couldn’t ever remember living without. Names were great, but soon little images appeared and the idea of seeing who had recently been on my blog was incredibly satisfying. MyBlogLog took off like a rocket.
Up to this point, Eric and his partner Todd hadn’t raised any money. I remember the first "are you interested in investing call" happening in May 2006. Amy and I had rented and apartment in Paris for the month and I can remember the conference call with Eric and this new guy Scott Rafer who Eric and Todd had brought in to be CEO. They were considering putting together an angel round with the idea of going for a venture round in three or four months. I committed $25k on the spot, although I remember Scott saying he really didn’t want investments of less than $50k.
MyBlogLog continued its torrid growth over the summer, appearing on virtually every blog I read. Fred Wilson – one of my co-investors in FeedBurner and another fan of MyBlogLog – and I started talking about doing a VC round. We came close to do a deal (the documents were a few days away from being signed) when Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog shortly after getting excited about them after seeing them at the Web 2.0 conference in 2006. I had one awkward conversation with Eric where I quickly told him that while I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be investing in MyBlogLog, I was psyched for him, Todd, and Scott and wished him luck. I also told him that I’d love to stay in touch and have another chance to work with him in the future.
I didn’t expect Eric to stay at Yahoo! very long (he lasted about six months, although Todd is still there trying hard to keep the MyBlogLog flame alive.) True to my invitation, Eric and I stayed in touch, he and Todd were a big help at TechStars in 2007, and Eric started making occasional trips out to Boulder to see me.
I spent most of 2007 raising our first Foundry Group fund. By the fall we had finished raising our fund and had turned our focus towards making investments. It was in this context that Eric and I sat down on one of his trips in the fall of 2007. Over a couple of hours, Eric ran me through a half dozen ideas he had for a new business. He was hedging a little – struggling with whether to go deep on one business or try to start a few. I strongly encouraged him to focus on one. I told him that four of the six ideas were stupid, one wasn’t for me, but one was awesome. It was the seed of what turned into Gnip.
During that trip, I dragged my partners Ryan and Seth into a conference room to sit with Eric and sketch out Gnip more. Eric was originally calling the idea Pingery but somewhere along the way Gnip popped out and it stuck ("meta-ping server" was a little awkward). Gnip fit perfectly in a new theme that Ryan, Seth, and my other Foundry partners were calling Glue and we told Eric that if he wanted to do Gnip as the exclusive thing he worked on, we’d be game to go after it with him.
I got a call from Eric a few weeks later that he’d decided to go all in with Gnip. We’d recently made an investment in Zynga and Eric had spent some time with Mark Pincus, the founder/CEO of Zynga. I think Mark’s single-minded obsession with the business he was creating made a deep impression on Eric, especially since Mark is a multi-time successful entrepreneur who also has plenty of angel investments and can basically spend his time wherever he wants.
Part of Eric’s success in MyBlogLog was his partnership with his technical co-founder Todd. I told Eric he needed either Todd, or a technical co-founder like Todd, as part of Gnip. Todd wasn’t available as he was committed to staying at Yahoo! so we introduced Eric to a few people, including Jud Valeski. We’d known Jud for several years as he was a Netscape/AOL refugee that had settled in Boulder. Jud had recently left Me.dium and was working out of our offices as he contemplated his next gig. Jud and Eric hit it off immediately and started working together remotely (
Eric in the bay area; Jud in Boulder) to both flesh out the idea behind Gnip as well as see if they could work together.
A few weeks later Eric and Jud gave their formal pitch to us for Gnip. It was a 10 page PowerPoint presentation that outlined the idea, opportunity, and how they would go about it. We committed to leading a seed investment of $1m on the spot – either by ourselves or with another VC firm. A few weeks later we closed a $1.1m round with SoftTechVC (Jeff Clavier) and First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman) and were off to the races (BTW – Josh has written a really clever post about Gnip titled The Story of Francis Bates.)
Eric, Jud, and Gnip have surpassed all of our expectations from our seed investment at the beginning of the year. They’ve totally nailed the concept we were kicking around when we first started talking about Gnip, have built a superb initial service in a remarkably short period of time with the help of Pivotal Labs, and have added a handful of awesome technical people to their team. They’ve managed to do this while still being split between the bay area (Eric, Tiffany, and Pivotal) and Boulder (Jud and the rest of the team).
It took a three year courtship, but Eric and I are now working together as partners. As my grandmother used to say, "My Gnip Runneth Over."
I’m sitting in the quiet zone in the airport lounge at MPLS so I’m not allowed to talk on my cell phone or listen to stuff on my laptop. But you can!
ReadWriteWeb posted an interview with me that Alex Iskold did – it’s titled People in Tech: Brad Feld, Foundry Group (nice SEO btw – I’m very surprised it’s not #2 on The Google for "Brad Feld"). I love working with Alex (I’m a small investor in Adaptive Blue) and think he has an enormous and fun brain. I’ve already gotten a few nice comments, emails, and tweets on my answer to the question "What is the meaning of life."
Do you like dogs? Do you like cats? Then you’ll love Ted Rheingold, the founder / CEO of Dogster. He’s on WallStrip this week. W00f.
Finally, don’t forget all of the TechStars Community action.
Oops. I just made Amy annoyed. "Brad – it’s time to shut down your computer and board the plane." Gotta go to Duluth!
The "Facebook for the enterprise" meme in now hitting its stride after all the activity at Enterprise 2.0 earlier this week. My friends at NewsGator were there in force showing off NewsGator Social Sites 2.0 which just started shipping.
Following is a short demo that’s up on Youtube that gives you a feel for how it works. While it’s a blurry video, Brian Kellner’s description of what he’s doing is the really useful part. Brian’s final line is "in total, it’s a complete social computing solution built right into SharePoint." Other demos / overviews are up on the NewsGator site if you are interested.
