Today, FeedBurner announced that it has acquired Blogbeat. Congrats Jeff. Congrats FeedBurner.
On February 22nd, I installed Blogbeat (ah – the joys of a good stats package – it’s easy to find out the day you started using it.) On February 28th, I wrote an updated “New and Exciting Stats” post on my blog where I mentioned Blogbeat. I’m a stats junkie – I was the seed investor in one of the first web analytics companies (NetGenesis) and had one of my big investment successes with another (Service Metrics). Stats have been very good to me.
I liked Jeff Turner (Blogbeat creator) from the first time I met him (via email). I had a very similar experience with Jeff that I did the first time I interacted with Dick Costolo (FeedBurner CEO and co-founder). In both cases, I was messing around with their stuff and I had a problem. I sent an email asking a question. Within minutes I had a response, an answer, a suggestion, and a conversation going.
Jeff was one of the first people I knew to exercise the FeedBurner API and integrate FeedBurner subscriber info into his stats. He got it – and knew what to do with it. As FeedBurner continued to build out depth in their stats, it made sense to take a classical “build vs. buy” approach. The fit with Jeff / Blogbeat was great. Hopefully you’ll agree when the new, integrated products roll out in Q4.
Lest you think I’m one-dimensional, email has also been very good to me.
My partner Greg Galanos led the first round investment in Danger, the company that makes the T-Mobile Sidekick. I’ve loved it since the day the Sidekick 1 came out and – over the past five years – have tried pretty much every other mobile / data device and always come back to my Sidekick.
I got my Sidekick 3 a few days before heading to Alaska. I didn’t expect it to work up here (my Sidekick 2 didn’t work last summer – T-Mobile’s service wasn’t strong enough.) Imagine my surprise when I showed up and it worked perfectly. I’ve had two weeks of it now and it is a simply awesome product.
Greg pointed me to a great review of the Sidekick 3 on the hiptop.com site. The author totally nails why this is such a great product. The brilliance of the company has been that they’ve known their demographic and stuck to it (hint – I’m not in the demographic.) Amazingly, with each interation, the product adds more distance from the alternatives.
After several years of trying to explain to people the difference between a Sidekick and a Blackberry, I finally settled on a straightforward analogy. Sidekick: Blackberry = Mac:Windows. That kind of says it all.
Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder and CTO – has a two part roadmap post up. His first post summarizes what NewsGator has been up to over the past 18 months. His second post talks about where NewsGator is going with their products.
I’ve heard plenty of chatter lately about the fundamental differences in enterprise software between shrink-wrap software, appliances, and hosted (or SaaS) software. Most VCs I know have fallen in love with SaaS – often without understanding the fundamental economics of the SaaS model (“trendy is good – thank you SFDC”.) Others are convinced there will never again by any life in enterprise software – which is just fine with me as I love a counter cyclical trend (e.g. enterprise software is my friend again – but don’t worry, I’ll stay away from the “marketing automation” vertical.)
I’ve got a lot of experience with each delivery type (Rally provides SaaS, StillSecure provides shrink-wrap and appliances, Klocwork and Newmerix provide shrink-wrap, DataPower (now part of IBM) provides appliances, and the list goes on and on.
NewsGator provides all three – shrink-wrap and appliances have been shipping for several quarters (and Greg interestingly points out that most of our customers are more interested in shrink-wrap software rather than appliances) and has announced (and is about to release) a Japanese version of the SaaS enterprise product with US and European language versions coming soon.
I’ve been involved in more than my fair share of “should we do another type” conversation, especially going from SaaS to shrink-wrap (“but our clients want to deploy our software behind the firewall”) and from shrink-wrap to appliance (or vice versa). Given the architecture of NewsGator’s products, we are able to give our clients the ultimate choice.
Interestingly, Symantec has recently decided to ditch their appliance products. Their assertion is that with the growing oversupply of excess underutilized server hardware in corporate IT shops, why would you want another rack mounted box that’s dedicated to a specific task? An appliance is certainly interesting to part of the market – which is why NewsGator provides it that way – but unless you are doing something specific in silicon, or need tight integration with the underlying hardware, shrink-wrapped software – especially with today’s virtualization technology – is often a better and more cost effective choice.
Periodically FeedBurner gets all their engineers in a room, turns over tech support to the business team for the day, and cranks out a bunch of features. Hackathon III occurred a week ago on Friday and generated a healthy list of new things for all the friendly neighborhood FeedBurner users, including:
I love this approach to pushing features out.
A few days before NewsGator released their plug-in for the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, I was at NewsGator for a board meeting and sat in on their Friday demo hour (one hour of rapid fire demos from stuff people are working on or things that got built “under the radar” during the previous week.) I saw some neat stuff, especially around a major release / announcement that I believe is coming in the next two weeks. I also saw a bunch of cool “small things” like new UI stuff being rolled into the products or long term features (such as filter by category) that are functional and just waiting for the right release cycle for each of the products.