I’ve been a SharePoint fan for a while – we’ve been using it for a while at Foundry Group. I find it much more powerful than many of the individual web-based solutions and it’s tight integration with Exchange and NewsGator Enterprise Server, along with it broad customization capabilities, make it work nicely for us.
As I predicted last year, 2008 would be the year that all of the consumer Internet innovations started migrating to the enterprise en-masse. NewsGator has been at the forefront of this and it’s awesome to see and use the products. While some argue that the consumer products for enterprise work just fine thank you very much, I don’t buy that argument. Maybe it will converge in five to ten years, but there are so many enterprise-focused issues that aren’t addressed in any of the consumer oriented products that I think there will continue to be some amount of a parallel universe.
To calibrate – when I talk about the enterprise, I’m not talking about startups or a 30 person company. I’m talking about 10,000 to 200,000 person enterprises that already have deeply embedded and extensively built out global IT infrastructures. That said, it also works great for a 11 person company like Foundry Group if you using a Microsoft-based infrastructure today.
One of the many satisfying things about being a venture capitalist is being involved in a company from the very beginning that has a huge vision that it subsequently executes on it maniacally. This is the case with Rally Software which announced today that it has closed a $16.85 million round led by Mohr Davidow Ventures.
Rally started out life as F4 Technologies. I remember my friend Ryan Martens sitting down with me and Chris Wand around 2001 and walking us through his idea for changing the how he approached managing the software development process. I can’t remember if Ryan used the word Agile at that time, but I remember scribbles on a white board that listed out all the different software that Ryan had used at BEA to manage his dev team and how maddening it was to try to integrate information in Word, Excel, Project, a dev workbench, a set of testing tools, and the support / QA system. Ryan had a vision for an integration web-based system to layer on top of all of this to help support and manage the software development process.
We weren’t the first investor in Rally. Ryan quickly raised about $400k of friends and family money. We offered Ryan space to work out of our office which he did for a year or so as he got things up and running. About a year after he got started, he was ready to raise a venture financing. At the same time, his partner at his previous company – Tim Miller – was doing an entrepreneur-in-residence at a local Boulder VC firm (Boulder Ventures). Ryan was encouraged to team up with Tim and shortly after that happened we co-led the first round VC financing with Boulder Ventures.
It has been a rocket ship from there. Tim, Ryan, and team have created a phenomenal company that is built on two trends that have picked up massive speed in the past few years: (1) Agile and (2) SaaS. In 2003 – while Agile was known – it was largely limited to ISVs and a few leading IT organizations. SaaS was beginning to be talked about as Salesforce.com’s success (and leverage from the SaaS model) became apparent.
Today’s financing by MDV marks another key moment in Rally’s history. In addition to a large financing that should comfortably carry the company through a point where it is cash flow positive, we’ve added Bryan Stolle from MDV to the board. Bryan previously co-founded MDV-backed Agile Software and served as CEO and later Chairman of the Board until Oracle acquired the company in July 2007 for approximately $495 million. Bryan is widely regarded as a visionary and pioneer in the product lifecycle management industry and knows Agile extremely well.
At this point, Rally is the undeniable leader in providing products for managing the software development lifecycle using Agile. The company has come off of three years of doubling its subscription revenue and grew its active subscriber base by over 50% in Q1 of this year. While Rally started off selling into ISVs, we are seeing rapid adoption at this point into corporate IT departments as every software development organization goes agile.
On top of this all, Rally has received huge industry validation through winning the Jolt Product Excellent Award three years in a row. Rally also gets regularly recognized as one of the fastest growing companies and one of the best companies to work for in Colorado.
I’m immensely proud of all my friends at Rally and the opportunity to be involved with them. If you develop software for a living, wander over to Rally Software and find out more about how to join the Agile revolution.
Intense Debate founder Jon Fox is a huge Leo Laporte / TWiT fan so it’s super cool that he ended up on net@night with Amber MacArthur talking to Amber and Leo about Intense Debate’s commenting system. The interview with Jon and Intense Debate CEO Tom Keller is about halfway through the show.
I’ve been really pleased with the progress Jon, Tom, and team have made with Intense Debate. A year ago when Intense Debate showed up at TechStars, Jon and his co-founder Isaac had an idea for an online consumer debating site. This morphed into the comment replacement system that is Intense Debate. I’ve long talked about comments being the dark matter of the blogosphere; Intense Debate helps to make them (and the ensuing conversations) much more relevant and useful.
Features are coming fast and furiously. Last week Intense Debate integrated with Lijit (so you can now include your comments in your Lijit search profile) and the reply by email feature is now out – I’ve been using it for about 60 days and it’s awesome. Look for Twitter integration this week along with maybe another magic special thing depending on how many all nighters Jon pulls.
Intense Debate is growing like crazy. If you have a blog and are still using your native commenting system, take a look at Intense Debate.
As a special bonus, Jon has a blog and have been putting some of his startup thoughts out there. You can follow along at home at Jon Fox: The ramblings of a young, web entrepreneur. His latest – Those dreadful early decisions.
I love it when blogs pop up from people I love reading – like Om Malik – that highlight stuff I also love. In this case, it’s FeedDemon and the ThinkPad x300. These are two of my favorite nerd things. I’ve been using FeedDemon since before Nick Bradbury joined up with NewsGator several years ago and still think it is one of the most finely crafted pieces of Windows-based software that I’ve ever used. And I regularly used it on my relatively new and currently sticker free ThinkPad x300.
NewsGator just released the latest version of their Inbox product – their RSS client for Microsoft Outlook. It’s free. It’s solid. It’s full of RSS chocolately goodness. ReadWriteWeb explains why Inbox 3.0 Brings Better RSS to Outlook.