While getting my ass kicked by Greg and Karyn German at foosball afterwards (I beat them once, but I had the secret Brian Kellner weapon on my team – once it was me and Seth, we got crushed), I reminisced with Greg about the very first time we met. I asked him if he “still had that presentation that didn’t have any numbers on it.” He did and sent it to me later that night.
I smiled when I saw this. I don’t remember exactly what I said to Greg when he showed me this slide, but it was something like “er – Greg – what are the numbers on the Y axis?” After a few moments of him sizing me up, he told me. His long term product vision came earlier in the deck, but it was remarkably prescient.
It’s obviously evolved in the two years since I’ve invested in NewsGator, but when I look back, it’s clear that the trajectory we are on is very consistent with the vision Greg showed me in 2004. His cover slide to the presentation says it all.
I’m really proud of my friends at Rally Software. Their business continues to grow very rapidly and they appear to have nailed the intersection of a couple of key trends – the growth of the Agile software development combined with the trendy but important reality of SaaS (“Software as a Service” for those of you living under a rock or in Alaska, like I like to do occasionally.)
Last week Rally closed an $8m financing led by Vista Ventures – this should fund them through profitability. Earlier this week, Ryan Martens – Rally’s founder and CTO – was named a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Rocky Mountain region. While I don’t usually put a lot of stock in awards, I’ve been a judge for the Rocky Mountain region in the past and recognize the high level of quality among the various nominees for this particular award.
I’ve said this before, but I don’t think I can say it often enough. If you develop software for a living, take a look at Rally’s stuff. A wide range of companies, from venture-backed companies (such as several of mine like NewsGator, Oxlo, Return Path, and Gold Systems) to large ISVs are now using Rally’s products. I’ve watched the adoption of Rally’s products spread through other VCs portfolio’s – such as my friend Scott Maxwell’s at Insight – it’s pretty fun to see the enthusiasm that Rally’s products coupled with the Agile methodologies can create.
When Niel Robertson – the founder and CTO of Newmerix – started talking about his idea for a set of “next-generation software quality assurance” products aimed at packaged application vendors, he regularly listed several packaged application vendors, including PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, and SAP as candidate packaged applications to target.
Newmerix focused their development initially on PeopleSoft products and has released three products – Automate!Test (automated software testing), Automate!Change (change management), and Automate!Program Manager (product management and regulatory compliance) – all for the PeopleSoft platform.
When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, a number of VCs that I know said something like “Brad – your screwed – there’s no reason for these products after Oracle owns the entire ERP footprint.” “Au contraire” I responded (using one of the few French phrases that I’ve actually managed to learn), the trend and complete migration zoo that Oracle will generate insures the need for these types of products (if you want a hysterical and detailed overview about why this is happening, take a look at Niel’s brilliant post titled “I Pity The Fool” – I bet you never thought that Mr. T and the elusive Dirk Benedict could be woven into a serious discussion of Oracle’s migration path for the various products they’ve acquired.)
Of course, only time (and performance) will tell the end of the story, but so far it’s getting more and more exciting every quarter. However, every time I talked to Niel, he’d look at me and say something like “SAP.” Sometimes it was more, but often that was it. Today, he backed up his word(s) by announcing that Newmerix now supports SAP’s products. We are starting via the acquisition of the Object Manager product line from a company named Skywire – these products immediately become Newmerix Automate!Change for SAP and Automate!Program Manager for SAP.
These acquisitions use a long time “early acquisition” strategy that I’ve used successfully in many of my portfolio companies (Fred Wilson kindly referred to me as the “master of the venture rollup” – fortunately I can count some real masters like Jerry Poch and Len Fassler as mentors.) If you’ve followed NewsGator’s trajectory, you know that they have acquired three companies to date – FeedDemon/BradSoft, NetNewswire/Ranchero Software, and Smartfeed.org/Windows Mobile Reader.
As an early stage VC, I’ve found that when you’ve got a clear long term strategy developed, a super strong leadership team that is open to integrating new technologies, people and products into their company (vs. a classical “not invested here approach”), and a willingness to get close to great small companies that can help you quickly extend your product footprint, a buy (vs. build) approach is often really compelling. There are lots of risks and not every acquisition or company is successful, but if you do it right, you can end up with some very nice companies like Return Path.
Congrats Niel and the Newmerix team on your nice strategic move – I look forward to the next one.
Eric has a great use case for the Slingbox and the World Cup. Since the only real excitement in soccer is a goal or a penalty (I know, blasphemy), multitasking with soccer is easy. The photo example is here.
If you have a Windows Mobile device and want to try out NewsGator’s new Windows Mobile feed reader, the beta is now available. NewsGator has had a mobile edition for phones that support HTML available for a long time (since I invested in NewsGator two years ago), however, in our desire to help people consume feeds anywhere, we’ve been working on a more robust approach to mobile clients.
As you’d expect, the Windows Mobile feed reader synchronizes your data with the NewsGator Online service (and subsequently with all the NewsGator products) so anything that you read on your phone shows up as read in NewsGator Online (and the phone can be configured to display only your unread feeds.)
Early beta feedback has been great – hats off to Kevin Cawley and the NewsGator team for quickly integrating Kevin’s previous company and products, Smartfeed.org.